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‘She’s Got No Name’ Review: Zhang Ziyi Suffers Stoically in a Stately Historical Melodrama
Zhang Ziyi stars as a woman accused of her husband's murder in Peter Ho-Sun Chan's "She's Got No Name," a sweeping period drama based on a true story.
The recreation of mid-century Shanghai remains impressive even as Chan’s evident admiration for his heroine’s survival instinct starts to become rote, locking Zhang into a screenplay (co-written by Shi Ling, Jiang Feng, Shang Yang and Pan Yi-ran) that gives plenty of depth to her character’s anguish, but little breadth to grow. She is clutching a large canvas bag, stained by a spreading bloodstain — from the beginning, there is little doubt that she committed the crime for which she will soon be arrested by showboating Deputy Police Commissioner Xue (Lei Jia-yin): that of murdering and dismembering her husband (Wang Chuan-jun). As Zhan-Zhou is tried and retried for this capital crime, Xi Lin (Zhao Li Ying), an almost cartoonishly glamorous local reporter and playwright, takes up her cause, influencing public opinion with her columns and performances, and contributing to the then-novel idea that, when it comes to ongoing domestic assault, there might be different shades of “guilty.”
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