Snakehead: Sympathy for a Human Trafficker. So, There’s That…
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C+
The exploitation of illegal immigrants by Chinese gangs known as “snakeheads” is a phenomenon familiar enough to be referenced in a Law & Order episode and the video game, Grand Theft Auto.
What’s new about this first feature from documentarian and music video director Evan Jackson Leong (he made the 2014 basketball doc, Linsanity) is bringing an Asian female perspective to this immigrant crime drama.
The protagonist is Sister Tse (Shuya Chang), a lean, wary-eyed woman in her thirties, fresh from an eight-year Chinese prison sentence and now a stowaway on a steamer to New York to find her daughter, who was adopted as a toddler by a New York family.
Read Bonnie Laufer’s interview Evan Jackson Leong and Shuya Chang here
In exchange for illegal passage to New York, she’s obliged to work off her $57,000 debt in a brothel in New York’s Chinatown, though her sex work career is short-lived. When she nearly strangles the brothel’s bodyguard, she earns the attention of the grandmotherly gang boss, Dai Mah (played by Jade Wu).
Dai Mah, who runs her international criminal operation from a basement office and parades through the Chinatown street-market as a local celebrity, sees something of herself — and a possible successor —in the tough, canny upstart.
Sister Tse carries herself with a hint of swagger and, though not openly defiant, is always a beat slow in lowering her gaze to those in charge. The apprentice passes the first test: Would she execute a gang member who had proved disloyal to the crime family? She absolutely would.
Sister Tse’s criminal training progresses in fits and starts, interrupted by flashbacks and come-and-go voice-over. The timeframe is fuzzy (weeks? months?), gauged by a progressively healing wound on Sister Tse’s temple from her first battle in the brothel as she graduates rapidly from restaurant work to gambling, debt collection, and then human trafficking.
Soon, Sister Tse is vying for power with Dai Mah’s two undisciplined adult sons: the mother’s favourite, hot-headed Rambo (Sung Kang), who has crossed into drug dealing, and the unambitious playboy, Pai Gwut (Richie Ng).
The claustrophobic Chinatown settings — a dim sum restaurant, a pet shop, a seafood wholesaler — feel authentic, though everyone here speaks in New York-accented English with the usual epithets and confrontational style.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
The decision to avoid having the characters speaking Chinese saves the trouble of subtitles but it also makes the drama feel generic, another pulpy sub-Scorsesian urban nightmare with episodes of spastic violence, the constantly throbbing soundtrack, the use of slow motion, and wide-screen, colour-saturated camera work.
What’s more interesting is Leong’s attempt to rationalize Sister Tse’s talent for violence with her maternal instincts as she begins to secretly stalk her now-adolescent daughter through the streets of Manhattan, longing for a relationship that is no longer possible.
Leong’s attempts to characterize both Sister Tse and Dai Mah as sociopaths-by-circumstance risks catering to stereotypes of immigrants doomed to criminality.
As if to balance the moral scales, there’s a plot digression designed to show Sister Tse’s compassionate side, when she uses cash from a side hustle to assist a friendly African immigrant, Zareeb (Yacine Djoumbaye), who once tutored her on how to make Chinese dumplings. Think of them as a couple of newly wrapped American dumplings, sizzling in the same melting wok.
Snakehead. Directed and written by Evan Jackson Leong. Starring Shuya Chang, Jade Wu, Sung Kang, Richie Eng, Yacine Djoumbaye, and Richie Eng. On VOD October 29.