Parky at the Pictures (DVD 2/7/2015)

Having opened with a static shot of a man staring at a stuffed pigeon sitting on a branch in a glass case in a Gothenburg museum (while a dinosaur peeks in from the adjoining room), Andersson presents the viewer with three brief vignettes. In the first, a man has a heart attack while opening a bottle of wine in his living room, while his wife continues to cook supper in the kitchen. The second centres on an old lady in a hospital ward fretting to her sons that she won't be able to take a bag containing her jewellery with her into the afterlife, while the last takes place on a ferryboat and shows a man collapse at the canteen counter having just paid for his lunch. The cashier offers the plate for free, but one is left to ponder whether anyone will accept a dead man's last meal.

The skipper of the boat (Ola Stensson) appears to take a new job as a barber, but his sole customer walks out when he learns that his only prior experience was in the military. At a nearby dance studio, a flamenco teacher (Lotti Törnros) tries to control her crush on one of her students (Oscar Salomonsson). Outside, a cleaning lady chats on the phone and informs the other caller, `I'm happy to hear you're doing fine.' The dance class also catches the eye of an old soldier (Jonas Gerholm), who sits in a restaurant and wonders when the lecture on strategic withdrawals is going to start. He makes a call and apologises for having got his timings wrong.

Oblivious to the world around them, novelty salesmen Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom) schlepp around the city trying to interest customers in a set of plastic vampire fangs, a laughing bag and a rubber mask of an old man called One-Tooth Pete. The goods are cheap and shoddy and there seems little wonder that the duo have to live in a rundown hostel and struggle to coerce their clients into settling their accounts. It also seems inevitable that they have superiors on their case about their poor collection record and, when the pair meet up in a bar to discuss their woes, they quickly start bickering. Around them, however, the discussion centres on a regular who has been drinking in the bar owned by Limping Lotta (Charlotta Larsson) for decades and the action suddenly switches back to 1943, as he sits in a corner and watches soldiers and sailors trading kisses for booze, as a singsong develops into a full-scale musical number.

At various places around Gothenburg, a man sits by the kitchen window while his wife chats on the phone and enthuses `I'm happy to hear you're doing fine.' Two young girls blow bubbles on the edge of a high balcony of an apartment block, while a mother fusses over her baby in its pram and a couple kiss on a beach. A young girl with learning difficulties stands up at the school talent show to recite a poem about a pigeon that has no money. But Sam and Jonathan are no more polished as they deliver their sales patter and one shopkeeper shoos them away, as though they were pesky birds that had fluttered into his shop.

Indeed, they don't even know their patch very well and have to stop off in a bar in the industrial suburbs to ask for directions. As they linger, King Charles XII (Viktor Gyllenberg) marches past at the head of an army heading for a showdown with Peter the Great of Russia. An officer ushers the occupants into the street, as the flamboyant monarch flirts with the barman while ordering a sparkling water. The scene bristles with bravura and it is all the more tragic, therefore, when the defeated rump passes by the window just eight scenes later, after the Swedes have been routed at the 1709 Battle of Poltava that saw Tsar Peter I gain revenge for the humiliating defeat at Narva nine years earlier. As the soldiers trudge along, the wailing of widows can be heard and the melody on the soundtrack that has been associated throughout with jollity takes on a sombre air.

This calamity seems to lower the spirits of Jonathan and Sam, who argue bitterly after being questioned about their shortcomings by their grasping superiors. They make up back at the hostel, as they are aware that they can only rely on each other. The CEO of a small company clearly has nobody, however, as he looks at the gun in his hand and tries to sound cheerful as he declares into the speakerphone, `I'm happy to hear you're doing fine.' The lonely colonel is also alone, as he blames his woes on the rain.

Across the city, a monkey is subjected to electric shocks in a laboratory, as a female scientist looks away and confides to the caller on her phone, `I'm happy to hear you're doing fine.' But this isn't the only barbarism being perpetuated in the city, as a unit of British colonial soldiers in tunics and pith helmets drive some African slaves (including women and children) into a large copper box suspended above a deep pit. A fire is lit beneath the drum and the screams of the dying souls are converted into an eerie form of music that is appreciated by an audience in evening dress.

This shocking scene appears to be a dream, however, but when the slow-witted Jonathan tries to explain it to Sam, he is patronisingly dismissed and told to get ready for another day's grind. In a café, Jonathan is fascinated by the sight of a woman removing a stone from her shoe. But, as Wednesday morning comes around, all that concerns a gaggle of commuters waiting at a bus stop to go to work is the sound of a pigeon cooing somewhere above them.

