Os Amantes do Rio

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

The first five minutes of Suzhou were hard to stand for me because I don't go for an overnervous handcamera. From than on one of the most sophisticated and touching lovestories was unfolded in the scenery of Shanghai where the director could only film unofficially. This makes Suzhou look half-documentary and helps to transmit the cold truth of betrayed love as well as the disturbing search for a warm reunion with the lost lover. You'll not only be surprised by the end. It will deeply move you.

Lu Ye made himself infamous for the Chinese government by making dark side of China movies. And Suzhou River is no exception and we love him for it.

We follow the narrator around the Suzhou river while he is searching for a job as a photographer for a strip club. While there he falls inlove with a stripper named Mei Mei, while they are dating, another couple is dating at the same time, Mardar and Moudan, the two girls Mardar and Moudan has one thing in common, they have the same face.

This movie is ment to be a society critic movie, and why not since we are use to see a beautiful side of China some times an overdoing side. So why not show a hiding side. Even though it's difficult when we follow the eyes of the nameless narrator and never see his face but then again it's from 2000 most movies at that time were experimental which ended in 2008. But the story is intriguing and you can feel the atmosphere like you are there, 7/10.

Although I enjoyed watching the movie, I thought sometimes if there's enough substance beneath the beautiful and sometimes poetic pictures. Thinking about this interesting movie and remembering scenes for one day - yes I think there is. The two melancholic love stories are indeed intelligently combined. Surely nothing for the typical popcorn-eaters, but highly recommended for people looking for 'real cinema'.

"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.