Mystery
Lou Ye
The story: Lu Jie (Hao Lei) and Yongzhao (Qin Hao) seem at first to be a version of the China dream made real. They are happily married with a young daughter and live a comfortably middle-class life.
Lu Jie befriends Sang Qi (Qi Xi), the mother of her daughter’s schoolmate who suspects that her husband is having an affair. Slowly, the life Lu Jie thought she had begins to unravel.

In his last few films, China’s auteur-provocateur Lou Ye has pushed buttons with his choice of material.
Love And Bruises (2011) depicted a sexually intense affair, Spring Fever (2009) took on homosexuality and Summer Palace (2006) featured the politically sensitive Tiananmen protests of 1989.
The last landed him with a five-year ban on film-making in China.
Mystery marks his return to “official” film-making and it has been showered with seven Golden Horse Award nominations, including for Best Feature Film, Best Director and Best Leading Actress.
His dedication and persistence to his craft is laudable, less so his latest effort.
The noirish mystery-thriller set in a rainy and dreary city harks back to his early breakthrough work, Suzhou River (2000), which featured Zhou Xun in dual roles.
While there was a surreal feel to Suzhou River, Mystery, for the most part, is anchored in the reality of here and now and the performances of Hao Lei, nominated for Best Leading Actress, and Qi Xi, nominated for Best New Performer.
As in Summer Palace, Hao is once again put through the emotional wringer by Lou.
After Lu Jie discovers her husband’s infidelity through a meeting with Sang Qi, her sense of pain and betrayal is acute and it is all played across Hao’s face.
In contrast, Qin Hao’s philandering Yongzhao is largely a cipher beyond the fact that he has trouble keeping his pants on. Later in the film, after a few more devastating revelations, Lu begins to exact her revenge, testing the audience’s sympathy for her.
Just when things seem like they might get interesting and nasty, the film changes tack to go back to the investigation of a car accident which claimed a young woman’s life.
The few twists and turns in the narrative here do not work – events unfold in a manner that is plainly improbable, particularly so towards the end when there seems to be a rush to wrap things up. For example, a key pouch is conveniently dropped, and found, and leads the police right to, well, the right person.
To be fair, some of what seems preposterous makes sense in the light of revelations doled out in the film.
Mystery works neither as a murder mystery nor as a dark domestic drama, stranded somewhere in the murky middle.
(ST)