Shanghai Triad reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Zhang Yimou's new film is deceptively simple. On the surface, it's the story of a 14-year-old boy's eventually painful initiation into an adultworld of corruption and betrayal. But as this plot unfolds against a specific historical background, Shanghai's gangster underworld during the 1930s, young Shuisheng's (Wang Ziao Xiao) experience begins to resonate beyond his youthful comprehension, in ways that also lead us to rethink our own initial interpretations. In this way the film works as a kind of intricate pattern, its possibilities folding back on themselves, its meanings dependent on its viewers. Like Zhang's previous movies, this one is exquisitely composed, dense with visual and aural details, smoky period interiors, brilliant yellow and red fabrics, the particular clickings of maah-jong tiles. But, unlike his other work, _Shanghai Triad_ is expressly subjective in its point of view. Along with Shuisheng, we peer through barely cracked open doors at men in suits speaking in low voices, or look through crowds of nightclub patrons, trying to catch glimpses of what's going on at a distance. And like him, we tend to be seduced by the fascinating surface of this world, trying to make sense of the film's many puzzle pieces. As it opens, Shuisheng literally just gets off the boat in Shanghai: the camera tightly frames his face while we hear the sound of water gently lapping against the pier. This sound soon fades, along with Shuisheng's past, now overpowered by the clamor of the crowd and traffic. He's welcomed to the big city by his Uncle Liu (Li Xuejian), who has arranged for his employment at the house of a powerful crimelord whom everyone calls The Boss (Li Baotian, who also starred in Zhang's _Ju Dou_). Because he's also remotely related to The Boss (by way of a third cousin), Shuisheng is expected to learn the family operations, to be grateful for the opportunity to escape from "the country,'' where life is predictable and harsh. At the beginning, his new life seems full of glamorous promise, looking toward a future filled with intrigue and excitement. Shuisheng's sense of wonder is illustrated in images that are intimate - as when he tastes ice cream for the first time - and vast - as when he's introduced to his new home and we see a series of long shots, showing hallways stretching into some incalculable distance and ornately decorated rooms. His job sounds like it will be equally showy: he's the personal servant for The Boss's mistress, Xiao Jinbao (Gong Li), a nightclub singer who goes by the westernized name of Bijou. When Shuisheng first sees her on stage, she appears as a kind of adolescent wet-dreamy vision, costumed in glorious red silk and feathers, set off by a chorus line dressed in white. From his perspective, she looks nearly ethereal, hazy and swaying slightly as she sings, "Your eyes are all over me... you want to love me.'' Because we've seen gangster movies before, we can appreciate the irony as well as the iridescence of her performance. While it's certainly exotic, it's also clear that the mystifying haze is the effect of cigarette smoke, the men in the audience view Bijou as, alternately, an enchantress and a "slut,'' and her vaguely gaudy routine alludes to Marlene Dietrich's around the same time (for instance, in _The Blue Angel_ or _Blonde Venus_). Still, there's a magic in this moment as well, in part because Shuisheng's point of view grants us no background (yet), in part because Gong Li is unspeakably beautiful, and in part because, as with Dietrich, the men watching her, whether reverent or contemptuous, are, after all, irrelevant. Their eyes may be "all over'' her, but they don't get it - they don't know what they're looking at - and she seems somehow removed, quite aware of the effect of this distance, her ability to move and manipulate her audience. And yet, like Gong Li's characters in Zhang's _Red Sorghum_ and _Raise the Red Lantern_, Jinbao is soon revealed to be trapped in the illusion of her power. Her relationship with The Boss is, of course, determined by his desires and, especially, by his business dealings. (In this way, it's a conventional gangster movie: when she's in the way, she's treated as expendable baggage.) The framing of her realization by Shuisheng's perspective makes it more emotionally complicated. For the movie underlines the similarities between their positions in this world which is orchestrated by men with money and sinister reputations. It takes Shuisheng and Jinbao - and us - some time to understand that their careers are so linked. When they first meet, Shuisheng seems to be an easy target for her frustrations, because he's powerless, naive, and clumsy (he walks into a mirror, mistaking it for actual space). She's cruel to him, calls him a "country bumpkin," and makes him practice his entrance into her bedroom until he gets it right. On one level, this episode serves as a critique of ritual for ritual's sake, and the pettiness that such devotion to tradition inspires in people who take their class privileges for granted (a theme that comes up again and again in Zhang's movies). But on another level, Jinbao's meanness, or more precisely, Shuisheng's view of it, is fallout from the infinitely more malevolent drugs and guns business that surrounds them both. And as they're thrown together more often, Jinbao begins to soften, confiding in Shuisheng and singing children's songs with him (granted, some of this "softening" process starts to seem a little contrived, but then again, it's from the kid's point of view). It's really the gangster violence that the movie is most concerned with, except that it's only available in secondary fragments, the bits of what Shuisheng imagines or overhears. Instead of full-on blood and guts imagery, we see pigeons take flight from a warehouse where shots have been fired, or bodies after they've been assaulted, but only briefly, as Shuisheng is hustled past them, straining for a look, but also horrified. Compared to the generally extreme concentration on violent acts that we may be used to seeing, this oblique perspective might seem, well, discreet. But as the movie leads to its conclusion (which you have to know is inevitable, but still comes with a disturbing jolt), what you're not seeing, what you're imagining at the edges of the frame, is almost uglier than if it was visible. And if the lesson that Shuisheng learns at film's end is harrowing, it's also rendered with such grace and simplicity, that at first you might not grasp how terrible it is. But the chilling sense of it is inescapable, as the credits roll over the sound of lapping water. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.