J Paul Johnson
For a mode of filmmaking that really no longer neo, its having been around since the 1970s and all, neo-noir has proved to be a practically evergreen source of inspiration for filmmakers. Even well into the 2020s, writers and directors continue to mine and deconstruct its tropes. But simply doing so—say, taking your much-abused protagonist on a journey into the dark side of drug running with a provocative femme fatale pulling the strings, lured as always by the twin desires of sex and money—doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything more than a rehash of plots we’ve all seen before. Even, that is, when the star is one of China’s most famous stars making her comeback: a game effort from the always-watchable Fan Bingbing isn’t enough to elevate the Korean-Hong Kong production Green Night, now streaming on the Film Movement Plus platform, beyond the pedestrian. It’s a film that sounds better when described than it turns out to be.
Having been blacklisted in mainland China after a $127m fine for tax evasion in 2018, Fan’s return to acting is big news. She made a cameo on a Korean TV show in 2022, but Green Night is the role that marks her first appearance on the big screen in five years—practically an eon for a prolific actor like her. Fan plays a customs agent, Jin XIa, a Chinese immigrant who works at South Korea’s Incheon Airport. Her abusive husband is nowhere to be found and her landlord is demanding the rent, so, in the tradition of film noir, the protagonist is getting neither laid nor paid. While she seems a stand-up sort, doing her job with due diligence, her life changes when one day at work she encounters a mysterious, mischievous green-haired girl (Lee Joo-young) whose suspicious behavior at the security checkpoint piques Xia’s interest.
Cocky and flirtatious, the green-haired girl with no name brazenly flits past Xia’s checkpoint, then convinces her to take her to apartment. Here is where the narrative is supposed, I believe, to turn on an unspoken attraction of XIa’s to the girl, but there’s little spark that registers between the two aside from the girl’s coy flirting: XIa seems, for most of the first act, largely rudderless, letting her houseguest pull the film’s narrative strings, and the girl in question seems more like a stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope: cute, energetic, idiosyncratic—even the dyed streaks of bright green hair tick a requisite trait box. But here she is playing a role from classic film noir: after all, a neo-noir needs its femme fatale, and she, for better or mostly worse, is it.
Green Night is not without its moments. Though the green-haired girl’s involvement in a deadly drug trafficking ring amounts to little, this aspect of the plot leads mostly nowhere in terms of the labyrinthine chases or moral quandaries for for which neo-noir is best known. The best scene comes relatively early when the girl rescues Xia from rape by the estranged husband (I am pretty sure it is rape, though its depiction looks more life he is bouncing her on the bed than assaulting her). She strangles him from behind with a string of Christmas lights that then pulse with flashes lighting up his tortured grimace in an effective close-up.
If that makes for the most memorable scene in Green Night, soon follows the worst. The two happen upon a man who passes out in the public women’s bathroom where they are deep in conversation. They take his wallet and keys and go to his apartment, where the green-eyed girl discovers a trove of foul-smelling women’s clothing, and for some inexplicable reason, this, of all things, is the thing that finally turns Xia on, and she succumbs to the girl’s passions. That is about as sexy, or for that matter rational, as it sounds: it’s at best simply poor scripting and at its worst both transphobic and misogynistic. Green Night‘s queerness isn’t an identity; it’s merely a pose, an aphrodisiac one at that.
The film’s press kit touts a quote calling Green Night “Thelma & Louise meets Blue is the Warmest Color,” except that it is not. It’s neither a rousing buddy-tale action-cape saga of feminist empowerment nor an authentic coming-out and coming-of-age story. It’s just a tepid lesbian-posing neo-noir rehash of old tropes in new clothes without either of those two films’ excellent performances or risk-taking approaches (acknowledging Blue‘s problematic production and sex scenes). Even Fan seems a little unmoored by Green Night’s script and direction, being pulled along more by exigent forces—the green-haired girl’s dangerous liaisons and her estranged husband’s physical violence—than her own agency. Green Night wouldn’t work with or without Fan Bingbing; her real comeback, if there will be one, has yet to appear.