Four years in the making, Roy Andersson's first feature-length experience with digital photography takes its inspiration from sources as diverse as Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1565 canvas, `The Hunters in the Snow' and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). However, it's also hard not to see the lugubrious Sam and Jonathan as the latest in a line of downbeat double acts that runs from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza through such screen couples as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in Hollywood Danes Harald `Bivognen' Madsen and Carl `Fyrtaanet' Schenstrom and Swedes Åke Söderblom and Thor Modéen to Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. Indeed, with their faces coated in white pancake make-up (like the rest of the cast), the pair resemble circus clowns, although they come closer to a Kaurismäkian incarnation than the more traditional Fellini type.

Jonathan and Sam are the closest that Andersson gets to protagonists in this freewheeling odyssey and their deadpan delivery sets the tone for the rest of the cast to follow. But this is very much Andersson's show, as he storyboards every sequence so that the actors know precisely where to move inside the fixed, deep-focus frame. Like Jacques Tati before him, he allows gags to play out in their own time and invites the viewer to scour the screen for small bits of business that are not readily apparent at first glance. Cinematographers István Borbás and Gergely Pálos deserve great credit for their digital compositions, as does the production design team of Ulf Jonsson, Julia Tegström, Nicklas Nilsson, Sandra Parment and Isabel Sjöstrand, as the settings are crucial to binding the time frames into a single cockeyed world, in which 18th-century despots are barely worth looking up from one's drink for.

Times are tough and getting through the day is often a struggle. Andersson is also ready to chastise those who fight wars for vainglorious purposes, conduct inhumane experiments on defenceless creatures and commit atrocities against fellow humans simply because they are different. But he is keen to stress how quickly death can strike and urges his audience to make the most of even the most mundane moment, as it can never be repeated. And, after all, it could be worse.

Olivier Assayas and Juliette Binoche go back a long way. In 1985, he made his feature debut as a screenwriter in collaboration with André Téchiné on Rendez-vous, a provocative study of sexual passion and artistic ambition that earned its director top prize at Cannes and made Binoche a star. She reunited with Assayas on Summer Hours (2008) and, by all accounts, challenged him to write a film that explored the female experience with more insight and sensitivity than he had done in such stylised thrillers as Irma Vep (1996), Demonlover (2002) and Boarding Gate (2007). The result is Clouds of Sils Maria, a treatise on acting and ageing that is riven with (auto)biographical references and self-reflexive nods towards such variations on the theme as Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve , Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (both 1950), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), John Cassavetes's Opening Night (1978) and Alain Resnais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2012).

There's a certain irony in the fact that the film won the Prix Louis Delluc, as the theorist-cum-director responsible for the Impressionist backlash against mainstream mundanity during the silent era once declared: `The French cinema must be cinema; the French cinema must be French.' Although made in English and set in Switzerland and London, this is very much a defence of the traditional kind of French arthouse cinema that is in danger of extinction because of the box-office dominance of effects-laden Hollywood blockbusters that seek primarily to entertain rather than provide intellectual provocation. Yet, Assayas is also keen highlight the way in which the actresses who star in such productions have a much shorter shelf-life than their continental counterparts, as the emphasis is more often on fetishised fantasy than everyday life. The point is wholly valid, but it might have been made with more finesse, as the protectionist tone is often stridently affected and distracts from the teasing intricacy of the storyline.

Actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is travelling from Paris to Zurich with her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) to collect an award on behalf of her mentor, Wilhelm Melchior, who had written Majola Snake, the play that had launched Marias career as an 18 year-old. She had played Sigrid, a young woman who had seduced her middle-aged boss, Helena, and made her so dependent upon her that the older woman had committed suicide after their break-up. A screen adaptation had brought Maria international recognition shortly after her original co-star had perished in a car crash. But she is now fed up with hanging from wires against green screens and is beginning to wonder where her career is going, as she edges into her mid-forties.

As they travel on an uncomfortable train, Valentine fields calls on a pair of mobile phones with an efficiency that suggests she knows her boss extremely well. Maria is in the middle of a messy divorce and Valentine is trying to set up a meeting when she receives a message that Melchior has died and that the award ceremony will now be a memorial. Offering her condolences to the playwright's widow, Rosa (Angela Winkler), Maria is reluctant to give a eulogy. But she is the consummate professional and delivers her tribute with such deft sincerity that former co-star Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler) can't resist flirting with her when he seeks her out to congratulate her on her performance.

