I've read a lot of writing I've admired, using language I wished I'd used, but I've never had the urge to rewrite someone else's story and put my name on it, either because I thought I could do it better or as a tribute that would show I could not do it better. But movies do it a lot, and now we have "A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop," opening here today. Unwieldy title and all, it's a Chinese film based on "Blood Simple," a 1984 film that was the first by Joel and Ethan Coen.
Actually, it's a lot more than "based on." Though set several hundred years earlier, and done in a stark, stylized manner, it's basically the same story–a man whose wife is cheating on him hires someone to murder both wife and lover.
In this version, the man, Wang (Ni Dahong) owns the noodle shop, where a kitchen staff tosses and kneads dough like a pizza kitchen gone mad, though there don't seem to be many customers. Yan Ni plays Wang's wife, whom no one calls by name, and her lover, Li (Xiao Shenyang) is a wimp who she dominates the way her husband dominates her.
Lots of horseback riding up one hill that looks like a false backdrop and down another that looks the same. One of the horses carries an expressionless policeman, Zhang (Sun Honglei), who epitomizes evil, and everything ends like the original James M. Cain novel.
Unless someone is a real fan of modern Chinese cinema, the best adaptation of Cain's marvelous crime novel remains then 1946 movie with Lana Turner and John Garfield.
A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop opens today at the Tivoli
—Joe