Parky At the Pictures (20/2/2026)

(Review of Man on the Run; and Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare; The Forbidden City)

MAN ON THE RUN.

`Stuck inside these four walls,' are the key words to understanding the Paul McCartney profiled in Morgan Neville's documentary, Man on the Run. He had first felt confined in Rishikesh in the spring of 1968 and then again during the recording of `The White Album', when he had annoyed John Lennon and George Harrison by recording certain tracks on his own. To avoid the walls closing in at Twickenham Studios and Apple's Savile Row offices during the shooting of Let It Be in January 1969, Macca had coaxed his disaffected bandmates on to the roof for the lunchtime concert that restored sufficient faith for the combo to reunite one last time for Abbey Road (1969).

But, despite producing a masterpiece, The Beatles knew their time was up. Ringo Starr has been the first to quit during the White Album sessions and George had walked a few days into the Let It Be shoot. But it was Lennon who broke up the band by announcing that he wanted to leave and, as McCartney explains in off-camera asides over the film's glorious archive footage, the quartet had agreed to delay the announcement until their business affairs had been put in order. However, Allen Klein was no Brian Epstein and, in trying to warn his closest friends about his sharkishness, McCartney succeeded only in coming across as the band leader that he never was. Indeed, his decision to hire relations of his new wife, Linda Eastman, to handle his affairs did more than anything else to drive the decisive wedge between the Fab Four. He compounded matters by refusing to move the release date of his solo album, McCartney, to avoid a clash with Let It Be and used a press handout to declare himself an ex-Beatle on 10 April 1970.

Audio clips abound of Lennon fulminating about McCartney stealing his exit thunder, but Neville opts not to use any quotes by Harrison or Starr about the split that turned them over night into solo artists. Lennon and Harrison had already released albums under their own name and Ringo rushed out Sentimental Journey to stake his claim to independence. More telling, however, was `Early 1970', the B-side to `It Don't Come Easy', in which the drummer speculated about his prospects of playing with his former bandmates again.

According to the lyrics (`lives on a farm, got plenty of charm'), McCartney seemed the least likely to come out to play. He admits that he became a bit too fond of a consoling dram, while coming to terms with his new situation by keeping far from the madding crowd on the remote High Park Farm outside Campelltown on the Mull of Kintyre. Indeed, rumours that McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike resurfaced until some intrepid journalists spotted him galumping around the property he shared with Linda, daughters Heather and Mary, sheepdog Martha, and `some cows and a whole lot of sheep' (to quote Ringo, who forgot to mention the horses).

Frustrated that his debut album had been drowned out by the furore of the Beatle break-up (in spite of the brilliance of `Maybe I'm Amazed'), McCartney persuaded Linda into joining him on Ram (1971), whose cover drew a snide photographic response from Lennon, who dismissed the homemade collection as rubbish (how nice it is to hear Sean Ono Lennon admitting how much he likes it!). Neville doesn't refer to the fact that McCartney would revisit the material under the name Percy Thrillington in April 1977. Nor does he mention the contributions of guitarists David Spinozza and Hugh McCracken. But drummer Denny Seiwell (who would co-produce Ram On: The 50th Anniversary Tribute to Paul and Linda McCartney's Ram in 2021) pops up to recall the experience of life on the farm and recording at Rude Studio. He also describes how he remained on the team when McCartney recruited ex-Moody Blue Denny Laine to form Wings for the Wild Life sessions later in the year.

Although brother Mike `McGear' McCartney, producer Chris Thomas, and journalist Pete Doggett chip in occasionally, along with such celebs as Mick Jagger, Chrissie Hynde, and Nick Lowe, there is little outside analysis of the music produced during the ensuing decade. It's known, for example, that Laine and guitarist Henry McCullough were unhappy with singles like `Mary Had a Little Lamb' (although `Give Ireland Back to the Irish' is conveniently forgotten) and some of the tracks selected for the unmentioned Red Rose Speedway (1973). McCullough also challenged McCartney's claim to have formed a band of equals, when everyone knew he was in charge in the studio. But he was also who everyone came to see when Wings embarked upon the 1972 college campus tour (a welcome getaway from a charge for growing an illegal crop in the farm greenhouse) that saw them pop up at student unions (the first being Nottingham University) and offering to play for buttons. Neville dutifully raises the media reaction to McCartney including Linda in the band on the strength of her limited keyboard skills. But, as Mary and Stella McCartney point out, she created some wonderful harmonies with her husband and put herself in the reluctant spotlight in order to help him through the post-Beatle crisis of confidence that would catch up with Lennon during `the Lost Weekend' that would see him reconnect with his erstwhile bandmate in a way that he would never quite do with George Harrison (having started playing regularly with Ringo) before their Threetle reunion during the Anthology sessions in the mid-1990s.

