Nuits d'ivresse printanière

Spring fever it ain't. It's a spectrum. With tragic consequences here. I didn't expect it to be so despondent in some parts. I guess you gotta know and be sure what you're getting yourself into. Mid-way I would've said avoid Jiang Cheng at all costs. He is like catnip for these bis, he sure is lethal. By the end I wanted to tell him to stay away from the bis. They're nothing but trouble. Also these women who just cannot handle it.

It goes a little too hard with the whole being gay leads to bad outcomes trope from a while back. Although these things did happen and probably still do. Couldn't have been easy in China in the 2000s. I found the underground club scene as depicted here interesting. The actors committed fully to the roles and the story does not hold back.

Kind of felt sorry for all three of them, in succession really. Didn't fully understand Jiang Cheng's relationship choice at the end, but that memory he has of Wang Ping I guess is meant to tell us how much he regretted and missed him.

I watched "Spring Fever" with my older brother and we thought that it was a really good movie actually, despite the intense sexual scenes in the beginning and dispersed lightly throughout. It felt like a real, gritty movie, enhanced with hand-held video cameras and such. It was raw in emotion. My brother even confessed to me it moved him because he felt for the husband Wang Ping, who was married yet seeing another man. He relented that he understood that inner struggle and turmoil it was to know you are one way yet feeling bound to live another way in order to please people around you. To be honest, the movie is for mature audiences, but that doesn't mean the feeling of the movie is lost in that sense.

SPRING FEVER provides a rather confusing, yet absorbing tale of Gay sexual compulsion, however, the film is much more that an average Gay love story. The female characters are just as compelling, and even a bit more interesting that the male leads. Although the story line strains to be vague and enigmatic, in the end, it just comes across as garbled and bewildering. I would suggest a visit to the Message Board at IMDb after viewing the film to help you to get a firmer grasp on the plot. But, the most interesting aspect of the film is that it provides a fascinating look at locations in China which are not usually shown on film. Has there ever been a film featuring a drag queen bar and a punk rock nightclub in contemporary China? SPRING FEVER is unquestionably an Art House film, yet disjointed as it is, it still is an evocative and expressive work.

I attended the North American Premiere of "Spring Fever" at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. A co-production of Hong Kong and France, director Ye Lou's "Spring Fever" is quite a unique film about a gay love triangle. There's very little dialogue, which is a device I normally relish, but here it just drags out the already minimal action. The film is shot with all hand-held and shaky camera style, using lots of extreme closeups. It might not have been that hard to handle except that the picture itself was very dark at times so it was often difficult to even see what was taking place. I don't know if it was the source print, digital transfer, or projection, but it made for a very disappointing experience.

This film by the director of SUMMER PALACE, which depicted turbulent relationships at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, is a murky five-way gay romance that's so depressed-feeling it's surprising there's only one suicide. According to Derek Elley's Variety review the director bypassed the five-year film-making interdiction his previous effort brought on by listing this as a HongKong-French co-production, though it was shot "in Nanjing, central China, on digital equipment," and transferred to 35 mm. -- not entirely successfully, judging by the extremely dark interiors, which lose the desired sense of metaphysical longings influenced by changing weather (and oncoming spring). The action isn't so easy to follow at a basic level, either. There's intense gay sex at the beginning (and scattered throughout). It develops that the one married partner in the affair is being followed at his wife's behest and photographed. She violently confronts her husband and humiliates the other man publicly at his place of work. Later, the man who tailed the lovers loses interest in his g.f. and becomes attracted to the unmarried gay man, whose talents include singing in drag.

There is a sequence when three of the principals overcome grief by doing some Karaoke singing and then go on a momentarily successful car odyssey together. Elley thinks this film better organized (despite its desultory later developments) than SUMMER PALACE, but still far inferior to SUZHOU RIVER or even the flawed but interesting PURPLE BUTTERFLY. To my mind, SUMMER PALACE was more interesting, its scenes more atmospheric. There was a sense of excitement around the impending revolt, a feel of palpable historical urgency. SPRING FEVER may attract some festival audiences and work best at gay series, but its literary quotations and moodiness only heighten its clumsy feel. If Lou Ye was trying to channel Wong Kar-wai (of HAPPY DAYS, say), he ought to have hired Chris Doyle and directed his actors better. Some French critics were impressed through all the mess (Allociné rating 2.3/46) and this was shown at Cannes. But it's still a mess. Seen in Paris at MK2 Beaubourg (to a packed house) in April 2010.