Maria is also sought out by theatre director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who wants her to star in a West End revival of Maloja Snake and she is most up out when he suggests that she plays Helena opposite Hollywood starlet Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), who has earned a reputation as an enfant terrible because her off-sceen antics have become the toast of social media. Jo-Ann has only ever appeared in low-budget sci-fi offerings and Klaus is intrigued to find out whether she could handle a more challenging role and how the critics and public would respond to such stunt casting.

Despite her misgivings (and the attendant fears of confronting her own mortality), Maria accepts the invitation after consulting with Henryk and Valentine. She is a fan of populist cinema and takes Maria to the pictures to see Jo-Ann in action, so that she can see that there is more to her than her celebrity persona would suggest. Keen to reacquaint herself with the text, Maria decides to spend some time in Melchior's chalet in the mountains nears Sils Maria. Valentine runs lines with her and they soon start arguing over the meaning of the dialogue and its underlying themes. Neither seems to realise that the action reflects their own relationship and, at times, it becomes difficult to differentiate between written speech and spontaneous chat. They also disagree over Jo-Ann's merits as an actress and Valentine has to keep making excuses to chat with her photographer boyfriend in order to prevent their heated exchanges from simmering over.

One morning, they wake early and venture into the Alps to view the Maloja Snake, the rare cloud formation that slips in a serpentine manner between the peaks of the glacial Engadin Valley. But Valentine vanishes shortly afterwards and, when the story resumes after a momentous fade to black, Maria is rehearsing in London with a new assistant (Claire Tran). Finding it difficult to focus on her new role, Maria treats Klaus and Jo-Ann with the utmost respect. But Jo-Ann appears to have no doubts about her ability to play Sigrid and is more concerned with keeping boyfriend Christopher Giles (Johnny Flynn) amused. However, his wife is so distressed by their very public liaison that she kills herself and Maria slips away from the rehearsal hall expecting to be inundated by paparazzi. She takes a meeting with hot shot movie director Piers Roaldson (Brady Corbet), who is keen to sign her up for a lavish sci-fi thriller. He clearly represents the future and Maria isn't entirely convinced she wants to be part of it. But she lights a cigarette and smiles with quiet resignation when she returns to the theatre to and Jo-Ann dismisses out of hand a suggestion on how to approach a tricky scene.

Much has been made of the fact that Assayas sets a key part of the drama in the remote Swiss town where Friedrick Nietzsche wrote the parts of Thus Spake Zarathustra. In particular, he devised the theories of eternal recurrence which posits that a finite number of events will repeat themselves infinitely over an infinite period of time - and das letzte Mensch (or `the last man'), which descreibes the antithesis of the Übermensch (or `Superman') as someone who has grown tired of life and is no longer prepared to take risks that would jeopardise their comfort and security. Clearly, these ideas impact upon Maria's situation, but they almost seem like red herrings designed to give what is actually a rather melodramatic scenario a veneer of complexity and sophistication.

The principal notion under discussion here is the fate of cinema, as Assayas (who is no stranger to escapism himself) laments the commercial clout of vacuous digi-epics that have created a new breed of imagistic auteur who relies more on CGI imagery rather than marquee names to pull in the thrill-seeking punters. Given that films stars are becoming an endangered species in this brave new pixellated world, the likes of Stewart and Moretz can expect to have much shorter careers than Binoche, as the tyranny of youth becomes ever more enshrined in the Neo-New Hollywood ethos. But Assayas is really adding little new to the points raised by Wilder and Mankiewicz 65 years ago.

Although Binoche holds the picture together, it was Stewart who won a César for her supporting turn as the factotum whose beauty and potential are amusingly hidden behind a pair of large (and consciously clichéd) spectacles. Valentine is a more mercurial character than Maria, as there is little going on psychologically besides her vanity and insecurity (although her last action is tantalising, as it could imply she has either discovered how to play Helena or has developed a crush on Jo-Ann, who is able to stand up to her in a way that Valentine never could). She claims to like being a Girl Friday and allows Maria's jibes to go over her head. But she also has a lively intelligence and it would be tempting to suggest that she disappears so suddenly because she can see herself turning into Sigrid during the reading of the play. Alternately, she could simply be a figment of Maria's imagination and she expires once she no longer serves a worthwhile purpose.