Neville unearths some excellent footage for this part of the story, although The ICA Rehearsals have been released as an album extra, while the `One Hand Clapping' session has now been given its own film. A bit more might have been made of the 1973 James Paul McCartney TV special, the Bruce McMouse animated project, and the reasons why Seiwell and McCullough were replaced by Geoff Britton and Jimmy McCulloch and why they opted out of the trip to Lagos to record Band on the Run (1973). The difficulties of working on EMI's outpost studio and the late-night mugging that might have had a calamitous outcome are ticked off, as McCartney allows himself a little pat on the back for having weathered the post-Fabs storm and produced an album to stand alongside All Things Must Pass (1970), Imagine (1971), and Ringo (1973).

He would never hit such heights again, even though there are fine tracks on Venus and Mars (1975), Wings At the Speed of Sound (1976), London Town (1978), and Back to the Egg (1979). But Neville seems less interested in the studio work than in the tours that took Wings (now with Joe English on drums) to Australia in 1975 and America in 1976. The Wings Over the World era has been capably covered in feature detail in Rockshow (1980), which was released during one of the most traumatic years of McCartney's life. It began with him being arrested for the possession of marijuana at Tokyo Airport in January 1980 and Prisoner No.22 reflects on the folly of his actions and the seven-year sentence he was spared in the only openly soul-baring part of the film. Of course, the year ended with the senseless murder of John Lennon in New York and one wonders how many times over the last 46 years must McCartney have regretted using the phrase, `It's a drag, isn't it?', after being doorstepped by journalists outside an Oxford Street recording studio. Yet the profound sense of shock and loss that this utterance revealed lingered and McCartney retreated into solitude again after parting company with new guitarist Laurence Juber and drummer, Steve Holley, as well as Laine, with whom he had composed the runaway hit, `Mull of Kintyre', which had done little to rescue McCartney from the punk-era backlash that made him the uncoolest man in British rock.

Neville rather skirts the fallout with Laine (you don't record an album entitled Japanese Tears if you're still bosom buddies) and fails to offer any summatory remarks about what McCartney might have learned during the post-Beatle decade and where he might have been heading before closing with the `Coming Up' video, which had supposedly reignited Lennon's competitive streak and sent him back into the studio to work on Double Fantasy. It's a mildly frustrating way to end, but it was obvious from the outset that this was always going to be an approved overview (Macca is an executive producer) rather than a objectively analytical and revelatory exposé. It's not even mentioned that McCartney found himself back inside the four walls in December 1980, as he didn't record again until Tug of War (1982) and didn't embark upon The Paul McCartney World Tour until September 1989, for which he chose to hire backing musicians Hamish Stuart, Robbie McIntosh (guitars), Paul `Wix' Wickens (keyboards), and Chris Whitten (drums) rather than reconvene Wings.

All of which begs the question, what purpose did Wings serve and why is McCartney so eager at this juncture to revisit their heyday with a documentary, another compilation album, and a 576-page book (Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run)? For all the access Neville seems to have had to McCartney himself, he doesn't really attempt to explore the group dynamic. Admittedly, he is restricted by the fact that Laine, McCullough, McCulloch, and Linda McCartney have all passed away. But he seems content to chronicle events without digging too deeply, which, one suspects, would have suited McCartney down to the ground.

Having already done justice to the likes of Brian Wilson, Sam Phillips, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Keith Richards, and Pharrell Williams, Neville is very much a safe pair of hands when it comes to telling tales without giving much away. The winner of an Oscar and a Grammy for his superb study of backing singers, 20 Feet From Stardom (2014), he is adept at using archive montages to sweep the viewer into a time and place, as he did most recently with the admirable Breakdown: 1975. But McCartney in legacy mode is a tough nut to crack and he's cannily opted to be a vocal presence only here to avoid distracting from the cherubic, but reinvigorated thirtysomething on screen. He's been in the public eye for over 60 years and knows how to spin stories to his own advantage. Indeed, no one has done more to reshape our understanding of The Beatles than the band's bassist, by dint of the fact that he has outlived John and George and can present his side of events so persuasively that they have become an `official' version that Ringo is happy to go along with.

