Movie Blog: 'Noodle Shop' All Ingredients, No Recipe

Yimou's latest effort is A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, a suspense-punctuated dark comedy based on the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple. Noodle Shop features both a girl and a gun (obviously), and somehow manages to be a movie. However, it's not a great one.

Full disclosure: I have not seen Blood Simple. As a Minnesotan, I am vaguely ashamed of this fact. That said, my take on the film may resonate more acutely with those who don't play cinematic mating games, synthesizing stylized love-children of American and foreign filmmakers.

I'm a fan of Yimou. I love of his epics, the best of which, in my martial-arts-film-loving opinion, was Hero. Hints of those films live in Noodle Shop. For instance: the elaborate costumes, the ultra-stylized choreography and the fantastic landscapes. But something lacks. Noodle Shop never reaches a pitch unique to Yimou's brilliance. I left the theatre thinking and feeling (somehow simultaneously), "Meh."

It would be false to say the film lacks beauty. The painted hills and Neptune-hued skies of Western China dapple the narrative with gorgeous and weirdly extraterrestrial landscapes. And toward the end of the film, when things get pear-shaped, there are some excellent dream sequences and hints of dark comedy that are sweetly unnerving, sort of like a "Hello Kitty" hara-kiri.

But Noodle Shop is bland. Overlooking its incredibly dry title, it's a story about a woman abused by her husband (a subject Yimou tackled brilliantly in Ju Dou) and her acquisition, at the beginning of the film, of a gun, which the woman hopes may end her suffering if she points it at her husband or her head. On top this, she is in love with a wimpy man (dressed like an I Dream of Jeannie transvestite) who works at her husband's noodle shop.

After the purchase of the gun, their affair is discovered by a sinister police officer with a mug as cold and vacant as a weathered spoon. He is hired by the husband to kill both the woman and her lover. Things get crazy when Greed and Death make appearances, and the characters fumble about in hesitation, ignorance and blood.

Perhaps the biggest bone I have to pick with Noodle Shop is that it isn't funny. The first half of the movie is difficult to watch; it contains a humor that comes off as something particularly foreign, like eating dog. The characters are oafish and whimper and whine constantly, and sometimes the film is just tastelessly gross. I don't mean to sound xenophobic, but perhaps one risks losing an audience when remaking a film through the prism of another culture.

To be fair, the film is suspenseful at times. The gun, as Godard's words imply, made things interesting as well as ridiculously loud. Honestly, the audio is the movie's most violent feature. On the surface, Noodle Shop looks like the work of a master filmmaker, but it never reaches those moments of ecstasy that, although they are transitory, make the film worth watching, nor is it built of an echoing architecture with evident artfulness.

Noodle Shop is for Coen Brothers and Yimou enthusiasts and foreign film nerds. Other than that, neither the narrative, the gun nor the girl are as lovely as China's landscapes. Despite my respect for Yimou, I can't recommend it.

-- Jonathon Sharp