DISTANT THUNDER review
It's not simply that the man's moved on to different subject matter. There are passing hints at what he's capable of, suggesting we might be onto a winner, but ultimately this plunges into hackneyed, over-ripe melodrama with even less subtlety or restraint than Red River (2009).
Distant Thunder is the story of Zhao Po (Guo Xiaoran), a nervous rural boy come to study in Chongqing. Shy and retiring, he lets himself be dragged around by his friends, sitting awkwardly in the background while they chat up girls, hoping no-one will push him too hard about his family history. He's clearly not coping too well with city life - in particular the sight of the girls working the backstreet hair salons expected to provide other services if the customer insists.
Lured into one of these by the pushy Gan Xiu (Huo Siyan) Zhao Po takes an unexpected shine to her and plucks up the courage to ask her out. Needless to say things don't go particularly smoothly. Zhao Po is convinced his friends won't accept her if he reveals she's a hair salon girl (tantamount to dating a prostitute) yet there's clearly more to his hangup than an obsession with propriety. Ultimately, his damaged psyche threatens to derail the relationship in tragic and lasting ways.
Technically Distant Thunder has its moments. Chongqing's underbelly is laid out under cold blue filters, the camera skipping across the city in long, jittery shots of crowded alleyways, shop fronts and underpasses. The score drifts along in the background, little underwater piano flourishes and synth twinkles that prove reasonably engaging. But it's obvious from very early on the story has some serious work to do to convince, and it never really manages it.
Guo Xiaoran goes for a perpetual rabbit-in-the-headlights expression almost as soon as he's on screen, a distant stare that feels like a terrible error of judgement. While nothing in the film stoops as low as the awful The Double Life, its handling of the protagonist's mental state comes across as similarly, thuddingly predictable. We're shown Zhao Po's childhood trauma inside the first ten minutes without the slightest bit of artistry, and the film barely even attempts to suggest he's ever going to get over it.
Hackneyed pop-psychology aside, things do seem as if they might improve once Huo Siyan turns up. Criminally neglected since her terrific turn in My Name is Fame, she breathes a great deal of life into a clichéd part and succeeds in making a lot of the stabs at social relevance seem like they might pick up some real weight. Briefly, Distant Thunder becomes a strange, queasily erotic little arthouse romance, like something Zhang Yibai (Lost, Indulgence) might have considered were he bored.
But the director doesn't seem to realise when to rest on his laurels, and forces the story into a ridiculously contrived third act progression handled with all the nuance of a hammer dropped into a bucket. There's nothing whatsoever in the script that feels as if Zhang truly understands what he's doing, and while the craft is still there (the shots of the river in pouring rain are especially haunting) the cartoon stupidity of the way events play out robs it of any real power.
Presumably Zhang doesn't actually believe, ah, maternal issues (to avoid spoilers) automatically turn you into a wallflower with a propensity for mental breakdowns, but he presents his story in such simplistic fashion this feels like it's the message he's trying to convey. Distant Thunder is as much a psychodrama as some random film student's halting attempts to play Hitchcock. Compared with the tortured love story in The Road, there's never any real question of where things are headed or what emotional state people are in, or any lasting sense they're more than archetypes.
Distant Thunder is hardly a disaster, and anyone prepared to suspend their disbelief for some undemanding arthouse-lite may well get something out of it if they don't think too hard. But it's yet another step back from a director who seemed to have found his feet, and a waste of a great deal of talent. There's nothing here Zhang's contemporaries haven't done many times better. For all the brief moments of artistic flair, far too much of it remains laughably overwrought and ultimately unsatisfying, making it difficult to recommend.
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