The same now seems true with Wings, which was always perceived as being a glorified backing band rather than a close-knit combo, no matter what Alan Partridge might have thought about the situation (`Wings. They're only the band The Beatles could've been.'). Perhaps McCartney wanted to redress the balance of all the Lennon documentaries that have been released since Martin Scorsese's epic Harrison tribute (when is someone going to focus on Ringo, who more than merits a cine-study)? Whatever the motive - perhaps it was simply to ensure that everyone else can see why he was so amazed by the Lovely Linda - this insider recap will delight Fab fans, as it's full of choice clips and relishable samples (some of which have made the accompanying soundtrack album), as well as the odd vindicatory snippet. It's also good for non-addicts to remember the consistently high standard of Macca's songwriting. But, despite the excellence of Alan Lowe's editing, 115 minutes isn't really enough to cover McCartney's 70s and a three-part mini-series might have been a better option, covering the self-doubt phase, the peak period, and the post-Wings Over America slide. As was the case with John and George, however, the definitive documentary on Paul McCartney will be posthumous. So, let's hope that this will be a good few years in the making yet and that there is still some history for him (and Ringo) to make.

FUKUSHIMA: A NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE.

The events and effects of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami have already been covered in such documentaries as Christopher Noland's 3.11: Surviving Japan, Stu Levy's Pray For Japan, Daniel Edge's Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown (all 2012). Matteo Gagliardi's Fukushima: A Nuclear Story (2015), Mark Olexa and Francesca Scalisi's Half Life in Fukushima (2022), and Philip Carillo's The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story (2023). There have also been TV deries like Channel Four's Fukushima: Days That Shocked the World (2026) and such dramatisations as Setsurō Wakamatsu's Fukushima 50 (2020) and Masaki Nishiura and Hideo Nakata's The Days (2023). Kohei Okada-Skogorev and Timo Wright even created a virtual reality documentary entitled

Fukushima - The Home That Once Was (2022), which offers viewers a tour of the forbidden zone. Into this crowded field comes James Jones and Megumi Inman's Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare, which marks the 15th anniversary of a natural disaster on Friday 11 March 2011, which claimed 20,000 lives and displaced 164,000 people from the area around the eponymous six-reactor nuclear plant.

A preamble takes us from the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 to the launch of a 1955 US-sponsored exhibition promoting the atom as the future of power. As anime cartoons promoted the safety of the new technology, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) started work in 1967 on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, where a special sea wall had been constructed to tame waves of any height.

Ikuo Izawa had been at school when the project began and he joined TEPCO as an engineer at the age of 18. He recalls how the company transformed the town and built schools to build a bond with the local community and generate a sense of trust in its reputation for safety. American Carl Pillitteri was a maintenance technician among the 6000 people working at Fukushima on 11 March, which he remembers being a beautiful clear day. At 14:46, a tremor rocked a roadway shown on CCTV and it

shook the Japanese parliament, where Prime Minister Naoto Kan was in attendance. A montage shows the impact on offices and a splash pool in the park, as people started to run out of buildings that could be seen visibly swaying.

At the plant, Izawa and Pillitteri realised that this was more severe than usual, with the later comparing the groaning metalwork to Godzilla's roar. Three miles away, at the Ukedo Primary School, 12 year-old Wakana Yokoyama was told to evacuate her second-floor classroom and she recalls feeling fear as the kids ran towards a shelter holding hands in a long line. A map shows the tsunami wave hit land 70 miles north of Fukushima at around 15:15 and sirens wailed at the Matsushima Self-Defence Force Base, as men on a balcony shout to people to run while watching the wave covering the rice fields and sweeping cars along the street. At Sendai (60 miles from Fukushima), a helicopter records the wave joining the river system and gliding inexorably forward over the fields. A cut to the airport shows cars and light aircraft being swept along by the tide, as Izawa remembers hearing news that a 10-metre wave (33ft) was approaching and being alarmed because the lowest turbine buildings were that height about sea level.

