Mark Reviews Movies: CLIFF WALKERS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 29, 2021

Co-writer/director Zhang Yimou essentially throws us into the story of Cliff Walkers, whether or not we're prepared for it. That's the case for the story's four protagonists, too, who are special agents infiltrating a puppet state in China, following the Japanese invasion of the country in 1931. That's all the background we get from a historical and political perspective, so the opening images of the agents falling toward the ground, tumbling through trees, and landing roughly in a remote forest certainly, albeit to a lesser degree, reflect our own feelings of confusion and ill-preparation.

Zhang and co-writer Quan Yongxian's screenplay doesn't illuminate much about the specifics of the politics and the history of its premise, likely because the movie is a Chinese production, made for an audience that is aware of those details. The good news for those who might not be, though, is that this plot doesn't require too much historical knowledge. We just need to know that there are spies working to bring certain atrocities to international attention, enemies working to stop them, and other spies hiding within the protagonists' circles and within the enemies' upper echelons.

All of this—the lack of historical details and the constant uncertainty about who is working for or against whom—does immediately make for a pretty confounding experience. It's one that's only aggravated by the screenplay's focus on how many twists, betrayals, and secret alliances, it can toss into this story. By the end, one might understand who was with whom, who was working behind the scenes and in the shadows, and what specific mission or missions were actually accomplished (even if the main one occurs off-screen), but as for what all these secrets and sacrifices and victories actually mean to these characters and in a bigger context, that's not, unfortunately and frustratingly, the filmmakers' primary concern.

The four spies, dropped into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (formerly and later Manchuria), are a pair of couples. Zhang (Zhang Yi) and Yu (Quin Hailu) are married, and Chuilang (Zhu Yawen) and Lan (Liu Haocun) are in a romantic relationship. All four, members of the Communist Party, were trained in the Soviet Union for a mission such this one: to rescue the sole survivor of a Japanese internment/extermination camp, which the Japanese bombed into oblivion as a cover-up. If the survivor's story goes public, it could raise an international outcry against the invasion.

Those are the basics, and in terms of characterization, the movie doesn't go much deeper. All of them are willing to die, each one pocketing a suicide pill in case things go wrong. Zhang and Yu left behind two children, who are living in the region and were displaced in the initial attack. Chuilang and Lan are younger and in love, hoping for some new dawn for their homeland.

The two couples separate into pairs—Zhang going with Lan and Yu teaming up with Chuilang. Matters do go awry almost immediately. The groups with which each team is supposed to align have been infiltrated by agents of the puppet state. Zhang and Lan find out quickly (in the first of several action sequences), and they have to risk exposing themselves in order to warn Yu and Chuilang. Meanwhile, Zhou (Yu Hewei), an agent for the Japanese-aligned government, has orders to find the spies. He wants to, although for other, unofficial reasons.

The resulting plot features plenty of spy games, playing out in the snowy forest, aboard a train filled with civilians and plenty of government agents, in the streets and alleyways of a city, and within the offices and prison cells of the puppet government's headquarters. The most striking element of this movie, as is so often the case with the director's work, is how enveloping Zhang's visual style is. There's little denying that Zhang's approach has style to spare, but as we've come to expect from the filmmaker, he doesn't spare us any of it. This is a cold but beautiful movie, haunting in turning the period setting into one of permeating suspicion and melancholy.

Abandoning the bright and lush colors of his previous films (His last one did the same, too), Zhang and his long-time cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding embrace the chilly, sparse aura of northeastern China, where the snow constantly falls to add a touch of brightness to some rather gray locales and the dark clothing of the story's players. Blood provides the other accentuating hue, as the agents fight various opponents in a train yard, in the alleys, and, during a rather chaotic climax, while racing through the streets of the city. The action here is intimate and often brutal, although it's also (particularly in the final shootout/chase) sometimes a bit too hectic for comprehension.

There's plenty here to appreciate, in other words, but despite the movie's handsome aesthetics and its usually sturdy action, it's the convoluted plot, which almost needs a chart to follow who's allied with or deceiving whom, that's the central concentration here. Like the movie's look, the storytelling here is all surface appeal—a lot of setup, punctuated by revelations of deception and action. Cliff Walkers is superficially involving, as we admire Zhang's technique and try to keep up with the plot's twists and turns, but it's significance—in terms of the historical, the political, and the personal—is wholly shallow.

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