After two films directed by Jia Zhangke that stars his wife and muse Zhao Tao we already know what to expect and indeed this newest film is more of the same. Indeed the director even indulges in his usual obsessions with the Three Gorges Dam and UFOs even as he experiments with the theme of the well known underworld honor among thieves.

In the early 2000s, Guo Bin is a local gangster boss in the city of Datong in Shanxi Province and Zhao Qiao is his girlfriend. He runs a nightclub while she oversees a mahjong parlor and they have many underlings who respect their authority. Still they must contend against rivals or even just punks out to make a name for themselves. One night their car is attacked by a group of such thugs and Bin is badly beaten. To save him, Qiao pulls a gun out to scare them away but this causes her to be caught by the police and imprisoned. She ends up spending five years in prison and Bin doesn’t visit her at all during this time. After she is released, she goes looking for him and finds that he has a new girlfriend and is too ashamed to meet her. During this time she also has to deal with petty problems like having no money and being cheated by the people around her.

This summary of the plot is very simple but doesn’t convey the unusual vibes that suffuse the film. For example there is a lot of out of date for the period pop music which as my wife notes is indicative of how it used to take time for pop culture to seep into the smaller cities in China. Bin and his compatriots adopt mannerisms that seem consciously patterned after the gangsters of Hong Kong yet the film doesn’t really specify what they actually do that is illegal money-making activity. Indeed the film shows them to enjoy few of the traditional perks of gangsters and Bin’s underlings become rich only after they have switched to become more or less legitimate businessmen. I read in this a kind of subversive messaging: it doesn’t pay to be gangsters in China because the state could never condone the existence of an alternative locus of power. Effectively it is saying that the Communist Party is the biggest gang in China and one can prosper only under its aegis. What is left is a very sad shadow of gangsterhood, perhaps even only a state in mind wrapped around traditional notions of brotherhood and loyalty with a touch of romanticism.

Unfortunately this theme is the only element in this film that feels interesting. The rest feels like a retread of old ground that Jia has already covered over and over again, down to the strong and stoic female lead. The film even makes uses of substantial time skips to document how the lives of the characters has diverged as he did in previous films. The nice thing here is that it shows Qiao remaining a part of the jiang hu, the difficult to translate term that can mean both the criminal underworld and the martial arts world, while Bin has fallen out of it, being just another nameless peasant. But it’s still too reminiscent of his other works and doesn’t add enough that is new.

I do like that Jia focuses on scenes of life in China’s second tier cities which are underappreciated outside of the country. I’m also puzzled about where and when do his scenes of the Three Gorges come from as it’s supposed to long since been underwater. It amuses me to think that he filmed plenty of footage of those areas in advance in the knowledge that he would need it one day. Overall however while this is solid work it will be of interest mainly to those who are new to this director’s oeuvre. Even his obsession with the Three Gorges seems a little dated now as China has moved on and there are plenty of other controversies and environmental mishaps to cover.