Pelletti remembers the silence of the encroaching water and the fact it started to snow, while Izawa describes how the control panels for Reactors 2 and 1 went out and he called to report a Station Blackout, which TEPCO had never experienced before. Meanwhile, New York Times journalist Martin Fackler had arrived from Tokyo and was appalled by the devastation in a scene he felt was like something from Hell. He also outlines the rising China Syndrome fears that one or more of the reactors would go into meltdown and plutonium would seep into the seal, with the potential to wipe out the northern half of Honshu island. Clips of global news bulletins alternate with shots of the decimated terrain, as Fackler reflects on the very real threat that a doomsday scenario was playing out.

As shift supervisor, Izawa was the senior many on duty in the control rooms and he had the monitors connected to car batteries so he could take readings. Engineer Katsuaki Hirano arrived to discover that water levels were dropping inside the reactors and the reality that the lack of power meant that nothing could be pumped back in to keep the core cool. As David Shukman provides clarification in a BBC News clip, we see Prime Minister Kan surveying the scene from a chopper and hear an extract from his memoirs, in which he recalled thinking that everything must be done to prevent any explosions.

Two miles away, Mayor Katsutaka Idogawa got a nuclear incident fax from TEPCO at the council offices in Futaba, which confirmed his suspicions that anything man-made would be prone to human error. The company also informed Izawa that a vent would have to be made to release pressure in Reactor 1, even though they knew anyone boring the hole would be exposed to radioactive material in the escaping gas. Kan's adviser Manabu Terata, describes a flying visit to the Emergency Respose Centre, where there was just time to hear that a `suicide squad' was being chosen to vent the containers before the government medical officer advised Kan to leave. Izawa had volunteered to undertake the mission, but he was persuaded to stay at the helm by Hirano and another senior engineer. However, they were stood down in favour of two younger volunteers, who had just left when news came of the white smoke from the reactor that suggested an imminent explosion.

This came around 15:30, but TEPCO withheld news of it for an hour and Kan was furious that he found out from the TV and had no background information to give to the population. Izawa was fearful that the walls of the control room would give in, but they held. Mayor Idogawa saw the grey gas cloud rise into the sky from the hospital, as staff and patients were being evacuated by bus. He was livid with TEPCO and Fackler reveals that the company kept making basic errors throughout the crisis, which meant that the Fukushima episode was a crisis caused by humans rather than a nature. Moreover, the drivers delivering batteries and generators refused to go closer than a dock two hours away, leaving plant workers to go and fetch vital equipment when time was of the essence.

Izawa recalls one control room worker asking if there was any point in them staying and he reminded him that TEPCO had a duty of care to the community that included their own families - thus, any retreat would be a betrayal of loved ones. After hours trying to get a line, he called his wife at an evacuation centre and was grateful that she appreciated that he had to stay to the end and this gave him strength.

After such an intense chronicle of events immediately after the tsunami, it comes as a shock to jump forward to 13 March without mention being made of what had happened in the interim. Amidst the news clips are extracts from a speech by President Barack Obama offering American help. Nuclear expert Charles Casto explains how memories of US postwar occupation prompted Kan to resist active help, in case Obama felt a need to step in if efforts failed. However, as the reactors were American design, Casto knew he would get the call eventually and he was frustrated by a lack of information from the Japanese on hitting the ground, especially as there had been a second explosion and the walls of Reactor 3 had crumbled under pressure, even though the chamber remained intact.

On 14 March, another explosion in Reactor 3 was followed by a dip in water levels in Reactor 2 and Fukushima staff were beginning to wonder why they were bothering, when all they could do was pump sea water from one fire tender. Fackler explains how out of its depth TEPCO was and Casto expresses his sympathy with Kan's plight, as he was trusting executives who wouldn't tell him the facts he needed to know. They were also resisting US assistance and senior manager Akira Kawano admits it was chaos at TEPCO HQ when Kan arrived to speak to the board and order all workers over 60 at Fukushima to lay their lives on the line to save Japan by avoiding calamity. Izawa recalls the sense of betrayal, as they had been risking everything already (and none of them were over 60) and they felt underappreciated - just as Reactor 4 exploded.

