A morose drama that never quite lives up to the promise of its moody, noirish atmosphere, Wang Qi’s “The Bargain” does at least look the part of the gritty, crime-shaded sprawling…
” does at least look the part of the gritty, crime-shaded sprawling urban saga. But however tactile and textured the photography, and however pleasurable the rendering of the city’s outskirts as a kind of gloomy nocturnal limbo, over a near two-hour runtime, the overriding impression of is of too little actual substance spread thinly across this deserted, forbidding nighttime streetscape, and of lives of quiet desperation that could stand to be a portrayed a bit more loudly.
At first, however, a knotty premise is set up as Liu , a round-faced bald-headed businessman who can at times resemble a particularly cherubic Buddha, is trying to offload his failing travel agency onto a couple of sharp-eyed new buyers. They politely decline the opportunity, and Liu returns dejectedly to work to the news that one of his drivers has been found deep in a coma in his car parked on Liu’s lot overnight.
Liu’s son Weiguo , a too-cool-for-school type with a messy haircut and a surly attitude, is another thorn in his side. As is becoming increasingly de rigueur for the kids of middle-class Chinese parents who aspire to upward social mobility, Weiguo went to college in America, though not, as he’s quick to point out at an interview arranged by his mother, to “one of the good ones.