Suzhou River

The action of this film is so slow that I couldn't help being disturbed by the popcorn muncher behind me two rows back. But, I've been thinking about it for days. It's images are nowhere as near as beautiful, but it reminded most of Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers". The scenes are so sparse that you can't help but to focus on the simplest of details on the screen...a roll of toilet paper on a bed and each passing character all get connected to the story line by the films end. And even though there is ample reason to connect the filthy river to the source of the main characters problem it is clear that the river that the title is describing to is the vast population of disconnected people that haven't a clue what is happening to them.

It is possible to chart the history of post World War II cinema as a series of national waves each peaking in different decades, for instance Italy in the '40's, Japan in the '50's, France in the '60's and '70's and China and Taiwan in the '90's. A case has been made out for Iran in the '90's but examples I have seen, however fine, have seemed to me to be rather small in scale when compared with the rich offerings from the far East. China entered the millennium with a tremendous bang with Ye Lou's brilliant "Suzhou River", the impact of which has left me reeling. Although I had become accustomed to the uniform excellence of the work of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and their contemporaries, nothing had quite prepared me for the dazzling narrative brilliance of this new work. Although Chinese cinema is often innovative in subject matter, the finest examples such as "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Temptress Moon" tend to be fairly straightforward in their sense of narrative flow. "Suzhou River" however, as far as I am aware, has no precedent in its fascinatingly oblique approach to storytelling, a quality it shares with the Canadian, Robert LePage's "Le Confessional". The two films have another feature in common, both being inspired by Hitchcock. Although "Hitchcockian" is a loose generic term used to describe films that employ the Master's approach to suspense, both "Le Confessional" and "Suzhou River" go one step further in concentrating on a a single Hitchcock work for their inspiration, in the case of the former, "I Confess" and in the latter, "Vertigo". But at this point similarity ends. "Le Confessional" is very much an imaginative meditation on "I Confess". Some scenes deal with the making of the film and subtly contrast the original situation with a Quebec family facing a similar dilemma of conscience and its consequences a generation forward in time. The Chinese film is very different insofar as "Vertigo" is never mentioned. It takes a "Vertigo"-like situation and proceeds to tease the audience with outcomes that are subtly different. Stylistically it bears no similarity as it employs a frenetic hand-held camera technique that would have been alien to Hitchcock's obsession with studied visual balance. However there is a wonderful technical bonus that Hitchcock would undoubtedly have admired, where one of the characters -the director probably - remains unseen throughout but uses the camera as his eyes. The device is not new - it was used by Robert Montgomery in "Lady in the Lake" - but what was there something of a gimmick is here subsumed into the narrative in a way that is deeply satisfying. The most direct reference to "Vertigo" is reserved for Jorg Lemberg's score with its sighing string phrases - pure Bernard Herrmann pastiche. "Suzhou River" is one of those very rare events, a film I immediately had to see again. Although works such as the Belgian "La Promesse" and the Japanese "After Life" have far deeper resonances of meaning, few films have excited me so much in recent years from the point of view of sheer technical bravura.

I saw this film last night at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema and I was mightily impressed. This film has been compared to Hitchcock's Vertigo, with good reason, but this is a highly original film. Lou Ye's film is less detached and cold than the Hitchcock, and for that reason more emotionally affecting. The choice to use POV shots for one important character, for instance, makes it easier for the viewer become attached to Meimei/Moudan, the lead female character. The actress in the dual role shows amazing emotional range. And the city of Shanghai is a place whose grit, decay and urban energy is palpable. The climax of Suzhou River is heartbreaking, and the coda leaves one with the POV character's feelings of yearning and world-wear

Told through flickering cameras, jump cuts, fluorescent lights, visual fragments and burnt colors, this is a romance within a romance, a narrator within a narrator searching for a girl he lost. He's a cameraman, someone tasked with seeing; he watches her every day as she comes along the bridge to an apartment they share. As he waits he imagines a story she told him about a man who spent his life searching for a girl he lost. Imagines her in the girl within the story's place, until that girl disappeared in the river. His own girl emerged from water the first time he saw her, mermaid in the club aquarium.

It's about his girl who never came back one day, vanished into air. The whole is narrated from the end, with the nested story about heartbreak as wondering about love, how people can truly do it. The river standing in for transient life that carries away the past.

It's not quite Kar Wai, albeit in the same vein of languorous longing that stirs electrifying poetry out of streets. It's a bit loose in shape, pieces of daydream that float, and very much influenced by French notions of layered narrative.

Noir Meter: not a noir

Imagine 'Vertigo' remade by Chris Marker in the style of Wong Kar-Wai. And yeah, it nearly is THAT good. Most people have noted the allusions to Hitchcock's film, from the obsessively searching protagonist and certain plot similarities to the echoes of that most achingly romantic of film scores and the overall mood of romantic fatalism. But it is a 'Vertigo' filtered through the Marker of 'La Jetee' and 'Sans Soleil', one that moves it away from its Hollywood or generic context and admires its metaphysical reach, sophisticated narratology and formal complexity.

Although 'Suzhou River''s plot seems banal enough, with its mixing of burgeoning love story and crime genre, the treatment of it transcends the mundane. This is achieved in a number of ways - in the sickly, Hitchcockian colour, making fantastic the grimly everyday; the restless, yet elegant camerawork, seemingly wired to the overflowing emotional lives of the characters; the choppy, elliptical editing, that alternately creates a more urgent sense of reality, of how life is lived by people whose sensibility is alive and alert, and less realistic, by drawing attention to the film's formalism, the idea that someone is pulling strings, ordering this 'reality'.

It is the shadowy narrator that is at the heart of the film's mystery, not the missing woman Mardar seeks. It is his narration that is most reminiscent of Marker - in its mix of observation and speculation he turns the everyday into science fiction as he compresses, dilates, plays with distinctions of time and space, even of genre: the opening sequence could quite plausibly belong to a documentary. As with Marker, via Benjamin, the narrator is trying to create a history, an alternative history to the official one, one that sifts through rubbish, rumours and ephemera, reads and connects random signs.

At first we assume the story is his, the narrative of his romance with Meimei; that the story of Mardar and Moudan is a digression, almost a move into urban legend. Eventually, we realise that this latter is the body of the film, and that the narrator has marginalised himself from his own narrative, let it slip away from him, just as Moudan does Mardar, Meimei herself does the narrator, Maddie/Judy does Scottie in 'Vertigo'. When it finally comes back to him in an audacious narrative loop, his privileging has been displaced, and he has become the villain, the hood who has the new hero beaten up.

It is here we recognise that 'Suzhou' is one of the great river films, like 'Boudu saved from drowning' or 'L'Atalante'; not only in its blurring of opposites - land and water, truth and story, documentary and fiction, male and female, human and mythic creature, history and memory, life and death, fate and free will - or in the idea that there are stories, histories, destinies that are subsumed, literally under water, unseen by the 'real' world, but unconsciously shaping it; but also in its narrative logic, its relentless circularity, its tributaries branching off from the main narrative river and finally flooding it. The fact that the narrator is a stand-in for both the director AND the viewer, through his disembodied point of view, and who nevertheless expresses himself through an unseen body (sex, violence etc.) only complicates his inexplicable motivations.

Like Wong Kar-Wai, this is a rare, total cinema experience, where acting, form, style, mood, colour, music, location, plot all cohere to overwhelm both heart and mind; a film that shows that the urge to tell stories is linked to death (in that they begin and end), sex (in that they lead progressively to climax and release) and a control (in that they order and remake experience) that combines both, just as Hitchcock revealed in 'Vertigo' over 40 years ago through the figure of Scottie Ferguson.