Caught In the Web | Review

Once Upon a Time, in the Digital Age…: Chen’s Latest a Message Heavy Oddity

A critique of the hounding one sidedness of the omnipresent media mixed with a heavy swirl of romance and melodrama dictates Chen Kaige’s latest feature, Caught in the Web, an oddly flat critique of the life and times in which we live, especially considering the controversy courting director’s past work, including his much hailed Farewell, My Concubine (1993). Despite dealing with modern issues of modern technological advances further mutating and bastardizing notions of journalism in a sensational driven news medium, Kaige’s film peculiarly feels out of touch, a generational rift in attitude and communication, or something that thinks it’s a bright critique of “the youth today” in a world still spinning swiftly out of control. While performances and visual aesthetics are engaging, there’s a definite shortage of narrative cohesiveness, and the juggling of several inconsequential subplots and themes all mashes together in careless incoherence.

Ye Lanqui (Yuanyan Gao) is a secretary to Shen Liushu (Xueqi Wang), the wealthy CEO of a notable Chinese company. At a routine checkup with her physician, she is diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and is told she must return within one week for a treatment or face certain death. Reeling from the news, Ye is lost in thought on a bus ride as she returns to work. While it’s customary to give up one’s seat to the elderly, Ye neglects to see an old man in front of her and is chided for her rude behavior by a fellow passenger. Ye reacts flippantly, not knowing that the incident is being recorded by a fledgling journalist, Yang Jiaqi (Luodan Wang), who takes the footage to her boss, Chen Ruoxi (Chen Yao).

Chen happens to be dating Yang Jiaqi’s cousin, Yang Shoucheng (Mark Chao), who is also on the bus that day. The three of them also live together as flatmates. While Chen Ruoxi makes the footage into a news story that blows up into a media firestorm, Ye tearfully breaks down in front of her boss asking for time off and a loan, not bothering to explain for what. As he comforts her, Shen Liushu’s wife, Mo Xiaoyu (Hong Chen) walks in on them, and is convinced they are having an affair. This, of course, further complicates Ye’s current situation as an infamous celebrity. In response, Ye quits her job and hires Yang Shoucheng as her body guard as life as she knows it crumbles down around her.

Conveniences and coincidences abound to a grating degree in Caught in the Web, a title which is meant to compare information exchange over the internet as a veritable spider web, a trap where victims are stuck, cocooned, drained of blood. Perhaps a metaphor not quite as fresh as it should be, it still invokes the promise of a biting thriller, or even satire, yet fails on both counts.

A wacky soundtrack, which switches back and forth between tracks that sound like instrumental versions of two quite notable songs from Kill Bill Vol. 1 creates a rather comical ambiance to key proceedings, while an ill-conceived romance between Ye and Yang Shoucheng feels like a grasping excuse for some third act hysterics. Between heaps of trite dialogue (“Only the mentally ill tell the truth!”) and Ye’s frustrating martyrdom (for reasons unexplained, she neglects to tell anyone of her diagnosis), Caught In the Web plays like an overly complicated soap opera.

Perhaps even more surprising than the fact that this comes from Chen Kaige is that the film completely fails to create anything sensational, either within its own narrative or as a critique of its subject. Ye’s social faux pas is responsible, we’re supposed to believe, for severe public outrage, and she’s treated to hostility and barely curtailed contempt wherever she goes. Sure, the point Kaige is making pertains to the dangerousness of assumption and the human penchant for only listening to one (the first) side of a story. And perhaps we couldn’t have seen Ye do something too terrible so as not to destroy any chance of empathizing with her, but even as believable as Yuanyuan Gao’s performance may be, we’re never led to give a hoot.

Simply put, the mottled stakes aren’t high enough for what transpires into a leaden finale. Instead, the film’s ridiculousness causes divergent contemplations, like what on earth must they think of Lindsay Lohan and her ilk?

★★ / ★★★★★