Produced outside the official Chinese production system, Wang Xiaoshuai's last film, 1996's Frozen, was such a subversive statement about government oppression that the director credit reads "Wu Ming," a pseudonym that translates "Nobody." In spite of the censorship controversy that kept it on the shelf for three years, So Close To Paradise comes complete with a credit for Wang, but in this case, the pseudonym seems regrettably apropos. How better to describe a neo-noir so colorless and generic that its cigarette smoke is more expressive than its characters? The censors may be to blame for eviscerating the film, which was reportedly heavily re-edited before the approved version finally premièred for Chinese audiences in 1998. There are faint traces of political unrest in Wang's depiction of late-'80s Shanghai, if only because it houses all the expected noir elements, such as a thriving criminal underworld, shadowy nightspots, amoral heroes, and pervasive corruption. But it's hard to tease out the film's intentions when these same genre tropes are linked to so much empty navel-gazing. Introduced with a deft flip of a cigarette into his mouth, Guo Tao came to Shanghai as a migrant from the countryside, but he's since abandoned his roots and embraced the life of a petty criminal. He lives in a cramped apartment with Shi Yu, a young and mentally underpowered naïf who earns an honest living as a menial dock laborer. When another hoodlum steals a bag of Guo's money, Guo interrogates a Vietnamese cabaret singer (Wang Tong) who knows the perpetrator's whereabouts and eventually kidnaps her when she won't tell him. Literally faster than you can say "Stockholm Syndrome," the two fall in love, but her connections to the criminal underworld doom their relationship. A passive observer to the action, Shi provides the obligatory voiceover narration, but it adds little dimension to the characters and offers few clues about the odd father-son dynamic he shares with Guo. Trapped in a seedy juke joint mouthing karaoke to synth versions of Sade's "No Ordinary Love," the Vietnamese singer is by far the film's most interesting character, a potent exemplar of Wang's grim, deterministic vision. But even she's relegated to the usual femme-fatale paces, defined mostly by red lipstick, heavy backlighting, and seductive curls of smoke. A skeletal noir draped thinly with attitude and style, So Close To Paradise gives the impression that its heart may have been left on the cutting-room floor.