Devastating humor delineates a Kafkaesque universe in this sly and subtle satire that has left the censors steaming. (The film has not yet been released in China.) It is the tale of a hapless individual who becomes caught up in a political wringer and emerges with a flattened ego. Zhao Shuxin is, by day, a mild-mannered, slightly disheveled engineer working for a Sino-German business in China; by night, he is a harmless if eccentric hobbyist. (He is played by Liu Zifeng, whom critics are calling the Chinese Woody Allen for his brand of bumbling sincerity.) A telegram-reading "Black cannon missing. 301. Find"-sent by Zhao to a friend is intercepted by a postal clerk, who dutifully turns the mysterious missive over to the Public Security Bureau. The police, in turn, hand Zhao over to the Communist Party committee in the factory where he works, and a thorough investigation is launched into what seems to be a case of international espionage. Zhao is never told what he has done wrong, so the absurd error on which the whole episode is based cannot be revealed. Zhao, it turns out, is quite literally a pawn in a giant chess game. The film's political daring is underscored by an inventive, stylized treatment-the Party meeting room is dominated by a giant clock seemingly borrowed from the Constructivists-but, as critic Geremie Barme notes, "The genius of the film lies in the way that the director turns the grinding realities of the life of the Chinese intellectual into a sophisticated black comedy."