Suzhou he

This movie offers a sharp contrast to the historical revisionism of Zhang Yimou and others of the Fifth Generation of Chinese directors who seem happy to peddle a lot of costume dramas, which, fine as they are, are hardly progressive. Sushou River shows us parts of Shanghai which rarely make it onto Western screens, and there's isn't a peasant, an emperor, a concubine or a red lantern in sight. Xun Zhou is extraordinary in a star-making role on a par with Zhang Yiyi's in Crouching Tiger... Ye Lou is clearly the one to watch from the 6th Generation, a true romantic with more in common with Wong Kar-Wai than Chen Kaige. Er...that's a compliment.

"Suzhou River" is set in an off beat and low key Shanghai, unrecognisable as the Chinese city of bright lights. Shot from the perspective of an unseen narrator, Li Jiqian, "Suzhou He" toys wonderfully with the identity of its characters in a city filled to over flowing. Ma Da, a motor cycle courier is looking for Peony (Xun Zhou) a girl he lost years earlier. Has he found her in Meimei? Meimei asks "Am I the Peony your looking for?", half hopeful, half mocking. A pivotal moment in self awareness in a society held together for so long by conformity.

Hand held camera work, shot, it seems, mainly in natural light sets "Suzhou He" apart from many recent Chinese films released in the West, especially the beautiful, luminous films of the 'Fifth Generation' film makers so popular outside China. An interesting and arresting look at love, life and relationships of a new generation in China.

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.

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.

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