LOST AND FOUND review

While the plight of migrant workers in Beijing is old news to many (after becoming a cause célèbre in the runup to the Olympics), Liu Yuejin's having a especially bad day. He's surrendered his meagre life savings to keep his friend out of trouble, made as much back again helping his philandering boss avoid a scandal with a famous actress, then been robbed of the reward. Now the thief's robbed Liu's boss in turn and made off with evidence of the coverup, dragging Liu, his family, his boss, the actress and sundry mobsters, moneylenders, police and private investigators into a tightening spiral of sordid intrigue.

Rushed out barely three months after Liu Zhenyuan's original novel (I Am Liu Yuejin), the 2008 mainland production Lost and Found is the third film from director Ma Liwen (You and Me), shot after production halted on her romantic comedy Desires of the Heart. The film is far more dramatic than the novel, coming in a shade under ninety minutes with less of Liu's trademark contemporary satire (he also penned Feng Xiaogang's Cellphone and has a planning credit on Huang Jiangxin's Gimme Kudos).

Lost and Found is a strange beast, charging through the escalating twists and turns of its central caper at a dizzying pace. Though never graphic it's a far cry from Ma's work on You and Me, shot through with frequent blackly humorous touches, half the cast openly out for themselves, the others struggling not to get crushed underfoot.

Visually it's something quite distinctive, an oddly stilted approach that by rights shouldn't work yet comes together into something special despite itself. Ma's camera is all the more idiosyncratic, the same blend of slow, clumsy pans and seemingly throwaway framing from You and Me now writ large - yet along with the gritty, grimy look from veteran cinematographer Wu Di and the plaintive vocal motifs and lo-fi synth in Chen Yufan's score the presentation echoes the sweaty, nervous energy of Hong Kong's golden age.

Appropriately, the cast are a rogues' gallery of enough little people, oily bureaucrats and puffed-up thugs to do any Triad movie proud. Li Yixiang (One Foot off the Ground, Blind Shaft) excels as Liu, playing him as all frayed nerve endings and desperation, perpetually on the verge of collapse as he trails wearily after his stolen money.

Liu Zhenyuan's plotting makes the beleaguered Henan chef an effective everyman, and his peril laudably real. Violence is an ever-present threat here, unsettling and foreboding, a rare achievement by the standards of recent mainland Chinese cinema; ordinarily, if the good guys always win, how scary can it be? Yet in Lost and Found the criminals feel genuinely intimidating, mean-spirited, vicious; again, the film is neither graphic nor even ultimately that violent, but it maintains a level of tension recent caper comedies like Set Off or One Night in Supermarket never quite match.

Admittedly the ever more convoluted circumstances can feel somewhat self-indulgent, like putting the leads through the wringer for the sake of it, and while the ending wraps things up fairly neatly (and sidesteps much of the contrived morality of too many mainland productions in the process) it doesn't come as much of a surprise.

Still, Lost and Found turns out to be much more than the sum of its parts, and what might seem like impatience or a lack of refinement (if it came from any other director) makes this strange little caper all the more memorable. Ma Liwen is fast becoming one of the mainland's brightest new talents, skipping from a tiny, intimate arthouse drama to full-on genre filmmaking with barely any slip-ups. Unfairly passed over outside the domestic market her third feature makes for hugely entertaining, compelling viewing regardless of the viewer's command of the Chinese language and for those willing to take a gamble it comes highly recommended.