Bloody Noodle Shop
By: Benjamin Ross Hayden
No need to pen this article as published by Rodrick Jaynes - The Coen Bros illusive pseudonymic persona who supposedly writes their articles and edits their film, who actually does not exist. This time, Chinese auteur director Yimou Zhang fashions A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop, an astounding remake of the Coen Brother’s 1984 classic, Blood Simple. 
Zhang’s earlier works are Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Ju Dou. These are memorable contemporary Chinese films. Zhang subverts a bygone theatrical technique for this film, Zhang states “I gave the remake a rich Chinese flavor. I also adopted the aesthetic style of the old Chinese opera piece, San Cha Kou. The result is the confinement of all the characters within the same space, each of them shifting roles with one another and making similar mistakes”.
Subverting styles and periods is a method the Coen brothers have mastered with films such as The Man Who Wasn’t There – noir films, The Hudsucker Proxy - classic Hollywood style, and Burn After Reading – the spy drama. 
Zhang’s subversion – the Confuciust Operatic – offers a far eastern perspective on the Coen’s underlying postmodernist absurdist meanings. The style, when blended with the ideas in Blood Simple, creates what Zhang holds about his film that “WGNS lays bare the absurdity of life – something ironically repetitive, always beyond our control”.
The film holds twelve - and probably more - direct thematic references to Blood Simple: the gun, emphasis on the gun’s chamber, the incompetent lover, the death of the abuser, the undead resurrection of the abuser, the hesitation to kill the undead abuser, the protagonist’s death dream, the bullet/arrow holes beaming light through the walls, and also the final death blow, unseen to Zhang (also the name of the female lead), as also unseen to Abby, played by Frances McDormand in Blood Simple. Most importantly, the final shots of both films: the pipes in Blood Simple – a mechanistic symbol for redundancy of the plumbing construction, a postmodernist visual metaphor in Blood Simple, equates with the pointlessness of numerous deaths, is seemingly repositioned in Zhang’s WGNS with the psychedelic water droplets of Zhan – the corrupt policeman – his death being as a water droplet trapped inside the metaphoric pipes of existentialist redundancy that the Coens contrastingly display at the end of Blood Simple.
In Zhang’s WGNS, there is apparently a subtle homage to The Dark Knight. The hyper-anxious lead, Li, asks the dead boss, Wang, "Why So Serious?". Li speaks to the back of Wang’s dead head – being a balding head with hair along the sides, this symbol of a Clown, taken with Christopher Nolan’s and Health Ledger’s Joker character, is reminiscent of The Dark Knight. This speaks about the new breed of world-class filmmakers referencing each other’s works, showing that film is a global language of intercommunicative inspiration.
Whether be the Coens referencing past genres, to Zhang referencing Coen thematics and the global filmmaking community at large, we see a growing symbiosis of cinematic interconnectivity weaving time, experience, and location into a unity of cinematic philosophy.
