Dead Pigs, review: a savvy portrait of the real China, under the neon buzz

• Dir: Cathy Yan. Cast: Vivian Wu, Haoyu Yang, Mason Lee, Meng Li, David Rysdahl, Zazie Beetz. No cert, 130 mins

Once in a while, fate comes up with a metaphor that’s simply too good for an artist to resist. In Shanghai in March 2013, the corpses of around 16,000 pigs came floating down the majestic Huangpu, having been illegally dumped by farmers from a poorer province somewhere upstream. Sailing through the centre of this sleek metropolis was a bloated and bristly reminder of the other China – slipshod, uncouth and not exactly above board.

The Chinese-American filmmaker Cathy Yan has used that incident as the backdrop to this deft, heady satire about the intersecting lives of the city’s haves and have-nots. In fact, Dead Pigs is her debut feature, but it’s being released on the streaming platform MUBI a year after her second, the Margot Robbie-starring superhero blockbuster Birds of Prey, opened in cinemas. It’s satisfying to see Yan’s personal style, mere hints in that studio project, right at the fore here, from her ability to find humanity in eccentricity to her talent for portraying cities not as mere backdrops, but vast and surging super-organisms, whose inhabitants are inextricably caught up in their coils.

Shanghai’s citizens are represented by an oddball quintet, three of whom are related. There’s Candy Wang (Vivian Wu), the headstrong owner of a beauty salon; her brother Old Wang (Haoyu Yang), a small-time pig farmer who’s run afoul of local loan-sharks; and the latter’ son Zhen (Mason Lee), who has tried to put as much distance between himself and his father’s hogs as possible, only to end up waiting tables at a restaurant whose signature dish is roast you-know-what. It’s here, too, that he meets Xia Xia (Meng Li), a rich and self-obsessed socialite.

Meanwhile, outside Candy’s front door, bulldozers rev their engines, ready to clear the way for an absurd new development of residential skyscrapers surrounding a life-size replica of Barcelona’s iconic Sagrada Família cathedral. This ludicrous venture is being shepherded into existence by Sean (David Rysdahl), a taciturn but ambitious young American architect who has come east to make his mark on the world.

Candy’s abode – a lonely turquoise box with a rooftop pigeon loft, surrounded by rubble on all sides – is the last holdout against the tide of Chinese modernisation, and as defiantly un-chic as its owner’s leopard-print dressing gown and plastic pink hair-rollers. Old Wang wants her to sell, since his share of the proceeds will help alleviate his debts. But for Candy, staying put is a point of principle, and a sign of her own entrepreneurial resolve. (As she cheerfully advises her clients at the salon: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”)

It’s Sean who ends up having to persuade this redoubtable character to back down and submit to the city’s onward march, while daddy’s girl Xia Xia finds her own status and connections coming to her aid in the wake of a drink-driving crash into a fruit-seller’s stall – which we hauntingly experience from behind her watermelon-splattered windscreen. Zhen, besotted with his glamorous customer, visits her in hospital afterwards, and is subsequently inspired to raise some money by throwing himself into traffic, then soliciting bribes from drivers to not involve the police.

The connections between this quintet aren’t always simple questions of cause and effect, but Yan isn’t teeing up a straightforward showdown between people and progress. Instead, as in the films of Jia Zhangke – the great Shanxi-born director who serves as Yan’s executive producer – the film artfully avoids coming to a settled view on the tensions it depicts, and takes brief, surprising tonal detours that keep cast and audience alike on their toes.

There is a splashiness to some of this that can make you a little too conscious of the ambitious young talent behind the lens, but the ambition itself is never less than thrilling. Certain sequences, including one in which Xia Xia coolly surveys Shanghai’s neon skyline, look as if they belong in a film made on at least 50 times the budget – which is, of course, what Yan went on to make next. But Dead Pigs’s intermingling of grit and polish is hugely satisfying: a potent combination of pearls and swine.

Available on MUBI from Friday