As Fackler explains, Kan allowed the plant to be evacuated, but 60 (known as the Fukushima 50) stayed behind to operate the fire hoses and monitor radiation levels. Hitano felt it was his duty as a human being, while Izawa knew he had to stay, as he could entrust the care of his wheelchair-bound wife to his three children, whom he contacted by email, as a way of saying his goodbyes. He was also moved by the fact someone suggested taking digital photographs of those at their posts in hazmat suits and breathing masks and Izawa admits feeling these were in bad taste at the time, but now realises they showed resilience and commitment.

As 17 March dawns, news reports circulate that a cooling pool has drained and that the nuclear rods can no longer be reached because of radiation levels. Hirano comments on dwindling supplies of food and water, while Izawa reveals how people managed to keep going on precious little sleep. We see footage from inside the badly damaged Reactors, as readings were taken that only convinced the staff that it was only a matter of time before catastrophe stuck. Something needed to change and it took the intervention of the Hyper Rescue Squad from the Tokyo Fire Brigade to turn the tide. Toyohiko Tomioka describes how they had spent the week helping victims of the earthquake and tsunami before they were dispatched to the 12-mile exclusion zone. Arriving on 18 March, they had to borrow Self-Defence Force breathing apparatus, but pumped 2500 tons of water and succeeded in refilling the fuel pool. As it became clear that the corner had been turned, Izawa was allowed to leave and he remembers being told he had been contaminated all over his body, but still felt good while sitting in a warm bath, whispering `I'm still alive' into the water.

As news footage shows hazmatted workers re-entering the reactor buildings, Fackler outs TEPCO for failing to act on a warming that a 15m wave was possible at Fukushima. Executives hid behind the `safety myth' and refused to even waterproof the plant, which should have been a common sense strategy. Kawano admits that TEPCO boasted of its safety record while investing insufficiently in maintaining levels because protection plans are expensive and cut into the profits that are always a priority in big companies. He concludes, therefore, that human nature rather than human error was responsible for TEPCO's underperformance.

Fackler discusses the backlash that TEPCO faced for a few years after the disaster, but the need to find alternative sources of energy has resulted in a resumption of the nuclear programme in Japan (and elsewhere). But he notes that it will be generations before the mess left can be cleared up at Fukushima and he worries that the lessons might be forgotten. Casto laments that Izawa and his colleagues still don't think of themselves as heroes because they most certainly were. But he is keen to leave behind his version of what happened so that the truth remains even after the tragedy has been forgotten.

Closing captions reveal that two plant workers perished in the tsunami, while one died of radiation poisoning. Several more have contracted cancer after a disaster that caused $200 billion-worth of damage. The end matter also notes that TEPCO regained the trust of the Japanese people and resumed the kind of adverts prioritising safety that it had used before the crisis. Yet neither the company nor the government has come clean about what actually happened behind the scenes during the terrifying week in March 2011, which means that this expertly constructed record can only scratch the surface when it comes to the truth.

Making judicious use of footage of the tsunami and the plant emergency, Jones and Inman convey the gravity of the developing situation with a steadiness that matches the response of Ikuo Izawa and Katsuya Hirano, as they recognised where their duty lay regardless of the personal cost. Their remarks are the film's strong point and their enduring humility regarding their self-sacrificial courage is deeply poignant. However, the fire fighters who spent hours pumping water on to the fuel rods feel a little shortchanged, as the co-directors go into less detail in explaining the risks and difficulties that they faced in providing the low-tech solution to a predicament that placed the entire future of the nation in jeopardy.

Editor Rupert Houseman works expository wonders with some of the TV news clips, while Uno Helmersso's disquieting score makes effective use of ticking to underline how much time was of the essence throughout the crisis. Yet the decision to leap forward a couple of days after chronicling events in such detail and with such intensity rather loosens the documentary's grip and the outlining of subsequent happenings fails to recapture the same sense of urgency and clarity. This is partly down to the fact that Jones and Inman clearly had limited insight into boardroom activity at TEPCO, but they might have made more of the fact that the inexperienced Kan administration was having to cope with the shattering impact of the earthquake and the tsunami, while trying to deal with a crisis that, for several unbearably tense days, threatened to dwarf Chernobyl. Martin Fackler offers an incisive summation, but more of his views on the TEPCO ethos and nuclear power's place in the race to replace fossil fuels might have given this laudable piece of historical reportage some needed politico-industrial edge.

