‘She’s Got No Name’: Cannes Review

Dir: Peter Chan Ho-sun. China. 2024. 150 minutes. 

The true story of a ugly homicide in Forties Shanghai is became a stirring widescreen melodrama with a message in Hong Kong director Peter Ho-sun Chan’s first Cannes premiere since martial arts drama Dragon, higher referred to as Wu Xia (2011). Programmed out of competitors as the ultimate red-carpet gala of a competition that has no official closing movie, She’s Acquired No Title options Zhang Ziyi’s meatiest function shortly as a lady accused of murdering and dismembering her husband within the closing months of the Japanese occupation of mainland China.

Marks the return of Zhang Ziyi as a number one girl

In some methods it’s an unashamedly old-school train, one the place each tattered cheongsam gown, bloodstained floorboard and iron jail grate has a tactile high quality. It’s quaint too in methods like the usage of slow-motion footage to drive dwelling poignant moments, or the delicate halation results that convey a mist of reminiscence to the movie’s black-and-white flashbacks. However She’s Acquired No Title offers this historic trigger celebre modern relevance by first teasing the story as a lurid true-crime story earlier than revealing it to be a drama of home abuse.

In a rustic that solely handed its first home violence legislation in 2015, one which has been rocked just lately by a collection of high-profile instances and viral Weibo movies, Chan’s movie is using a wave that it must also assist to enhance. Abroad play might be helped by its widescreen attract, the return of of Zhang Ziyi as a number one girl, and a script that flirts with sentimentality but additionally has another extra attention-grabbing strikes – for instance, in the way in which it interlaces supporting characters like pig-headed police commissioner Xue Zhi-wu or Xi Lin, a playwright, journalist and divorcee who takes up the case of the so-called husband-butcher.

The preliminary identify by which Zhang’s character is thought is Zhan-Zhou, a mix of the household names of a husband who fairly actually owned her. Illiterate, cowed, her face disfigured by a birthmark that marks her out as a pariah, she is discovered by police huddling in a nook of the wretched condo she shared together with her husband (Wang Chuan-jun) whose heft and stature earned him the nickname ‘Massive Bear’. He’s a dismembered corpse by now – all besides the pinnacle, which can by no means be discovered.

Zhan-Zhou confesses instantly, and there’s little doubt at any level that she was accountable. The whodunnit strand in what follows focuses on the seek for an confederate – as a result of the general public, stirred up by the media frenzy that follows the ugly discovery, refuses to consider that such a small girl might kill and carve up such a giant man, or that any girl would ever kill her husband until she had a lover. However largely, it is a ‘whydunnit’, one which takes the grand guignol shock-value of the crime and turns it inside-out by depicting the ‘deparaved’ killer because the true sufferer.

A contemporary, cigarette-smoking unbiased girl, Zhao Li-ying’s canny proto-feminist Xi Lin leaps to Zhan-Zhou’s defence, partly for her personal acquire, in newspaper editorials and a tacky melodramatic play she writes primarily based on the case. Lei Jia-yin’s bullish police commissioner isn’t occupied with motives. He takes this crime as an affront to what he sees because the pure order wherein males command and girls obey, and he makes it his private mission to safe her execution.

The 1945 Shanghai of She’s Acquired No Title isn’t the decadent metropolis, seen by means of a haze of opium smoke, acquainted from so many films. It’s a spot of dirty tenements the place individuals eke out a residing or, like Massive Bear, hand over and take to playing. It’s additionally a spot of chilly institutional buildings – courtrooms, prisons, a police HQ – which may simply as effectively be in Berlin. The favored theatre the place Xi Lin’s performs are carried out supplies some aid from the dramatic darkness of the backstory sequences, and can invade the principle trial story in the direction of the top within the movie’s most audacious formal transfer. There’s one posh residence – the household dwelling the place the sad daughter of Zhan-Zhou’s defence lawyer lives. However this swish abode with its tasteful mix of Chinese language, Japanese and European design parts is usually there to make the purpose that home abuse cuts throughout class limitations.

Going to trial for the primary time on the day earlier than the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Zhang-Zhou’s lengthy drawn-out judicial journey spans two administrations, Japanese and Chinese language, including an additional word of jeopardy as paperwork are burned and death-row prisoners summarily executed. She’s Acquired No Title is optimistic, maybe, in utilizing this political transition as a metaphor for a hoped-for attitudinal shift in modern Chinese language society – however to take action in a movie that stands by itself two ft as an empathetic feminine survivor story at the least means that’s message might be heard.