Director – Juan Martin Hsu – 2025 – Argentina, Peru – 90m
*****
Argentinian cops and robbers procedural is set largely in the world of Mendoza’s immigrant Chinese community – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
2010. Mendoza, Argentina. The family-run, Chinese restaurant of Dageng (Kon Yam Pin) receives telephone threats for protection money. When they don’t pay up within 24 hours, a motorbike with two riders pulls up on at their door which opens onto the main street and fires four shots. So Dageng’s son (Willy Kon Chin Yi) delivers a rucksack containing $50 000 to the gang. But later, the riders complain there was only $30 000 and demand another $20 000.
Lots of similarly threatening phone calls overlap on the soundtrack as we see numerous yellow cables plugged into a telecoms hub, recalling similar motifs in movies as diverse as Three Colours Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953).
The prosecutor’s office is monitoring phone calls, but faces challenges. One such is that the calls are in Cantonese so require an interpreter to turn them into intelligible Spanish. Another is illustrated when the current interpreter quits, terrified what might happen to her family if word about the nature of her work gets out. Undeterred, Prosecutor in Charge Diana Belenguer (Victoria Almeida), overhearing a fragment of monitored conversation in Mandarin Chinese, puts in an official request to the PRC for an interpreter and is sent Officer Bin Li (Chien Min Lee), impressing him with her ability to speak Chinese “a bit” and delighted to receive his gift of Oolong tea.
Meanwhile, Kwan (Alex Kawen León Yee), based at a local nightclub, sends Xu (Andres Alberto Tan He), accompanied by Lao Hong (Michael Liao Morey), Tao (William Loo Long) and Wu (César Wong) out to pick up the shipment of eight women he’s expecting. When they get there, ho. Xu takes the four, who include the Pujianese (Yuchen Che), however, the sellers will only part with four. Two of the four appear to be related to Xu, who takes them to a shopkeeper’s above premises apartment where he believes the girls will be safe. In doing so, Xu puts himself on the death list of ruthless local godfather Hou (Emilio Chau Chiu), who is also a family man concerned about his teenage daughter’s progress at school. Hou sends Kwan to kill Xu; Kwan doesn’t want to do it, but knows he must to prove his loyalty to the boss.
Meanwhile, the situation deteriorates at Dageng’s restaurant, with Dageng shot in the arm on one occasion and in the head on another. His son describes the fatal shooting to the prosecutor’s office, which verbal description is followed by harrowing police photos of the crime scene corpse. Meanwhile a gang war escalates as men from a rival Chinese mafia bundle Lo Hung off the street and into a car boot, claiming that his gang has been operating on their turf. He is later found in the desert cut into several bloody sections.
And as she traverses a car park, the prosecutor herself is threatened by gunman on a bike who tells her, it’s the last warning before she gets a bullet. Back in her apartment, this prompts her to phone her estranged mother with whom she hasn’t talked for years. She doesn’t explain why she called, and there’s a lot of tension between the two of them. She subsequently initiates a SWAT raid on the gang’s club, with Hou among those taken into custody, claiming one moment to be a lowly minion way down in the pecking order and the next threatening Officer Li as you might expect a powerful crime boss to do.
Xu and the Pujianese have got away and are relaxing by the coast – but Kwan, his orders from the boss on his mind, has tracked them down…
There is something quite refreshing in the way all this is put together in this Argentinian-Peruvian co-production. Unlike a lot of gangland films, which focus on the gangster as anti-hero, this spends a lot of time with ordinary people such as restaurateurs and convenience store owners whose lives are ruined by the gangs’ everyday business and the violence that can result. And yet, if you’ve come for a gangster movie, it doesn’t short-change you. Several times, it switches back and forth most effectively between the iconography of the gangster movie and the very different genre of the immigrant drama.
The one indigenous Argentinian with who the narrative spends a lot of time, Prosecutor Belenguer, is shown spending time with the Chinese officer and you suspect that, were they not in law enforcement and had they met under other circumstances, they might have embarked on a full blown romance. As things stand, the tentative beginnings of a romance develop, but very much in the shadow of the professional reasons that both of them are there.
The narrative optimism of their relationship contrasts with the romance between Xu and the Pujianese, which is much more in the mode of the doomed lovers who go on the run for whom things aren’t going to end well. The fact that the latter scenario may be a cliché makes the one between the two law enforcement officers all the more effective.
Overall, this presents a very unusual mix of genres and plays out as a cinematic breath of fresh air. Highly recommended, regardless of whether you’re coming at it for the immigrant drama or the gangster aspect; and equally regardless of whether you want to see a Latin American movie or a Chinese one.
Street Wanderers premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 7th to Sunday, November 23rd 2024.
Trailer:
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: