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Starring: Jiang Wen, Ge You, Zhou Yun, Shu Qi
Director: Jiang Wen
"We should struggle less at home, and expand more ashore," says a character during the first section of "Gone With The Bullets," in which a Chinese diva triumphs over her U.S. and European counterparts in a rigged beauty pageant in Shanghai. Director Jiang Wen, who co-penned this film with eight other screenwriters, has certainly walked the talk in this line: "Gone with the Bullets" is an extraordinary mélange of seminal stylistic tropes from abroad, a two-hour-plus journey taking in nods to newsreels, silent slapstick, musicals, film noir and even New Hollywood.
Unlike his brilliantly barbed, sensitively structured and meticulously multi-layered 2010 hit "Let the Bullets Fly," "Gone With the Bullets" --described as the second installment of a trilogy of gun-slinging satires set in tumultuous 1920s China -- is a sprawling, episodic spectacle reading less like a j'accuse of social malaise and more like a record of a self-styled auteur's ego going completely into overdrive as he indulges in shaping his lead character (played by himself) as a misunderstood and victimized idealist while unleashing a torrent of supposedly clever bites at the hands that feed him.
Jiang's character in the film, Ma Zouri, carries a similar life trajectory to Yan Ruisheng, a middle-class man who...