A mystery has been resolved this week at the Shanghai International Film Festival as Peter Chan’s re-worked version of She’s Got No Name helped open the event, before going on an almost-immediate limited release on 120 screens spread across this vast city.
The acclaimed Hong Kong filmmaker’s decision to split the film – which made its premiere out of competition at Cannes in 2024 – into two parts had raised eyebrows, as did the news that the first installment would take the marquee billing at China’s major annual cinema gathering.
In the end, it all makes sense.
While the Cannes version’s 150-minute running time and twisting narrative arc had prompted questions of the film’s commercial potential, the version of She’s Got No Name that screened at SIFF comes in at a tight – and tense – 96 minutes that dig deep into the darkness of the real-life tale of an abused woman Zhan-Zhou (played by Zhang Ziyi), charged with the murder of her husband in the Japanese-occupied Shanghai of the 1940s. It was a case that gripped war-torn Shanghai, given the gruesome details of the murder and subsequent dismemberment of the victim, the fact that the victim’s head was never found, and the desperate circumstances of poverty and abuse under which it all unfolded.
SIFF also provided an ideal platform to showcase a production where Shanghai itself plays a scene-stealing, co-starring role, while its stars were on hand to ramp up the glamour during the festival’s opening ceremony.
The day after the opening finds Chan being whisked between screenings as the film rolls out across Shanghai before its nationwide opening on June 21. He’s in a reflective mood, sipping coffee in between engagements in the back of a people-mover as the rain-soaked city streams past outside.
She’s Got No Name’s narrative is now split between the aftermath of the murder – Zhan-Zhou’s incarceration and trial and the emergence of it all as a cause célèbre – and what’s to come in…
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