Hybrid detective – Weekend
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Disappeared in the Stars, a masterful detective story based on a French play, which plays out a plot full of surprises according to old recipes – Chinese, Japanese and Soviet – has been released in Russia.
With noise, commotion and shouting, a handsome Chinese diving instructor, He Fei (Zhu Yilong), bursts into the police station of a resort island in an unnamed Southeast Asian country. There are five days left before his visa expires, and he demands, he downright insists, to launch an official search for his wife Li Muzi, who disappeared without a trace from their hotel room two weeks ago, on the evening of their first wedding anniversary. But the police just grunt: you never know what tourist’s wife has been on a spree while on vacation! When his demarche reaches the height of hysteria with insults against law enforcement officials, He Fei is thrown out of the police station with white hands.
Back in his room, He Fei takes some pills – he was prescribed them for a neurological disorder that affects divers, but the side effects are forgetfulness and irritability – and lies back in the pillows. And when he wakes up, next to him lies a completely unfamiliar woman, who claims that she is his wife Li Muzi, shows her passport, in all the photographs in his phone she is also the same, she is also in the filming of security cameras in the stores they visited, the servants hotel, photo studios, restaurants – everyone recognizes the impostor as the woman with whom He Fei came on vacation. The police are freaking out over the false call, especially after receiving information from the “wife” about the pills He Fei is taking, which are prohibited here. Only lawyer Chen Mei (Ni Ni), who has not lost a single case, believes him. The couple devotes the remaining four days to the investigation, which will result in racing on motorcycles and SUVs in search of surviving evidence of the existence of the real – in the husband’s opinion – Li Muzi, showdowns with the mafia, murder, bloodshed and complete guignol in the insane asylum, where Mr. He still goes will accompany.
In other words, there is no way to tear yourself away from what is happening: what we are looking for is the same quality “interesting film” that we are looking for, adored by audiences all over the world, but for some reason becoming increasingly rare. In China, “Gone Girl in the Stars” became the leader at the box office, collecting more than $500 million. It is clear that in Russia the audience for Asian films is still limited, but “Gone Girl” may be helped here by strong old ties. Firstly, it is based on the play by the French master of ironic detective stories, Robert Thomas, who did not write much, but turned out to be incredibly popular in the USSR. On New Year’s Day 1983, the whole country laughed with a hangover at the whims and hysterics of the detective-obsessed Mademoiselle Pastique in the cascading performance of Sofiko Chiaureli in the film Look for a Woman. The corpses stabbed to death before her eyes evaporated without a trace, and she, who liked to knock back a drink, also could not prove anything to the police. This classic from the golden age of Soviet television is a production of Tom’s play The Parrot and the Chicken (1966). Around the same time, Soviet theaters, from regional to the Moscow Theater of Satire, began, as if undermined, to stage another of Tom’s plays, “8 Women” (1958), and in 2002, Francois Ozon turned this detective story into a film musical, collecting under one roof and making superstars of all generations sing and dance. Finally, one of the leaders of the Soviet box office in the mid-1970s was the crime comedy “A Pretty Little Thing” (1973), the script for which was also written by Toma. His recipe – laughter, secrets and a plot that turns inside out – worked flawlessly.
“Gone Girl” is based on the play “Trap for a Lonely Man” (1960), which in the 1980s became the most popular radio play in the USSR, and in 1990 turned into a film of the same name with Karachentsov in the title role. The authors of the Chinese film even claim that they were making a remake of the Soviet film, and not an adaptation of Tom. There is no question that they could have seen a Soviet film in their youth. After a long period of absence of any relations between the USSR and China, in the mid-1980s, when cultural exchange was re-established, many Chinese films were watched here – it is logical to assume that vice versa.
Among those Chinese films, by the way, there were two excellent detective stories – “Death of a Fashion Model” (1987) and especially “The Dream of an Actress” (1985), where a murder took place on the set. That over the past years, Chinese filmmakers have not lost either their taste or skill for a good detective story, today’s Chinese TV series prove. On television in this genre, the Chinese surpass their closest neighbors the Japanese in the quality of production, and the Koreans in the sophistication of the detective mystery itself. As examples, we can safely recommend “Detective L” (2019) about Shanghai in the 1930s – an excellent collection of puzzles in the spirit of John Dixon Carr about impossible murders, locked rooms, where during the investigation the killer and the victim can easily change places, or even merge into one whole. And if you are closer to the field of detective stories plowed up by the series “Bones” about a sociopathic genius working with the police, then your option is “Under the Skin” (2022).
“Gone Girl” has the skill of the above-mentioned films, but Tom’s intrigue is perfectly evidenced by the fact that Hitchcock himself fought for the rights to its film adaptation. Another thing is that by calling their film a remake of the Soviet “Trap”, the authors are still disingenuous. The Soviet film adaptation faithfully followed the outline of the French author and retained both its theatricality and humor. The Chinese, having left the main line, created a lot of completely new ones, which allowed the wide-screen film to gain entertainment, and the modern viewer, accustomed to a more rapid change of events than was customary in the last century, not to get bored and stay hooked almost until the last frames.
“Almost”, because the finale, with waves, tears, tango music, is a bow to the Japanese detective story, under whose strong influence the Chinese are still: and, admittedly, in terms of unexpected endings and tasty deceptions, they are far from the outstanding authors there , many of whom – like Edogawa Rampo, Soji Shimada, Miyuki Miyabe, Keigo Higashino or Yukito Ayatsuji – defined the laws of the entire detective genre. However, the Japanese detective also has such a characteristic feature that hardly fits into the universal canon: every detective novel or film ends with a long final cry of the killer, telling what drove him to the crime. To the Western eye, such melodramatic endings are not very natural for an elegant detective story. The authors of “Gone Girl” almost completely abandoned the irony of the French literary original (however, incorporating elements of absurd comedy, when an impostor wife breaks an empty bottle on her head or in scenes from an insane asylum with its insinuating fanatic doctors), but they added a long, tearful Japanese tail.
But the authors of “Gone Girl” don’t look only to the East for inspiration. He Fei’s half-dance, half-fight with his false wife in a seaside restaurant clearly copies the communication style of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There is also a direct nod towards Russian cinema: the appearance of the copy wife begins with a close-up of the palm of the sleeping He Fei, slowly falling onto the sheet, and at the moment of landing the camera discovers a woman’s hand next to it – rhythmically and compositionally, that shot from Solaris is completely repeated here “, in which the false wife Hari appears for the first time.
In theaters from October 12
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