THE FORBIDDEN CITY.

It's safe to say that Gabriele Mainetti's La città proibita (aka The Forbidden City) is the least typical film screened by CinemaItaliaUK. This martial arts saga is the director's third feature, but the first not to have been co-scripted by Nicola Guaglianone, after They Call Me Jeeg Robot (2015) and Freaks vs the Reich (2021).

In Fujian Province in 1995, a couple who have broken China's one-child policy (Jia Yimin and Elisa Wong) decide to raise Yun in public, while keeping Mei a secret. Father Xiao teaches the girls martial arts and this comes in handy a quarter of a century later, when Mei (Yaxi Liu) comes to Rome to find the sister who had gone missing after leaving home to make enough money to pay the fine that would allow Mei to become a citizen.

Having been trafficked, Mei is ordered to strip in the basement of a restaurant-cum-brothel that is run by triad boss, Mr Wang (Shanshan Chunyu). But Mei defies the madam (Sheena Hao) and pulps the henchmen who try to pin her down, as she kicks, punches, and slashes her way up a winding staircase into the kitchens. Pans full of boiling oil make effective weapons, as Mei dodges cleavers and knives before walking calmly through the dining area of The Forbidden City and out into the bustling Esquilino district. Unable to speak a word of Italian, she makes her way to Ristorante da Alfredo, where she has been told (by an old woman in the brothel) she will find her sister.

This busy trattoria is run by Marcello (Enrico Borello) and his mother, Lorena (Sabrina Ferilli), but it's in debut because her husband seemingly ran away with a Chinese prostitute. When Marcello tries to explain this to Mei using the translate function on her phone, she threatens to beat him up. However, she realises he is telling the truth and storms out of the kitchen that has filled with smoke because Marcello had been distracted by two English customers complaining because Lorena had tried to over-charge them.

The restaurant is protected by local crook, Annibale (Marco Giallini), and his henchman, Cip (Claudio Pallitto) and Cioppe (Daniele Mosca), who pay Wang a call to ward him off. However, Annibale also retains his youthful crush on Lorena and he reassures her that she will be safe as long as she remembers what she owes him.

When Mei reduces Cio and Cioppe to gibbering wrecks in the after hours marketplace, Annibale recruits Malik (Seck Abdoulaye) and a couple of his fellow migrants to be his new crew (this after he had told Marcello that Rome has become like Asterix's Gaulish village because it's forever under siege from foreigners). But Mei gets past them with an abducted member of Wang's gang and forces Marcello to drive out to the spot where Alfredo and Yun were burie. After the exertion of digging, he vomits on seeing the corpses, but Mei weeps over the sister who had promised to protect her and she send her on her way in a burning boat.

Shocked by what he has witnessed, Marcello confides in Annibale, who tells him that his father had fallen in love and had put Yun into a love nest that ran him into debt. They pay a visit to the apartment, as does Mei, who touches some of her sister's clothing before applying her red lipstick and putting on a red dress in order to launch an attack on Wang's place. Despite being heavily outnumbered, she holds her own before being overpowered. Even then, she manages to fight back and crashes out of the window into the street, where she is picked up by a delivery driver who dumps her outside Marcello's restaurant. Here, she is found by his kitchen assistant, Śānti (Tomal Islam), who takes her to his family home and calls Marcello to collect her. He carries her home and tries to convince Mei that he had nothing to do with Yun's death and that her sister had been in love with his father.

Returning from having watched Annibale set light to his car to remove traces of incriminating evidence, Marcello is taken aback when he sees Mei scrubbed in in one of Yun's dresses. He cooks for her and she gulps down the noodles, pausing to offer him a taste across the table. But she is frustrated when he locks her in the apartment (even though it's for her own good) and he returns to find she has trashed the place. As it's dark, he agrees to take her on a tour of the city on his Vespa and she is delighted by the landmarks, as they whizz along. When they stop by the Forum, however, Mei becomes emotional when she talks about the sacrifice that Yun had made for her and how she wishes she could have told her how grateful she was. Marcello puts Mei to bed and returns home to find Lorello waiting for him. She has done Mei's washing and asks about his `girlfriend', but he is evasive and says nothing about Annibale asking permission to take her to dinner - as they are family.

