The Green Hat

‘Green hat’ is Chinese slang for a man who is two-timed by his wife. The film itself seems at first sight to be about something else entirely: three boys are messing around on a Chinese beach and then rob a bank. Afterwards, they intend to split up. One of the kids is planning to travel to his girlfriend in the USA. On the way to the airport, he stops at a call shop to inform her about his arrival – and there he is surrounded by the police. ‘What is love?’ is his surprising last question to the inspector in charge. The inspector continues to wrestle with this question and so do we, as we see how he gets a prescription for pills to combat impotence (‘no, these really work!’), how he is still humiliated by his unloving wife who prefers to spend their wedding day in the company of her young and well-endowed lover, how he tries to humiliate this lover, etc. Liu Fendou previously helped write screenplays for the melancholy hit Xizao / Shower (Zhang Yang, 1999) and Spring Subway (Zhang Yibay, 2002), but Green Hat is very different. A Chinese tragi-comedy about penis envy has never before contained so much post-modern frivolity, strange dialogue and so many rude words… Liu himself says he wanted to make a ‘romantic’ film, but ended up investigating a side of himself that he thought he had ‘healed’ long ago. (GT)