Rating: R | Runtime: 95 minutes
Release Date: December 11th, 2009 (China) / September 3rd, 2010 (USA)
Studio: Edko Films / Sony Pictures Classics
Director(s): Zhang Yimou
Writer(s): Zhengchao Xu & Jianquan Shi / Ethan Coen & Joel Coen (script Blood Simple)

You are such a wimp, the biggest I’ve ever seen.

A prolific director in China, Zhang Yimou found an audience in America with the wonderful Hero and his follow-up House of Flying Daggers. Curse of the Golden Flower came next with its stunning visuals, but its lackluster storyline left me thinking perhaps his style had gotten the best of him on the almost film per year pace he begun. But then he decided to do something completely out of left field, pushing the serious feudal artistry of wire-work battles and large-scale wars to the side and choosing to transport the Coen Brothers’ debut film Blood Simple to the Gansu province on the cusp of gunpowder’s introduction to society.

Known for more screwball fare, the Coens’ film was actually darker and less blatant in its humor than their subsequent work. So, Zhang—looking to possibly break free of the epics he had been constructing—took their script and infused more absurdity than was maybe needed. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is very much a faithful adaptation, but the increased humor finds a way to subvert the drama that made the original so memorable.

Taking place at a time where the police force rides horses, a spinning wind-powered siren shrieks on their approach, and swords are sheathed at their sides, a Persian arrives to show the wife (Ni Yan) of Wang’s (Dahong Ni) noodle shop owner his wares. Demonstrating the precision of his swords to her and the restaurant’s bumbling employees (Xiao Shen-Yang’s Li, Ye Cheng’s Zhao, and Mao Mao’s Chen), the question of whether he has a weapon for instant death gets answered by his collection of handguns.

Assured in her negotiations to drive the price down while Zhao’s buck-toothed confusion and Li’s frightfully shook body look on, Wang’s wife purchases the three-barreled revolver and requests a demonstration of the Persian’s cannon. The blast brings the police in an attempt to keep order within the province. They threaten the noodle shop’s workers by showing their cruelty to adulterers, bringing four souls bound and arrested to face the consequences. This authoritarian presence shakes Li to his core, especially considering the affair he’s been having with Wang’s wife that starts the chain of events to follow.

Despite all the commotion, Wang has been in his office meticulously setting up a stage play he will later force his wife to partake in—abusing her with fist and burns as he has the past ten years. Bribing his waiter Zhao to spill the beans of her buying a gun, Wang’s full comprehension towards her reasons don’t occur until Chief Detective Zhang (Honglei Sun) stops by to explain Li’s relationship with her. A seemingly by-the-book officer, Zhang shows his greed for money by taking an offer of riches to murder both Wang’s wife and her boyfriend in a way that makes it look like they left town to never be heard from again.

The prospect of more money and the nagging ‘morality’ to kill a bad man instead of two seemingly innocent souls leads the officer to hatch an intricate plan to frame the five noodle shop employees in an elaborate scheme of theft and murder instead. Able to construct each crime scene as he’d need it to look for the police to never suspect outside interference, Zhang takes pleasure in making everything just right—not knowing that the idiocy of the four people he presumes are asleep will put a wrench into the entire plan.

All the twists and turns from Blood Simple are included. While that film had an edge of suspense as it turned pitch black and serious, the filmmakers here decide to constantly subvert the tension with slapstick and exaggerated acting. Both Sun and Ni are fantastic in their cold-blooded, calculating characters that pit Zhang and Wang against each other as the intelligent orchestrators thinking they have everything under control.

Yan also does well as Wang’s wife to authentically portray a woman with nowhere to go since her husband’s cruelty drives her into another man’s arms while that boyfriend’s cowardice demands she take her safety—or demise—into her own hands. Headstrong and forceful at the start, a mid-film breakdown spilling her feelings and isolation truly resonates and shows how good this movie could have been if they stuck to the drama.

It isn’t even just the inclusion of Cheng and Mao’s imbecilic characters as comic relief that derails the good parts, though. Shen-Yang’s Li fails in his attempts to tightrope both aspects of comedy and tragedy too. He is such a wuss for the first half of the film that it becomes hard to believe what he is eventually called upon to do.

Because of its more humorous bent, the screenwriters do a good job excising a portion of the original script when the wife finds out what her boyfriend has done to her husband. His fright would have ruined all realism if they kept it in and her knowing look at the end serves to express it well instead. The changes made are crucial to allowing the plot lines to transfer competently and I applaud them for this maneuvering.

Having the private detective role change to an actual corrupt police officer is a welcome alteration too that lends more severity to the actions and need for a flawless cover-up. There’s some frame-for-frame homage throughout like blood dripping from a shot man’s hand, the pat of a shovel on the dirt of a fresh grave, or the rays of light shining through recently made holes in a wall as A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop proves a fun companion piece to its originator.

Much like American remakes of foreign cinema, however, I posit the question of whether it was necessary. The cultural chasm may have rendered the comedy cheap to me while successful in China, but I can’t help think how much better this would be had it stayed true to its predecessor’s graveness. If anything, I appreciate it as an exercise for Zhang Yimou to branch out and I look forward to his next.

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Left to Right: Yan Ni as Wang’s wife and Ni Dahong as Wang. Photo by Bai Xiaoyan, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.