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Yan Ni in A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP (Photo:
Bai Xiaoyan/Sony Pictures Classics)

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP
Directed by
Zhang Yimou
Produced by
Zhang Weiping, Bill Kong & Gu Hao
Written by Xu Zhenghao & Shi Jianquan, based on the film Blood Simple by Joel & Ethan Coen
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
Mandarin with English subtitles
China. 95 min. Rated R
With
Sun Honglei, Xiao Shenyang, Ni Dahong, Yan Ni, Cheng Ye & Mao Mao
 

Somewhere in the world, there must be someone who had always longed for Joel and Ethan Coen’s neo-noir film debut Blood Simple to be remade by as a martial arts film transported to imperial China, with the Coen brothers’ black comedy replaced by naïve foreign slapstick. This person will love A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop. Everyone else will wonder why this unlikely remake exists and leave the theater none the wiser.

In its own way, Noodle Shop hews pretty close to the original, trading in an American bar for a Chinese noodle shop. The film follows the shop’s perverse owner, who suspects his younger wife is having an affair with an employee. He hires a crooked “cop” to spy on them and then later to rub them out—this is old China, so he wears blue-tinted armor and carries a whistle “siren” on his horse. What happens next will be familiar to the original’s fans as it’s mostly all there: the safe, the murder, even the blindly groping hands getting transfixed by a sharp object.

The setting is, it must be said, wonderful. The noodle shop is nestled in a barren valley beneath ochre hills. It’s spectacular country. And unlike director Zhang Yimou’s almost unwatchable recent films—bloated, inert pageants like Hero and House of Flying Daggers—the movie has some blood in its veins. Zhang clearly doesn’t take it too seriously and plays it loose, even including a martial arts-style noodle-making scene (the best in the movie), performed by a couple of surprisingly acrobatic cooks. 

But random wackiness only goes so far. As the plot unfolds, and the misunderstandings and double-crosses pile up, the picture drags. Worse for Western audiences, at least, is the film’s almost completely unintelligible sense of humor: one character dresses like a flaming court jester and another has prominent buck teeth. Is this even supposed to be funny? Maybe there should have been a second set of subtitles telling you when to laugh. Brendon Nafziger
September 3, 2010

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