Only the River Flows: Challenges of Pre-Digital Age 1990s Power Crafty Police Procedural

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

Watching Only the River Flows, a twisty police procedural from next-generation Chinese filmmaker Shujun Wei, I was reminded why I love films set on the cusp of the digital age. Analogue had a different grain — heck, it HAD a grain — and everything was a little creaky and a touch more difficult, including detective work. Call me old-fashioned, but I dig that.

Case in point: When a police officer listens to an audio tape that’s been found at the scene of a murder, he asks one of his cop colleagues if they can remove the background noise and isolate the voice. Easy-peasy in 2024. But this is 1995. “Our technology isn’t advanced enough,” the subordinate says, which is one of my few quibbles with the screenplay. He should have just replied: “That’s impossible.”

In any case, it’s lucky he can’t remove the sound of a passing train, because when our mildly obsessed detective Ma Zhe (Yilong Zhu) listens to it for the umpteenth time while driving in his car, it occurs to him that that distinct pattern of the whistle might be a clue to where the recording was made. Cut to him riding the rails with an engineer who explains what the sound means, and why it could only have come from one particular location and time.

But that’s just one clue among many, and as Ma Zhe continues to follow the threads of the case, it seems as though the universe doesn’t want him to solve it. His ping pong–loving police captain is convinced a local mentally disabled guy known only as “the madman” is to blame, while a hairdresser from a nearby factory is certain he’ll be convicted, even as he swears he isn’t the criminal.

Meanwhile, bodies continue to pile up near the riverbank — first an old woman, then a potential suspect (well, I guess it wasn’t him!), a curious child and more. And in a lovely creative flourish, the local police force has recently taken over a defunct cinema, so Ma Zhe works surrounded by celluloid and plush seating, and at one point, dreams he’s in a movie, waking up to find himself in a movie theatre instead.

Only the River Flows — based on the novel Mistakes by the River by Yu Hua — runs a tight 102 minutes but crams a lot of atmosphere into that time, moments of high drama interspersed with bizarre humour. For instance, I was tickled by a scene in which a poetry reading is interrupted, first by a well-meaning moderator who asks the crowd to stop laughing at the reader and applaud him instead and then, in the midst of that ovation, by the police.

But there’s also a subplot in which Ma Zhe and his wife (Chloe Maayan) learn that the baby she is carrying may have a genetic defect. It’s a 10 per cent chance, the doctor tells them, while also calling the risk “high,” and then leaving them to figure out what to do next.

China’s one-child policy and general state intervention loom large. And while 1995 may have been a technologically different era in this part of the world, in the People’s Republic, the social gap between then and now constituted an even wider gulf.

I’d be lying if I said I completely understood the film’s conclusion, but I’d also be a jerk if I spoiled it, so let’s just say it’s a touch open-ended. Maybe there’s a cultural connection I’m not getting. China is a different country, after all. But then, the past is a different country too. I lived in the ’90s, but it’s been a while.

Only the River Flows. Directed by Shujun Wei. Starring Yilong Zhu, and Chloe Maayan. Opens August 1 at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto; August 9 in Montreal, Ottawa, and Sudbury; August 16 in London, Waterloo, and Hamilton; and August 23 in Vancouver.