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Clothes make the man in this contemporary Chinese fable. A hapless ne’er-do-well (Lian Hongli) in the tradition of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten undergoes a transformation after slipping into a traffic-cop uniform he nicks from his parents’ laundry shop. Launched from zero to hero, he suddenly has no difficulty chatting up his record-store crush and asserting himself against the neighborhood bullies — until the ruse is unmasked. Director Diao Yinan’s milieu study of his home-town Xi’an provides a layer of political allegory that takes the Chinese government to task for the widespread corruption within its ranks. To access these deeper meanings, however, viewers must overlook irritatingly low production values and a soporific pace. Diao’s DigiBeta video camera, live sound, and unschooled ensemble of actors make Uniform an earnest but interminable exercise. In Mandarin with English subtitles. (94 minutes)