Worth: $9.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Fan Bingbing, LEE Joo-young, KIM Young-ho, KIM Min-gu
Intro:
… there’s only so much that pure aesthetics can do to make up for this frustrating smeared haze film.
There’s a certain unassuming power that comes from the meme-as-mission-statement “Be Gay Do Crime”. A notion that life as dictated to LGBTQ+ people by non-LGBTQ+ people is inherently unjust, and so the only rightful way to exist within that system and stay sane is to actively buck it at every turn. It’s what puts the ‘transgressive’ in transgressive Queer cinema, like the works of John Waters and Kenneth Anger, and it still finds shine in both the mainstream (Luca Guadagnino’s cannibalistic love story Bones and All) and the underground (Max Barber’s scrappy and extra-ultraviolent Crazed Gender Twisters from Planet X, and yes, that film is real).
With Han Shuai’s sophomore feature Green Night, the transgressive is refracted through the patriarchal structures of East Asia, pairing up the Chinese Jin Xia (Fan Bingbing) with the Korean Green-haired Woman (LEE Joo-young) for an outlaw road trip; but first they must deal with Jin Xia’s rapist husband (KIM Young-ho).
Shuai’s script goes to great lengths to detail how trapped women are made to feel within the system, infused with the fallacious notion that they cannot exist without the very same people who treat them as sub-human. Between the gradual intimacy of the main pair’s relationship and the imagery surrounding them (the juxtaposition of birds in flight with stickers of birds stuck on a window is a particularly inspired example), there’s a lot of mood behind the overall musings on how women are treated and, in turn, treat each other and themselves. Being expected to swallow it, is the same as being made to choke on it.
Well, for a time. Once they steal their way into a crossdresser’s hotel room, dance to ‘Jingle Bells’ (the Christmas imagery is jarring, to put it lightly), and a lengthy projection session involving a little girl who survived a house fire on the news… yeah, it goes the rails pretty damn quickly.
As much as it wants to vent off its fireworks-tattooed chest about the injustice of it all, the film unfortunately steadily loses coherency and falls into the trap of defining women solely by the damage that’s inflicted on them.
Only one of the two leads is properly named, furthering the sense of dehumanisation (not to mention a later development involving a dog that… waht?), making the dicier moments come across as hypocritical and even entitled, as if victimhood is an excuse to perpetuate the very cycle of human disregard that started this all off.
Where films like Promising Young Woman, Hustlers, and even Nimona show an understanding of how ‘hurt people hurt people’ is a curse to be broken rather than a mantra to live by, the way Green Night tends to nestle into it is quite off-putting.
Green Night gets an amber caution light at best. The performances and chemistry of the leads are good, and the production has moments of ingenuity in conveying its larger messages… but the messages themselves get garbled over time and the narrative stringing them together is lacking even for a 90-minutes-and-change feature film.
When it isn’t being vaguely exclusionary, it’s just downright perplexing, and there’s only so much that pure aesthetics can do to make up for this frustrating smeared haze film.
