Director Peter Ho-sun Chan used to be a major stalwart of post-New Wave Hong Kong cinema, with every film of his either a commercial success, an awards magnet, or both. His ’90s films like He’s a Woman, She’s a Man, and Comrades, Almost a Love Story remain all-time classics, and The Criterion Channel recently began streaming the latter. But like many Hong Kong filmmakers of his generation, he has struggled to work consistently since moving his career to Mainland China, with his Li Na biopic long in battle with the Chinese censorship board. Will his latest film She’s Got No Name win back his former reputation and success?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. Like many big-budget Chinese productions these days, She’s Got No Name is an over-stylized mess. Starring the world-famous Zhang Ziyi in the role of a real-life murderer, She’s Got No Name recounts one of the most infamous crimes in modern Chinese history. It is 1945 Shanghai, and the Collaborationist authorities have arrested Zhan-Zhou (Zhang Ziyi) for the murder and dismemberment of her husband into 16 pieces. The police commissioner Xue Zhiwu (Lei Jiayin) forces her to admit every illogical detail of the crime, while Zhan-Zhou contests she was mercilessly abused by her husband. The courts hastily sentence her to capital punishment, but the execution is luckily put on hold when Japan loses the Second World War. The Nationalists retake sovereignty of Shanghai, and a new, sympathetic lawyer Ye Boxiu (Fan Wei) fights to overturn Zhan-Zhou’s death sentence.
Based on the scandalous details of the historical case, there is great potential for a thrilling crime film here. But no matter how hard Chan tries to force momentum out of his film, it falls flat. He jumps around the timeline with black-and-white flashbacks, which only end up zapping any energy and confusing the viewer. There is also the recurring device of a stage play that directly mocks the court case, with characters on trial often stepping onto the stage for monologues — these elementary, try-hard techniques evoke fellow Hongkonger director Ho Cheuk-tin’s breakout hit The Sparring Partner, except that is Ho’s directorial debut, and Chan is more than 20 years his senior.
With the murder clearly shown in the opening scene, Chan firmly establishes early on that the mystery isn’t whether Zhan-Zhou did it or not, but what her motive is. After 150 long, grueling minutes, the only answer Chan comes up with is “she was abused,” which has been clear since the first act. He is not able to develop his point into something more nuanced, specific, or systemic. Instead, any argument he makes about gender is vague, cumbersome, or stuck in the past. If anything, Chan and the film unknowingly perpetuate misogyny, relishing in prolonged, repetitive imagery of Zhan-Zhou getting beaten, yelled at, and nearly killed. For a movie that is ostensibly fighting for a better place for women in Chinese society, it sure loves visualizing the opposite.
She’s Got No Name largely traverses three spots on its historical timeline: 1937, 1945, and 1948. Although only a little more than a decade apart, these three years represent epochal changes in China’s sovereignty and political climate. Yet, Chan is not able to make good use of this background and fails to illuminate the changes in society between those three periods. The film is lavishly mounted with well-lit, high-contrast shadows (rarer than you’d think in contemporary Chinese cinema), and it is always impressive to see colonial Shanghai resurrected. But despite changes in aesthetics and atmosphere, there is no meaning brought out of them. As a state-approved film, it is especially vacuous on the brief Civil War period governed by the Nationalists. It might as well take place in any other 11-year period in Chinese history.
More than Peter Chan, Zhang Ziyi is probably the main draw of this film. Despite her inactivity these days, she remains a global celebrity and a face of Chinese cinema, and her acting talents are indisputable. Unfortunately, She’s Got No Name is a waste of her time. She spends most of the film behind bars, abused, or waiting for something to happen. Her co-stars, especially the male ones, have much flashier material. Jackson Yee is once again impressively transformative as a blind neighbour, while Lei Jiayin becomes fixated on Zhan-Zhou’s case like a Javert to her Jean Valjean. But still, many of these characters’ motivations are bewildering, and they come and go like pieces of a puzzle in disarray.
Even though Peter Chan has never hidden the commercial goals of his films, there have always also been higher artistic ambitions behind them. She’s Got No Name is a failure on both fronts. As a piece of commentary on womanhood and history, it is empty, repetitive, and counterintuitive in anything it is trying to say. As a piece of entertainment, it is more critically sluggish, incoherent, and boring. When even out-of-competition slots in the Cannes Film Festival are so hard to come by, giving Chan’s to a more deserving, younger Chinese-speaking filmmaker must be a better use of everyone’s time.