Chinese director Han Shuai’s first movie, 2020’s coming-of-age story, Summer Blur, was such a big worldwide festival hit that programmers and distributors have been maneuvering ever since to be advantageously positioned when the followup finally dropped. In that regard, Green Night is certainly a surprise. A surreal gangster tale set in Korea, the movie’s entire vibe implies that Han was determined to not repeat herself. The casting alone would seem to reward the anticipation: Chinese star Fan Bingbing makes her own long-awaited return to the screen as an Incheon Port security guard married to a violent Korean man of faith, and rising Korean actor Lee Joo-young plays a punky drug mule who seems to have the hots for Fan’s character. 

Han sets the movie in the seedier environs of Seoul and its suburbs, a gambit that highlights the contrasting sensibilities of the core relationship. Fan’s Jin Xia is a Chinese woman trying to get out of her disastrous marriage-for-convenience and secure a resident visa, while Lee’s unnamed, green-haired retrobate seems to function as more or less a monkey wrench thrown into Jin Xia’s plans. There’s not a lot of coherence to the sequence of events that follow their first meeting at the security checkpoint in the port when Jin Xia attempts to scan a Korean woman for contraband and she responds by coming on to her. When Jin Xia tries to report this scofflaw to her boss, he doesn’t seem to care, thus indicating some kind of under-the-table quid pro quo. Jin Xia’s humiliation is exacerbated when she finds herself being stalked by the Korean woman, who readily admits she’s carrying drugs into the country for some Chinese concern. Without reason, Jin Xia succumbs to green-hair’s charms and allows her to crash at the crappy apartment she rents away from her husband, who pesters her with calls begging her to come back when he isn’t dropping in to give her another beating in the name of the Lord. Green-hair tries to return the favor by involving Jin Xia in a big drug deal, which will make her enough money to get a visa, albeit illicitly. The rest of the movie supplies plenty of transgressive potential, including copious violence, harrowing medical emergencies, and nasty language, but Han never gets a purchase on the underlying motivations and settles instead for a kind of artsy narrative ambience, which just comes across as being coy.

Even the promise of a cross-cultural romance fails to play out convincingly, though affection born of desperation does manage to develop between the two mismatched women. The structure, which is episodic to the point of distraction, fails to support the whole, even as a genre exercise. If you want to convey grit, you have to offer more than just the trappings of reality. 

In Korean and Mandarin. Opens Jan. 19 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

Green Night home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 DEMEI Holdings Limited (Hong Kong)