The performances of the female triumvirate are knowingly splendid, although some of the more self-consciously profound dialogue and more laboured in-jokes still ring hollow. Indeed, the action can occasionally feel precious, as Assayas over-strives to legitimise serious acting. But he makes inspired use of François-Renaud Labarthe's production design and Yorick Le Saux's cinematography, which is audaciously supplemented during the Snake sequence by monochrome footage from Das Wolkenphänomen in Maloja, a 1924 short directed by Dr Arnold Fanck, the father of the popular Bergfilm (`mountain film') genre that launched the career of Leni Riefenstahl. Moreover, he remembers his duty as an erstwhile film critic to challenge the medium to take stock of itself and evolve, as both an escapist spectacle and as an artform. He may have been a bit too defensive in his dismissal of the new guard. but the chances of any of them replying with similar eloquence or efficacy are virtually nil. After all, who in today's Tinseltown would bankroll such a contemplatively introspective movie unless it could be made in 3-D and somehow involved alien life forms?

Dramatic nuance is in short supply in several of the pictures on offer this week. In fairness to Xavier Dolan, the 25 year-old Quebecois wunderkind has never shied away from over melodrama in his previous four features: I Killed My Mother (2009); Heartbeats (2010); Laurence Anyways (2012); and Tom At the Farm (2013). But Dane Susanne Bier has always striven for a certain social significance since she came to international attention with her Dogme95 outing, Open Hearts (2002). Working in collaboration with screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, she followed Brothers (2004) with an Oscar nomination and a Best Foreign Film victory of After the Wedding (2006) and In a Better World (2010). Yet, in each case, the message was laid with a trowel and this failing has also compromised her English-language projects: Things We Lost in the Fire (2008); Love Is All You Need (2012) and Serena (2014).

So, we shouldn't be surprised that both Mommy and A Second Chance are heavily dependent upon clichés, contrivances and caricatures. But, while Dolan typically makes a virtue of his Sirkian affectation, Bier leavens her Loachian social realism with Ozu-like digressions that are designed to prompt the audience into examining their own consciences and shedding their preconceptions and prejudices, as the hackneyed action takes ever-more improbable twists. It's one thing to bombard viewers with plotlines that would seem far-fetched in a second-rate soap opera, but to browbeat them at the same time seems a bit excessive.

In a dystopic Canada some time in the near future, a law known as S-14 is passed to allow parents to discard their emotionally unstable offspring. Three years after being widowed, fortysomething Anne Dorval takes advantage of the legislation to have 15 year-old Antoine-Olivier Pilon (who suffers from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) placed in a juvenile detention centre. However, he is expelled after causing a fire in the cafeteria and Dorval makes no secret of her resentment after she has a traffic accident while driving to collect him.

Once home, the pair bicker incessantly, with a ferocity that might be described as Oedipal were the blonde-dyed, cross-dressing Pilon not so obviously out of the closet. Although she dresses provocatively, Dorval is not afraid of hard work and cleans houses and translates children's books to make ends meet. Moreover, Pilon is capable of genuine affection and buys his mother a necklace and enjoys listening with her to the musical playlist compiled by his late father that includes tracks by Celine Dion, Laura Del Rey and Sarah MacLachlan.

Their antics are highly resistible, but they intrigue neighbour Suzanne Clément, a teacher with a trauma-induced stutter who is on sabbatical while battling depression. She is keen to find a distraction from her own domestic travails and offers to help Pilon with his schooling. Dorval readily agrees, as she knows that her son will be incarcerated in a much tougher institution if he fails to settle down and find a focus. But, while he enjoys taunting Dorval about how much he adores Clément after the dissolve into a giggling fit after opening a wine box, Pilon is soon picking fights with her, too. Indeed, one becomes so intense that Clément pins him to the floor after he breaks her necklace and Pilon wets himself from a mixture of fear and confusion.

Dorval finds herself being drawn to Clément and the trio have their happy moments dining, dancing and cycling together. But, when Dorval is served with a $250,000 lawsuit by the parents of the boy who received second-degree burns after Pilon set him alight, she turns her attention to lonely lawyer Patrick Huard, in the hope he can provide a little legal and financial assistance. They arrange to go on a date, but Pilon is immediately jealous of a rival for his mother's affection and, out of a twisted loyalty to his father, he accompanies them to a karaoke bar, where his rendition of Andrea Bocelli's `Vivo per lei' enrages some homophobic patrons and the evening ends in disaster.

Following a further contretemps with Dorval, Pilon attempts to kill himself with a Stanley knife in a supermarket. He dreams that he is grown up with children of his own. But, in bitter reality, he is being driven to another detention centre, as Dorval can no longer cope with his tantrums and tirades. However, she is dismayed when Clément informs her that she is moving to Toronto and the action ends as Pilon makes a bid to escape, despite having nowhere else to go.

