Suzhou River

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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'.