Wei Shujun’s detective noir Only the River Flows (based on a story of the same name by Chinese author Yu Hua) is set in a small town along a river in China’s Jiangdong province where it seems the sun never shines. The atmosphere is unrelentingly melancholy: the town’s infrastructure is crumbling, the police have turned the local cinema into their headquarters (no one sees films there anymore), Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” plays frequently, and––yes––there is a murder.
Heading the investigation is Chief of Police Ma Zhe (played beautifully by Yilong Zhu), a talented investigator with a slightly depressive aura. An older woman is found murdered by the river, and as the team investigates they don’t exactly uncover misdeeds, but rather the secret lives of people crushed by the demands of conformity: a clandestine couple, a person repressing their gender identity, and a man so misunderstood that he’s only ever referred to as the madman. It’s this aspect of the case that begins to erode Ma Zhe’s psyche; when he and his wife (Chloe Maayan) learn their unborn child may have a severe disability, the plight of those who can’t conform becomes even more frightening.
To his credit, Shujun allows this anxiety to color the investigation without spelling it out. River is at its best when metaphors and themes are held below the surface, and at its weakest when it brings these undercurrents to the surface (as in a second-half dream sequence that almost derails the film’s carefully constructed tone).
Only the River Flows’ grey sameness (already a perfect ambiance for a procedural) is made eloquent and textured by the 16mm cinematography and Shujun’s knack for visual metaphors, some of which are wryly funny (a basket of ping-pong balls is knocked over by our distracted detective while taking a group photo) or lyrical (the jacket of a recently deceased is ceremoniously laid out in the river) and sometimes a little on-the-nose (e.g. the opening scene where a child pretending to be a cop in an abandoned apartment walks through a door and nearly plummets to the ground).
But Shujun has built a compelling, evocative mystery that maintains its enigmatic, unfinished feeling even after the higher-ups have closed the case and patted themselves on the back. And he doesn’t let his troubled investigator veer into cliche: Yilong Zhu’s performance is consistently grounded, even when performing classic noir detective tasks (darting down dark alleys after shadowy assailants, obsessively poring over evidence that just doesn’t add up). Yilong Zhu gained weight to play the detective and progressively lost it throughout shooting. It’s never commented on, but his shift is startling and effective: a man hollowed out not by existential anxiety or the moral rot and financial collapse around him, but by his empathy.
Only the River Flows is now in limited release.