There has always been something of Rainer Werner Fassbinder about Xavier Dolan. He is never afraid to push buttons or go to limits. Nor is he averse to playing with his medium and, as a consequence, he shoots this in a 1:1 aspect ratio whose confining boxiness is emphasised by black lines down the side of the frames. However, when Pilon starts to feel good about life as he is skateboarding along the street, Dolan has cinematographer André Turpin extend the frame to widescreen as Pilon pushes out his arms and feels the space around him. This contracts the moment things take a down turn. But Dolan makes the mistake of repeating the shot later in the picture and succeeds only in cheapening the effect.

He also has a bad habit of dawdling. The sequences of Pilon pirouetting in a car park in a shopping trolley is made tolerable poetic by the use of the Counting Crows track `Colourblind'. However, the scenes of Pilon acting out to the Oasis hit `Wonderwall' and having a hissy fit to `Blue (Da Ba Dee)' by Eiffel 65 are little more than glorified music videos and smack of self-indulgence. Indeed, the action could be comfortably cut by 40 minutes without reducing its impact, as the downtime does nothing to make the shouting matches (which often recall the snarling wit of those between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Mike Nichols's 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) between the leading trio seem any more shocking or intense.

Yet, Dolan continues to write coruscating dialogue and bring the best out of his actors, with the scene-stealing Pilon more than holding his own against the experienced Dorval and Clément. But, while this act of psuedo-atonment for the brattishness of I Killed My Mother (which shared the Special Jury Prize at Cannes with Jean-Luc Godard 's infinitely superior Goodbye to Language) remains laudably personal and demonstrates a growing maturity in Dolan's film-making style, he rarely has anything of momentous significance to say about his characters or their milieux. And, until he does, he will remain an arthouse darling, but will never be the artist he clearly has the potential to become.

The investigation is much more leisurely and anything but expert in Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice, an overdue follow-up to the equally minimalist and mannered Uniform (2003) and Night Train (2007). The action is sometimes a touch too capriciously confusing, while the episodic structure prevents the Diao from sustaining either momentum or suspense. But, by borrowing liberally from a range of film noir classics, he gives this teasingly gruesome psychodrama a cutting chill to match the evocative snowscapes captured in the depths of a northern Chinese winter by cinematographer Dong Jinsong.

When body parts are found in 1999 on a coal mine conveyor belt in the province of Heilongjiang, detective Liao Fan is assigned the case and quickly ascertains that victim Wang Xuebing was cut into pieces and dispatched by delivery lorries to sites within a 100km radius of his home. Widow Gwei Lun-mei works for dry cleaner Wang Jingchun and betrays little emotion on hearing the news of her husband's demise. But, as he has just been through a painful divorce with Ni Jingyang, Liao allows himself to become intrigued by her and keeps finding excuses to visit the little corner shop in a quiet part of town.

Eventually, Liao narrows the suspect list down to two brothers, who work at the pit and have access to the trucks. However, when he tries to ambush them at a barber's shop, there is a shootout that culminates in the deaths of two cops, as well as the siblings, while Liao himself is badly wounded.

Five years later, Liao is employed as a security guard in a local factory. He drinks heavily and is feeling low after the theft of his moped when he bumps into old cop pal Yu Ailei. Rousing himself from his lethargy, Liao is intrigued to learn that two more butchered corpses have turned up and that the clues link back to Gwei, who had been dating the victims before they disappeared. Each man was found wearing ice skates and Liao is unable to resist snooping round the Rong Rong laundry. He rescues Gwei when Wang makes a lustful lunge at her and tends to the burn she receives while trying to fend off her boss with a hot iron.

Ignoring Yu's warning not to get himself involved with a femme fatale, Liao persuades Gwei to go skating at an outdoor rink. He falls over as they glide to `The Blue Danube' blaring out on the tannoy, but he follows Gwei when she slips off down an icy path by herself and they kiss when Liao pulls her to the ground. Yu tries to follow, but cannot make out what is happening in the darkness before all three are admonished over the loudspeaker by the owner for leaving the rink in hired skates.

Gwei and Liao return home in a taxi and seem oblivious to the fact they are being followed by a white van. Yu follows at a discrete distance and, when Liao and Gwei go to the Red Star Theatre to watch a 3-D film entitled Lucky 13 in a kung-fu festival, he trails the driver into a narrow alleyway. He orders the man to stop and is about to handcuff him, when he slashes the cop across the face with a razor-sharp skate and proceeds to stab him mercilessly with the glistening blade.

