The Forbidden City
It’s always a unique pleasure when a movie does not take a direction you expect it to go. I honestly thought that Gabriele Mainetti’s crime thriller was going in a very specific way, but when we realize that something is not quite what we thought, “The Forbidden City” became something genuinely kind of awesome. There’s emotion behind the drama, and the central situation, and it won me over. It’s going to be difficult to dislodge from my favorite films of the year.
The film starts in 1995 in a province in China. At this time, the country has its one child policy in place, where a family has to pay a fine if it has more than one child, or they will not be recognized. A father is teaching his daughters kung fu when a government functionary comes by. One of the daughters is forced into the home to hide. Cut to two decades later; the one child policy is gone, and one of the daughters, Mei (Yaxi Liu), is in what seems to be a spot where women are human trafficked. She fights the people in charge- she wants to know where her sister, Yun, is. She is in Rome. At the same time, a cook in a family restaurant, Marcello (Enrico Borello), is trying to deal with the fallout of his father disappearing with another woman. Their paths will cross, and they discover both people are connected.
I will admit to going back to the beginning to realize that Mei was the second child at the beginning of the film, and Yun was their parent’s “one child.” So my initial assumption about one being human trafficked (and I thought it was the second child who was not registered) was wrong, but criminal syndicates still play a role in “The Forbidden City,” and reminding myself of this necessary information doesn’t diminish the fact that Mainetti’s film- which he wrote with Stefano Bises and Davide Serino- really worked for me. At first glance, this feels like a fairly straightforward revenge thriller, but- especially as Mei and Marcello get closer- it has a thoughtful undercurrent about how sometimes, family will sacrifice a great deal to give one another the life they deserve, even if it means that sometimes, others are trapped by circumstance. There’s a strong emotional undercurrent in the film that is a huge part of my love for it, on top of the fact that it is a kick ass action film. The performances by Liu and Borello anchor the film, and Mainetti keeps it moving at a brisk pace, even if you think this narrative might get bogged down in filler for its 138 minutes. By the end, I was won over, and everything in this film just clicked for me.
