One could argue that Joel and Ethan Coen's 1984 Blood Simple qualifies as the most arresting American cinematic debut of its decade. Hip, stylish, tense, and inventive, the sublime low-budget thriller weaves a tale of Texan marital infidelity that spreads into a labyrinthine web of homicide, incomprehension, and grisly double crosses. As first-timers, the Coens both understood the pull of James M. Cain-style noir and felt confident enough to slightly rework its conventions, with an unusual narrative framework that gives the audience a bird's-eye view of the action, and subtle touches used to draw wickedly funny undercurrents out of the material. Of all the directors who might conceivably tackle a remake of Blood Simple, it is difficult to imagine Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, the visionary creator of Raise the Red Lantern and Curse of the Golden Flower, landing on anyone's list. A director known for long, contemplative scenes, meditative sequences enriched by poetic visuals, and deliberate character development, Zhang isn't prone to the spareness and accelerated rhythms of Simple -- his vision seems dramatically at odds with the Coens' purposes in their premier outing. We're reminded of those disparities time and again in A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, a laborious, excruciatingly dull, and misguided retread of Simple that Zhang crafted.
Noodle Shop transposes the same basic events of the Coen film to the Shaanxi province of ancient China, a terrain of mountainous desert vistas with a tiny enclave of isolated buildings. The most prominent fixture in this settlement is a noodle shop run by the elderly Wang (Ni Dahong); his unnamed wife (Yan Ni); and cook Li (Xiao Shenyang), a flighty, fear-driven wimp prone to bedding the lady of the house behind Wang's back. Also on hand are a couple of nitwit employees, waitress Chen (Mao Mao) and waiter Zhao (Cheng Ye), who plan to rob Wang's safe when the old man fails to issue their wages on time. Zhang establishes Wang's character with pointed succinctness (and has us siding with the lovers) when Wang screams at his barren wife for her inability to "lay eggs" and then blisters her back with a hot poker in reprisal for the infertility.
The story itself gets under way when a colorful Persian arms dealer (Julien Gaudfroy) turns up at the shop to hawk his wares. He sells a three-chamber gun to Wang's wife, who admires the instrument's ability to kill instantaneously. No one, including the audience, is quite sure what the woman has in mind for the weapon, but it begins floating around from character to character. Meanwhile, the infidelity between Li and Wang's wife sets into motion a domino-like effect of tragedies when Wang learns of the cheating and hires a humorless police deputy named Zhang (Sun Hong-Lei) to slay the errant couple. Zhang finds the gun lying not far from the sleeping lovers' bodies -- though he doesn't use the weapon as one might expect.
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The film's most predominant flaw is that the narrative unravels at such an awkward pace. Blood Simple took the time required to establish each gruesome story detail, and then moved on -- one never sensed the Coens lingering or stalling unnecessarily; they maintained a rapid clip, and each shot seemed perfectly measured and informative. Noodle Shop, like its predecessor, may only check in at an hour and a half, but it feels three times as long. Zhang pads out the first hour with endless views of the surrounding countryside and ham-handed comedic asides, such as the never-ending patter of Zhao and Chen, which add little to the story itself. Most of the twists present in Blood Simple do eventually occur, but Zhang takes too long to reach them -- thus draining the developments of all necessary tension -- and rushes through the events when they do transpire.
The comedy introduces another problem: Zhang never pulls humor from the thriller elements per se. Instead, jokes surface and hang in the air with an aura of desperation; they seem manufactured and tacked onto the murderous subplots. For instance, one throwaway bit has the arms dealer demonstrating a cannon's firepower to the noodle shop staff. The scene ends with the trader's face covered in a mask of black soot, a joke that redefines "derivative" -- it seems pulled straight out of decades-old Walter Lantz and Tex Avery cartoons. This doesn't elicit laughter, nor does an oddball gag that has Zhao misunderstanding the purpose of the gun and believing (at least, in the English translation) that its primary purpose involves killing moose -- a line that Zhang has Cheng Ye repeat multiple times, to underscore its hilarity.
On occasion, Zhang merely borrows plot points from Blood Simple without also preserving the narrative purpose or intended effect of those occurrences. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final sequence. Simple wrapped with a few delightful zingers, including a surprise dropped into one of the main characters' laps at the last minute about the individual whom she believed had been stalking her, a side-splitting closing line delivered by a murderer, and a visual gag involving what is colloquially referred to as "Chinese water torture." We do get those developments in Zhang's version of the denouement, but the delivery is off -- the character who should be shocked barely registers surprise, the scene lacks the ambiguity of the protagonist questioning the real killer's identity, and Zhang films the water gag in such a way that one can't even determine what is happening. This last move gives one pause (it isn't terribly surprising that a Chinese filmmaker would want to divorce his own national identity from a mode of torture derogatively associated with it), but Zhang's decision to film the joke from the victim's point-of-view has the adverse effect of obfuscating the situation and giving one an additional impression of misguided directorial technique.
