| SUZHOU RIVER Director: Lou Ye "For a long time people have tried to use this fantastical medium to say something about reality. Most of what we know as romanticism, and many love stories, are totally unreal. But people need this kind of romanticism in order to face the harshness of life. In the end though, too much romanticism will turn in to nothingness." Lou Ye Without giving too much away Suzhou River is basically a stylish remake of Hitchcock’s Vertigo with a few changes in plot to make the focus more on the nature of imagination and love rather than on the nature of obsession and madness. Interestingly, the first few minutes the film, directed by Lou Ye, is shot subjectively from the POV of a narrator – who only has a casual connection to the story he tells. Soon, though, director Lou Ye switches to an objective camera position and begins to tell the tragic story of Mardar and Moudan. Mardar (Jia Hongsheng), a quietly unassuming man, takes the job as motorcycle messenger and is instructed to carry around, and look after, a skinny teenage girl named Moudan (Zhou Xun) so that her father can do his illegal smuggling business without getting her into trouble. They fall in love, life is sweet and all seems good. Then -- since the world that they inhabit is a modern day noirish Shanghai -- trouble starts and things start to go bad. Especially when Mardar is instructed to kidnap Moudan and use her for ransom to get money out of her father. Distraught and angry at Mardar’s betrayal, Moudan runs away and jumps off a bridge into the Suzhou River to her death – or does she? The second half of the film has Mardar searching for Moudan. Instead he finds Meimei an identical twin to Moudan who works in a bar where -- believe it or not -- she is the main attraction of a floorshow in which she dresses as mermaid and floats around in a 3000-gallon tank. Like many Chinese films this one has a fatal romanticism and features characters that seem to be set in a fateful Mobius strip that leads to a destructive end. The difference here, though, is that the story takes place in modern day China and deals more with the "fate" of of people in their actions towards one another as opposed to "fate" of people at the hands of the unjustly wrought cultural system. There is no doubt that director Lou Ye is influenced by the great Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. But the cinematography, the editing, the set design and the use of sound isn’t nearly as audacious or playful as they are in Kar-wai’s films. Suzhou River runs out of steam toward the end mainly because it doesn’t go that extra step to becoming a real thriller and, unlike the films of Wong Kar-wai, the romanticism fades and the character’s motives seem mysterious and shallow. It ends up being a lukewarm paean to the mysteries of identity and to the anguish of lost love. - Matt Langdon |