Green Night

I heard the criticisms of Green Night long before I watched the film. Green Night features a scene in which the lead female characters yell at a male-assumed person for being in the wrong bathroom. After knocking the person out, they steal their wallet and break into their hotel room. Then, they try on a bunch of the person’s clothing, have sex and discuss why no one would ever want to be a woman. As a reviewer, I put off watching the film because I didn’t know how to approach this. I find the scene and what it represents unconscionable. But it also wouldn’t feel correct to present a review of the film that only focuses on one scene. I worried about having to balance one abjectly offensive scene against the rest of the film. Turns out, Green Night made this easy for me. The film is bad anyways.

In Seoul, Jin Xia works as a secruity officer at an airport. She is married to an abusive man who she is trying to escape. One day at work, Jin Xia encounters a mysterious green-haired girl who the film never gives a name. The girl offers Jin Xia a ride home after her shift. Jin Xia realizes that the girl is a drug mule. And needing money herself, she agrees to go into business with the girl and split the profits. While the pair do spend much time in the Seoul-ridden underground doing crime-related activities, they also develop a tenderness towards one another.

There is a consummate vagueness to Green Night. I don’t even know what genre to qualify this as. There’s several thriller elements involving drug crime and murder, but Green Night is far from thrilling. The moments of overt violence feel inherently out of place in what is otherwise a slow and atmospheric slog. I heard some comparisons to Wong Kar-Wai’s work. But it’s note remotely at the level of that cinematic master. Instead, the film has what I can only describe as a “film festival vibe” to all of its visuals; polished, pretty and not particularly unique. Yet there’s also clearly an attempt at gritty realism. Those are two antithetical aesthetic choices.

The film’s attempt at edge and grit are also borderline laughable to me. Green Night is a story about some women discovering lesbian desire amongst abusive partners, a crime spree and a lot of time spent riding double on a scooter. These are all such common WLW elements as to be cliche. Especially the Thelma & Louise-esque crime spree stuff. It’s been done. It’s been done over and over again. Green Night is not a good example of this sub-genre, and feels completely unoriginal after such a long history of this type of story.

If anything, Green Night dips into tragedy porn. There is a pretty upsetting rape scene between Jin Xia and her husband. And this isn’t the sum total of bad things that happen to the character. Played by glamorous Chinese superstar, Fan Bingbing, the film seems to delight or at least think it’s being artistic when it degrades, and abuses a woman most known as an untouchable symbol of beauty. This culminates in a borderline absurd scene in which she dramatically chokes on a piece of gum for a while. I don’t know what would be worse; the version we get, where this is a bit of a cul-de-sac of a story beat, or a version of the film where after all the other stuff, Jin Xia died from some chewing gum.

Green Night is aimless, it has a transphobic attitude on clear display and also, the movie has continuity errors regarding Jin Xia’s forehead injury. The “film festival vibe” at least means the film has visuals that were shot with the expectation that this film would be seen in theatres. So at times, the film is pretty to look at. But if anything, that’s in conflict with this story about crime and abuse. This feels like a muddled artistic vision that culminates in something that’s mostly dull and occasionally inexcusably offensive.

Overall rating: 4.6/10

Other WLW films in similar genres