Finding Mei missing from the apartment, Marcello goes looking for her after she has confronted Wang about Yun. She wounds him and leaves to find Marcello doing tai-chi in the park. They go home together and she tells him what Wang had revealed to her. Alfredo (Luca Zingaretti) had made a deal to buy Yun (Haijin Ye) from Wang so that they could go away together and he had agreed to sell him the trattoria as part of the deal. Being a bigot who wanted to keep his little patch free from outsiders, Annibale believed his friend had betrayed his Italian roots and had shot him. Seeing Yun sobbing over her dead lover, Wang had shot her because she was no longer of any use to him.

Hearing the truth, Marcello goes in search of Annibale. He is dining with Lorena at the trattoria and Marcello takes over in the kitchen from Śānti to cook him the noodle dish he had made for Mei. Annibale is affronted to be served with foreign muck, but Marcello reminds his mother how much Alfredo had liked it and regretted that it disagreed with him. Refusing to listen, Annibale leaves. But Marcello follows to taunt him that his reign over the district is over because his views are outdated. He pulls a gun and is so distraught when Lorena and Mei (who has climbed across a roof to escape from the locked apartment) follow them to the back alley to see what's going on that he shoots himself in the chest and Marcello cradles him, even though he had done so much harm to his family.

Years pass and Lorena runs the restaurant, with Śānti as the chef and Malik as the pot man. Mei teaches martial arts classes in a small Chinese town, while Marcello cooks for their two children, a boy and a girl. She smiles at him across the dinner table, perhaps still surprised that her trip to Rome had had such an unexpected outcome.

There are several surprises in a scenario slickly scripted by Mainetti, Stefano Bises, and Davide Serino. The sequence in The Forbidden City seems to follow on from the rural Chinese opening, but Mei strolls out following an extended set-to on to a Roman street and almost into the path of an oncoming scooter. Mainetti also makes the most of every twist, as Mei's investigation entangles her further into Marcello's world and its dark underbelly. Yet, for all the neatness of the writing, it's the choreographing of what we might call the `pizza fu' action that leaves the deeper impression. Owing more to Sammo Hung than Jackie Chan, the fights have their slapstick moments. But the emphasis is on the precision and power that enables the elfin Mei to overcome bigger males, who could pack a punch if they could only get one in edgeways.

If helps, of course, that Yaxi Liu is so gracefully potent. Having been Liu Yifei's double in Mulan (2020), she has made the transition from stuntwoman to actress with the same impeccable timing she brings to her Bruce Lee-inspired Wushu fighting style. Intently impassive for much of the time, she adeptly handles comic business like translating by smartphone or bashing heavies with flowers and fresh fish, while also showing a more vulnerable side after she's badly beaten and when she weeps over her sister's shallow grave. Enrico Borello makes a generous co-star, as he essentially stooges to Liu, while allowing Marco Giallini to steal scenes as bigoted dastard, Annibale. Sabrina Ferilli also has a couple of choice moments, as she slips champagne on to the bills of unsuspecting customers and quizzes her son about his new lady friend.

Despite a glorious nocturnal Vespa ride that pays homage to William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953) and Nanni Moretti's Dear Diary (1994), the romcomedic element is rightly downplayed to avoid it deflecting Mei's vengeful purpose. But the closing scene of domestic bliss still feels a bit unearned, in spite of its sly aside on Italian masculinity and the contrast it offers with the migrant experience of Rome. It's a rare misstep, however, as Mainetti again reveals his gift for offbeat storytelling, as he riffs on Wang's contention that when it comes to Italy, `everything is permitted and nothing is important'.

Particularly noteworthy is the sense of place Mainetti generates, as he and cinematographer Paolo Carnera make the most of the Chinatown district around Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. Production designer Andrea Castorina and set decorator Marco Martucci also do a splendid job of creating the worlds apart interiors of The Forbidden City (with its multiple storeys and network of subterranean tunnels) and Ristorante da Alfredo, while Francesco Di Stefano's kinetic editing of the pulsating martial arts sequences avoids the annoying Hollywood habit of cutting away on impact to mask the stunts (although there is more chopping than in classical Asian pictures). With Fabio Amurri's score remaining the right of pastiche, this is a highly entertaining, if occasionally meandering 138-minute caper and it will be fascinating to see what will next take Mainetti's directorial fancy.