If guns were legal in China, that story would have never been made; if Fan Yi-Ping didn’t write “Records of Seeking Gun” at the basis of this fact, if Lu Chuan (the director) didn’t like the story so much and didn’t choose this project as his first movie, we could have never been able to enjoy Missing Gun. Even if it’s not perfect, as a new director’s debut, that’s a really worthy piece of art nonetheless.

You can find a lot of psychological elements in this movie. If you focus only stays on the title, you might be misleaded into an action movie. In fact, the director paid great attenttion on discribing the spiritual world of the main character Ma Shan, from weightlessness in the beginning, to extreme, persistent and at last regressing. This process is actually a way that a man looks for the mainstay and significance of his life.

Taking a general look at Mainland Chinese movies , a movie like Missing Gun,which meets the both requirements of mainstream and commerce, is very few. The big success at the box-office in mainland China is made by different factors, but the reason ,which pushs you to the cinema, is a wonderful debut made by the director and screenwrite--Lu Chuan. He took two years hard-working on the script and used his talent to make this movie very unique, no similarities made by other Chinese director. These two reasons are probably why a new director could invite such big super stars as Jiang Wen and Ning Jing to join the project.

In the movie, there is a part: Ma Shan and his friend squat on each side of a yard, trying to remember what happened the night Ma Shan lost his gun at his sister’s wedding. They just recall that Ma Shan sited on the side of the main table, suddenly, there is a red table appear in the middle of the yard. This part wasn’t written in the original script, it was an abrupt flash that caught Lu Chuan’s mind on the moment of the shooting. During the shooting, he asked phtographer stop the camera without any actors’ moving, then he put a table there and went back to the camera. A simple scene turned into an imaginative and striking cinematic scequence. Lu Chuan is really a man of genius.

The biggest regret is the weaken and vague ending. This makes all the brilliant narratives before turned into illusory. But even the story may be a bit simple, the praiseworthy cinematic vision makes it up. The extra-ordinary inconceivable beautiful little town in Guizhou Province, calm, clean and tidy, becomes a striking contrast with the tense rhythm of the seeking process. Its existence is a very important element of this movie.

On a side note, all actors had to speak local dialect in the movie and this not only makes this movie more true and beleivable, but also makes the acting a bit over-dramatized. Someone said, a new director usually can bring us a good movie. Lu Chuan’s debut is a proof. Missing Gun is not the movie to miss!