Distraught at losing a friend, Liao finds a number on a pad in Yu's car and boards a bus with the same registration. It's crowded and he is pushing along the standing area when he sees someone with skates over their shoulder. Liao gets off at the stranger' stop and they eat in the same café. When the skater goes to a dancing club, Liao tags along and waltzes distractedly with a lonely woman before following his quarry through a maze of corridors. However, he opts not to pursue him up a staircase and decides to bide his time.

Some time later, Liao sees the suspect making ice delivery with his van and tails him to a remote spot. The perp carries something shrouded in a sheet on to a railway bridge and Liao watches dispassionately as he tosses Yu's severed limbs into a coal truck passing below. Realising the identity of the killer, Liao returns to the ice rink and has the owner page Wang Xuebing. However, he skates off too quickly for Liao to catch him and he contents himself with paying Gwei a visit to ask what she knows about her undead spouse. She reveals that Wang killed a man during a bungled robbery and decided to fake his own death. However, he was unable to stay away from her and started murdering any man who showed an interest in her.

As she feels trapped, Gwei agrees to betray Wang and he is gunned down in an ambush that also claims the life of a cop. Liao is hurt when Gwei ignores him at the funeral home when she comes to claims her husband's ashes and he confronts her on the railway bridge near her home. He asks if she kept the ashes she had claimed were Wang back in 1999 and she insists she threw them in the river. But Liao recalls Yu saying that she had buried them under a tree outside the Rong Rong and he wonders whether Gwei is as innocent as she claims.

His focus falls on a leather coat that had proved key to the case five years earlier and tracks it down to internet café owner, Chang Kaining. He directs Liao to the Daylight Fireworks Club, where the female owner recognises the coat and says her husband was wearing it when he abandoned her for his mistress. She climbs into a bathtub fully clothed and cackles as she avers she would recognise the woman anywhere. Convinced he is on the right lines, Liao arranges to meet Gwei at an amusement park. They ride the Ferris wheel and he notes her reaction when she sees the Daylight's neon sign glowing in the darkness. Liao tells Gwei to confide in him and they clumsily make love before going for soup and dumplings at a nearby café.

She promises to see him later, as she has to open the laundry. But, much as he is smitten, Liao has to do his duty as a former policeman. That night, therefore, he shows Gwei the incriminating jacket and she confesses that she killed its owner after he became a nuisance. She also reveals that Wang tried to cover up for her and then became jealous when she started seeing other men following his `death'. Liao gets out of the car and trudges through the snow, as Gwei is driven away. He goes to the dancing club and throws himself into some energetic gyrations in a bid to work through his frustration and regret.

A few days later, Gwei is taken under police guard to the tenement where she used to live. A couple expecting a baby let them in and watch as Gwei describes how she killed the coat owner with a knife in the bedroom. She is made to point to different parts of the room for video evidence. But, as she leaves, fireworks rain down from an upper room of a building opposite and she half smiles as she is led away. The fire brigade arrives and, although the camera remains a distant observer, it seems clear that the display was Liao's way of showing Gwei that he cared while bidding her farewell.

Stuffed with auteurist flourishes and eccentric digressions (such as the visit to a landlady troubled by a horse roaming the corridors of her property), this is a disarming thriller that keeps threatening to grip only to slacken off or become unnecessarily convoluted. The sequences at the dance club (the second of which appears to culminate in a homage to Claire Denis's Beau Travail, 1999) are a case in point, although the entire strand with the leather coat is rather awkwardly handled, considering its significance to the plot. However, there is something satisfyingly labyrinthine about proceedings that are allowed to develop in their own good time.

The performances of Liao Fan and Taiwanese star Gwei Lunmei are excellent, with his shabby shamus and her enigmatic black widow being solidly supported by Yu Ailei as the world-weary inspector and Wang Jingchun as the lecherous laundry owner, whose devotion to Gwei sees him bring her a scarf as she is about to be driven off to jail. But the characterisation is rather sketchy and Diao often seems more intent on alluding to Hollywood gems and curios than he does on generating tension. However, the vein of bleak humour is subtly sustained, while the use of the industrial landscape and the rundown backstreets is exemplary. Hard-boiled aficionados will be hooked, as will those seeking a little political allegory about the price China has paid for its economic advancement. But this would always occupy the lower half of a double bill with Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin (2013).