'A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop'

Although he established his directorial cred via the elegant chamber dramas "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Ju Dou," famed fifth-generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou has become increasingly absorbed by pageant - evidence of which includes "Hero" (2002), "House of Flying Daggers" (2004) and the hallucinatory opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics.

All of which makes his adaptation of the Coen Brothers' 1984 "Blood Simple" strange, given the pulpish fiction of the source material. But it's also a case of East meets West meets East.

It was Dashiell Hammett who wrote "Red Harvest," which influenced Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," which influenced the Coens, who influenced Zhang, whose plotline follows "Blood Simple's" almost religiously. Wang (Ni Dahong), the miserly owner of a ramshackle noodle shop in the Chinese outback, suspects that his firecracker wife (Yan Ni) is having an affair with his wimpy chef (Xiao Shen-Yang). He hires his informant, a local policeman (Sun Honglei), to kill the pair. But the rustic tables, as they say, are turned.

The wild card in "A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop" is the gun - a cannon-like, three-barreled pistol - that Wang's wife buys from a Persian merchant, and which endows her with a power she could never attain otherwise. As metaphorical firearms go, it's a pretty potent symbol, and Zhang makes the most of it, as he does the striated desert landscapes of China's Shaanxi province. The film is played for broad laughs and Zhang often seems more preoccupied with its visual qualities (which are extraordinary), than any narrative momentum. Ultimately, however, "Noodle Shop" delivers.