Goose Shit Lake

A review of THE WILD GOOSE LAKE (2019)
Written and Directed by Diao Yinan
Cinematography by Dong Jingsong
Score by B6
Staring Hu Ge, Liao Fan, Gwei Lun-Mei, and Wan Qian

Some months back I ran into the trailer for The Wild Goose Lake and I was instantly taken in. I wanted to see this movie bad. It had everything I wanted in a movie: Crime, dirtbags on motorcycles, a beheading, a tiger, brutalism, and maybe violence-centered disco? Lots of ideas on offer, all of them intriguing to me. Unfortunately is not what I had hoped for. Having braved the rain and a pandemic, I can say that I have a candidate for my worst movie of the year. I can also comfortably say that this is the second worst thing to be involved with Wuhan province to come out this year.

The Wild Goose Lake is a threadbare neo-noir centered around a man who made a mistake in a fit of desperation and the people in his orbit and then. . . I don't know stuff happens and the plot concludes. It's a film that takes a long time to get nowhere. It's also a film where the motives of its characters don't seem to be murky as they are underdeveloped. You can't tell if its characters are concealing something or if there just isn't anything there. Of course if you have to ask yourself what the director is getting at, you probably have the answer. . .

Also, there's a sexual assault towards the end of the film. And it's bad. Not just because it's supposed to be bad, but because it doesn't add anything. It's just there. It's this shocking bit of sexual violence that doesn't add anything and doesn't seem to say anything other than look what I can film.

And fuck that.

Having just watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a film completely without the male gaze, it was shocking and deeply unpleasant to watch The Wild Goose Lake needlessly assert itself remind me that misogyny is live and well in the entertainment industry. (Of course the cast of Portrait of a Lady on Fire knows all about that. . . )

It was at this point in the film that one of my five fellow film goers walked out of the theater. Good for him.


That said there are moments of actual sublimity in the movie. They are as follows:

• After taking down a suspect, a troupe of plainclothes cops assemble around the perp. Each one of the cops is wearing shoes with lights on the bottom, like they're a bunch of overgrown mall rats. I can't tell if it's supposed to be funny, but like all of the good moments in this movie, it feels out of place.
• A man gets murdered with an umbrella. It's a really strange moment, because it feels like something out of a Takashi Miike movie. Up until this point, as many moments of stylization (and violence) as there are,  The Wild Goose Lake seems to take place on planet Earth, not in the world of Asian Extreme. Still, as jarring as the moment is, it was fun and ridiculous and made me wonder where this movie had been for the entire time.
•  The noodles at the end of the movie look really, really good.

The Wild Goose Lake is a humorless film without characters, and it lacks the panache to make up for its shortcomings. It's a frustrating movie to watch, because there clearly seems to be some sort of talent and perspective behind it-- just none of it ends up on the screen-- at least not in one piece.

Overall, these rare few moments have all of the joy of picking the good stuff out of a salad. Except that the salad is wilted and the dressing is terrible and you just wished that you had ordered something else.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will see you next time, space cowboy. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.