When Voiture de luxe opens we find a middle-aged teacher, Li Qiming, disembarking from a ferry, having left his countryside home in search of his son in the city of Wuhan. Both Qiming's son and daughter have left home to start new lives in the city, joining the wave of young people following a similar course in the new China. What drives Qiming to search for his son is the fact that he has not heard from him in a long time, and his wife, dying of cancer, wishes to see her son again before she dies. Qiming is met by his daughter, Yanhong, who takes him to her apartment in the city. Yanhong shares her flat with another young woman, A Li. Upon entering the flat, we can see in Qiming's face an immediate recognition of the circumstances that both of the young women live in. Qiming is stoic, yet the worn, slender, once handsome intellectual clearly takes in all the significance of what he sees in the flat. On the other hand, as a loving father, denial seems also to be at work, and he does not immediately come to any conclusion about how his daughter is earning her living.Yanhong is a beautiful young woman, and we soon see how she earns her living when she goes off to her job. Her workplace, ostensibly a karaoke club, is in fact a well-appointed brothel. Any visitor to China over the last decade will be familiar with the club's decor. As clients leave their luxury automobiles to enter the club, they are greeted by rows of attractive young women who bow, smile and utter a demure ni hao. Inside, marble floors are polished to a dizzingly high shine, curved staircases and state-of-the art lighting abound. Trade the dominant red of the karaoke club for more subtle hues and the setting is one which has become ubiquitous in China's burgeoning multi-star hotels. The contrast between Yanhong's workplace, her living quarters and the meaner streets of much of the city behind its Potemkin village facade of luxury is jarring.
The preferred companion of a brutish customer who is clearly a gang leader, Yanhong is nevertheless called from his side by the club's reckless owner, Da Ge, with whom she is in a relationship of sorts. This is clearly a mistake on Da Ge's part, a mistake which drives the plot of the film. Da Ge's relationship to Yanhong is somewhat nebulous. An older man who is not Yanhong's physical match, he is part lover, part boss, part pimp, and, as we later discover, soon to be the father of her child. While this subplot simmers in the background, we watch Qiming begin the search for his son. In the course of doing so, he encounters a police officer, a man of his own generation with whom he has an immediate affinity. Like Qiming, the police officer is about to retire, but out of sympathy, exerts a special effort to find the boy. After the detective obtains a lead to the boy's wherabouts, Qiming decides to celebrate by inviting him, as well as his daughter and her boyfriend, to dinner at a restaurant.
By the time the dinner takes place, we have learned through a flashback that Qiming's son had been in a gang with Da Ge, and it was their ill-conceived plan to hijack a luxury car that brings all of these characters together. By drawing the odd, losing playing card, it is Qiming's son who must stand in the middle of a dark road and get the driver of a luxury car to stop. The plan is only half successful since Da Ge gets his car, but, in the process, Qiming's son is killed. It is only when Yanhong is hospitalized after an assault engineered by the mobster who resented her being taken off to Da Ge in the club, that Da Ge, remorseful and guilt-ridden over the assault on his pregnant girlfriend, confesses that it is he who is responsible for the death of her brother.
The dinner party at which the protagonists meet might well be a scene directed by Hitchcock. It is clear early on that the detective recognizes Da Ge, and for the persistent police officer, who accepts a ride home from Da Ge and then asks to see the automobile's registration, the ride is his last. Shortly after, with the detective's dead body at his side, Da Ge is intercepted by his mobster nemesis and is himself assassinated. The film ends with Yanhong leaving the city to return to her rural village. She there tells her father of her brother's real fate, and in the closing sequence, we see Yanhong delivering hers and Da Ge's child as Qiming sits outside of the delivery room resignedly listening to his daughter's labor pains.
Ordinarily, the cinematic cliche of trading the death of one character for the birth of another is used to represent hope. And although the expression on Qiming's face as he awaits the birth of his grandchild may be somewhat ambiguous, there is nothing ambiguous about what that birth represents in the overall context of this tale. Director Wang Chou's view of where China's present course is taking the nation is deeply pessimistic. In the newborn child, the blood of victim and victimizer is inextricably mingled. Yanhong may be back in her village, but she brings with her the seed of corruption she may have hoped to leave behind. When first she returns home, she goes to see her father in the school where he teaches. The landscape is a clear departure from that of booming Wuhan. What we see is a wide shot of the school, a wide sand-colored brick building bearing a red flag, an expanse of sand-colored playground in the foreground. Though true to what schools look like all over Asia, it is here an image of innocence that poignantly hearkens to traditional hopes for the future. Yanhong goes to a child's swing that she recalls from her childhood, and it is while seated on the swing that she tells her father what happened to her brother.
Yanhong's double migration, her return to the countryside, of course suggests that one can't go home again. In an early conversation between Qiming and the detective, we learn that the drama of the urban-rural divide had already played out in the life of her father. When a lead on the boy's whereabouts leads the two men to a kitchen on the campus of Wuhan Universty, Qiming announces that he had been a student there forty years before, during the Cultural Revolution, and that, because he had "said something wrong," he was "sent down," that is, sent to the countryside to do penance for his crime. With the Cultural Revolution long over, Qiming might well have returned to the city, but he makes a choice to stay and teach in the rural village. "I miss my students," he confesses shortly after arriving in Wuhan. He, too, cannot go home again. This writer has had more than one experience in China with Chinese old enough to have experienced the Cultural Revolution to know that, for many who lived through the period--Western characterizations aside--it was a period of hope and even expanded horizons. For many who were sent down, life long attachments were made, and those who participated came to look back at their lives among rural peoples not merely with nostalgia, their heads filled with propaganda songs, but with great emotion.
What is incontestable in this film is what has happened to Qiming's children as a result of jumping in Wuhan's turbulent waters--one has died, the other become a prostitute. Even Da Ge, who at times actually seems sympathetic, is a victim, perhaps of his greed or even his lapses into humanity, but also as a consequence of his ineptitude for a life of crime. He is simply not ruthless enough to compete. There is a scene (which at first may seem gratuitous) in which we see the stolen Audi, the luxury car that has cost the life of Qiming's son, being repainted. Great care is taken to cover glass and chrome with newspaper and masking tape and we watch the car, originally a silver gray, morph to a glossy black vehicle and watch it imperiously cruise out of the garage where the work was done. The car is a symbol of the new China, a mere reworking of capitalist fantasies of lives drenched in luxury. When Yanhong's dad and his detective/friend travel about, they travel on bicycles, not in luxury cars. Da Ge's stolen Audi had its parallel in the collapsed Soviet Union, where in the early nineties, rows of black Mercedes limousines driven by what were presumed to be members of the Georgian mafia could be seen parked outside of Moscow's and St. Petersburg's new luxury hotels.
For its view of the environmental and social costs of China's new path, Luxury Car is an invaluable work of art.
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