Alright, the summary is a conscious echo from the title of a Tolstoy story, namely "How much land does a man need?" The plot line of the story is easy: old man acquires land, becomes possessive of it, gets an offer from the neighboring Bashkirs, that is the extremity of land he can walk to and return to his starting point in a day will be his. He gives it a try and almost succeeds. Being totally exhausted he drops dead when he returns and is buried in a six feet long grave. That's how much land a man needs.
But while Tolstoy's story is more of a sketch than a story, or a parable, Yimou is intentionally operatic on the visual level. But to what purpose, since he employs only six actors with three or four extras? Six actors somewhat handled as Beckett would have, how can this escape being labeled a life-less bravura performance fuddling scale and purpose? Nothing to worry about if you let it all wash over you. For all its spectacle it is accurately, masterfully economic. The handling of the actors, ranging from the tradition of Chinese theater to Commedia del' Arte and spaghetti western codes is effective and lets the moral be and breathe, grim and outrageous at once: who would relieve his bowels on - his finally, due to the fallen sachet - grave? Who would have thought that his colleague, to call him that, existing seemingly for comic relief in the film, would be another sardonic knot in the rope of continuous miscalculation greed who tightens around everybody's careless, comic thrust and strangles greed and alibi together? Alibis are the others' half-read alibis, while greed is one's own blind-spot; it is only the killer-cop who tries obsessively to restore the patterns of the objects prior to the crime, as if to extinguish his involvement, while actually he proves that this is impossible: no matter how hard one tries, the alibi will always rhyme with crime.
It is all more delicious then, that in the end Yimou avoids continuing his tale with what Wang's wife would do: the killer-cop is dead, and this is as economic it should be.
Now, people complain that the lush, surely color-filtered if not digitally enhanced cinematography is there for its own sake; a spectacle at odds with the tale. I would agree with that, I even did at the beginning, comparing some takes and scenery with kitschy tourist souvenirs, but as the film moved on its warp, it seemed to me as an anamorphic distortion of the proceedings: otherworldly, sublimely indifferent, somewhat sickening in communicating us their splendor. And it is a distortion that fits with the final one that pops where the greedy and deadpan representative of the law meets his end in a deadly drop. This is how much story a man needs from a master of the craft.
But while Tolstoy's story is more of a sketch than a story, or a parable, Yimou is intentionally operatic on the visual level. But to what purpose, since he employs only six actors with three or four extras? Six actors somewhat handled as Beckett would have, how can this escape being labeled a life-less bravura performance fuddling scale and purpose? Nothing to worry about if you let it all wash over you. For all its spectacle it is accurately, masterfully economic. The handling of the actors, ranging from the tradition of Chinese theater to Commedia del' Arte and spaghetti western codes is effective and lets the moral be and breathe, grim and outrageous at once: who would relieve his bowels on - his finally, due to the fallen sachet - grave? Who would have thought that his colleague, to call him that, existing seemingly for comic relief in the film, would be another sardonic knot in the rope of continuous miscalculation greed who tightens around everybody's careless, comic thrust and strangles greed and alibi together? Alibis are the others' half-read alibis, while greed is one's own blind-spot; it is only the killer-cop who tries obsessively to restore the patterns of the objects prior to the crime, as if to extinguish his involvement, while actually he proves that this is impossible: no matter how hard one tries, the alibi will always rhyme with crime.
It is all more delicious then, that in the end Yimou avoids continuing his tale with what Wang's wife would do: the killer-cop is dead, and this is as economic it should be.
Now, people complain that the lush, surely color-filtered if not digitally enhanced cinematography is there for its own sake; a spectacle at odds with the tale. I would agree with that, I even did at the beginning, comparing some takes and scenery with kitschy tourist souvenirs, but as the film moved on its warp, it seemed to me as an anamorphic distortion of the proceedings: otherworldly, sublimely indifferent, somewhat sickening in communicating us their splendor. And it is a distortion that fits with the final one that pops where the greedy and deadpan representative of the law meets his end in a deadly drop. This is how much story a man needs from a master of the craft.