A strange one, a noirish story-in-a-story about a bagman who gets friendly with the young girl he’s driving around, the narrators possibly making up the story as they go. It all leads to kidnapping and murder and suicide and mermaids. I chose this one because the director (who also made Saturday Fiction with Gong Li and Purple Butterfly with Zhang Ziyi) had a new film at Cannes, which unfortunately nobody liked. The bagman also starred in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Frozen, and Zhou Xun (who played the girl and the other girl) was in Wang’s Beijing Bicycle and also Tsui Hark’s Dragon Inn sequel (not his Dragon Inn remake).

The bagman and his charge:

The narrator’s girlfriend: