“Suzhou River,” Reviewed: Gangland Romance as Political Critique

There are sufficient genres mashed up in Lou Ye’s 2000 movie “Suzhou River” to fill a competition, and its complexity is excess of a show of the director’s virtuosity. Cinematic kind has a particular which means for filmmakers working beneath censorship, and Lou, a Chinese language filmmaker, did (and nonetheless does) as many different filmmakers (such because the Iranian director Jafar Panahi) do beneath related circumstances. Lou constructs an intricate narrative to remind viewers of his have to take roundabout measures to recommend what’s on his thoughts; by calling consideration to brazen artifices, he emphasizes the obstacles to his depiction of actuality. The puzzle-like complexity of “Suzhou River” (which is taking part in at Movie Discussion board, in a brand new restoration) warns viewers to observe the movie strategically, to not take it at face worth, to be cautious of what they’re seeing whilst his attractive story attracts them in.

In “Suzhou River,” Lou—a filmmaker of meticulous craft and a strong sense of symbolism—builds his protagonist’s story across the character’s personal storytelling, devising a number of layers of motion, from documentary-like exploration to faux-archival video clips to the depiction of fantasy-like fiction that then hyperlinks up with the protagonist’s day by day life. That’s why, in a approach, simply describing “Suzhou River” is a type of essential thought, as a result of its twists and turns are so abrupt, its dramatic construction so elusive, that it requires a type of roadmap to spotlight its ironies and allusions, the realities implied by its calculated evasions.

For starters, “Suzhou River” is positioned beneath the signal of trailblazing modernism: it’s a diary-film, not an precise diary however a composed work of first-person cinema, by which the central character and central consciousness is fictional—possibly. Regardless of dominating the movie together with his standpoint and his voice-over narration, the protagonist stays a cagey and calculated thriller—he’s by no means named, and his face isn’t even seen, although his palms pop into the body just a few instances, for just a few moments. What’s extra, Lou doubles down on the modernistic premise by making “Suzhou River” cinema-centric: that unnamed protagonist (voiced by Zhang Ming Fang, who’s uncredited) is a filmmaker of kinds, a contract videographer dwelling and dealing on the teeming, louche quasi-underworld of the Shanghai waterfront, beside the titular river.

The protagonist—I’ll name him the Videographer—lends the film a documentary-like tone, with its scenes, seemingly those who he himself has filmed, of the day by day lives on the waterfront of hangers-on like himself who scrounge and scuffle within the metropolis’s margins. One common consumer, a sleazy supervisor of a sleazy evening membership, hires him to videotape the efficiency a younger lady named Meimei (Zhou Xun), a swim-dancer who does a present within the bar as a mermaid in an aquarium-like glass-walled tank. After the present, she and the Videographer meet; they begin a romantic relationship, however she, too, is an individual of thriller, vanishing for days at a time. Throughout one among their reunions, Meimei flings a romantic insult on the Videographer, doubting that, if she disappeared, he’d be as devoted as a younger man of city legend named Mardar—a motorcycle messenger who, when the lady he cherished disappeared, spent his life searching for her.

At that time, the Videographer turns into a type of cinematic Scheherazade, making up Mardar’s story, which is dramatized because the Videographer himself, in voice-over, narrates and feedback on it. The story of Mardar (Jia Hongsheng) is a mix of movie noir and supernatural fantasy, a downbeat story of a younger man who’s at unfastened ends; he buys a stolen bike and has large goals, however finally ends up one of many metropolis’s horde of motorbike messengers. A sleazy night-club operator hires Mardar to ferry a younger lady named Moudan (who’s additionally performed by Zhou Xun) forwards and backwards between the properties of her dissolute father and her aunt—and, in the midst of these journeys, the 2 fall in love. The connection of Mardar and Moudan seems to be a posh gangster tragedy—full with kidnapping, firearms, tried suicide, police violence, homicide, incarceration, and dire secrets and techniques of a felony and sexual previous. It’s informed with flashbacks and a jolting shift in dramatic perspective, it incorporates a phantasmagorical twist of mythological reincarnation, and—precisely as Meimei informed the Videographer—it includes Moudan’s disappearance and Mardar’s relentless seek for her.

But Lou has nonetheless extra narrative tips up his sleeve, and there’s no discussing the movie with out revealing the juiciest of them. In a variation on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” Mardar, in the midst of his seek for the vanished Moudan, encounters Meimei and believes that she is definitely his misplaced lover. Then, Lou provides yet one more twist, remodeling “Suzhou River” right into a bewitching cinematic Möbius strip: Mardar, via his acquaintance with Meimei, meets the Videographer, whose actual life turns into intertwined with the lifetime of the fictionalized character of his imaginings. Worry no spoilers: the film goes even additional with its intermingling of fable and actuality, reality and fiction. Its radical indeterminacy, its abyss of unstable identities and unresolved mysteries, is on the coronary heart of Lou’s daring political diagnostics.

The Rube Goldberg-esque dramatic framework delivers documentary-like depictions of a dirty and colorless Shanghai that’s disconnected from the shining high-rise capital of commerce, untouched by fast technological growth, crammed with shadowy wanderers remoted from the official social order of labor models and Celebration administration. The depiction in “Suzhou River” of unemployment and idleness and drunkenness, of gangland crime and police corruption, of covert maneuvering exterior the ambit of Celebration propaganda and patriotic pomp, is daring in itself. Its boldness, deflected in its intricacy, nonetheless all of the extra considerably depends upon a narrator, the Videographer, who’s in hiding—a storyteller who, in telling such a narrative, doesn’t dare disclose his face or his identify.

Lou’s profession is centered on such a mix of defiant depictions and elaborate ruses, and he has endured official censure in consequence. His story of a storyteller in hiding was prophetic: “Suzhou River” was banned in China, and Lou was punished for exhibiting it within the Rotterdam movie competition in 2000 with a two-year ban on filmmaking. Within the 2006 movie “Summer season Palace,” he was, apparently, the primary Chinese language filmmaker to dramatize the sanguinary repression of scholar protest in Tiananmen Sq., in 1989—and he went even additional, with an allusive critique of Westerner intellectuals’ facile embrace of the identical Communist ideology that’s embodied within the bloodbath. Not solely was the movie banned however Lou was banned from making movies for 5 years, ostensibly for exhibiting it within the Cannes Movie Pageant with out authorities authorization. Lou’s 2019 movie “Saturday Fiction” tells a dazzlingly difficult historic story of the Second World Warfare—one which’s centered on a theatre troupe confronting the repressive violence of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai—to allegorize the paranoiac ambiance of surveillance and infiltration in China’s current-day cultural scene. It, too, was subjected to censorship in China, although it was finally launched there, in 2021.

The proliferation of genres in “Suzhou River” displays again on the bowdlerized media world from which the movie borrows—and on the inside lives of individuals whose feelings are conditioned by it. When the fairy-tale romance, full with mermaids, bursts into actual life, it, too, turns into absurd tragedy. Lou exposes the bitter realities which might be commemorated and sweetened within the soap-operatic tales of affection, loss, and craving, of the kind that get framed as city legend, get sung because the sentimental pop ballads that fill the film’s soundtrack, and get filmed in “Suzhou River” itself. In impact, Lou, by turning hypotheticals into certitudes and myths into realities, is upsetting viewers to bypass the constructive information that’s the stuff of official media and the constructive photographs of life that underpin private optimism. Assume, the movie suggests, of the worst interpretation of what’s occurring—think about the ugliest motives and cruelest contexts for the tales that you just hear and browse, and know that they’re more likely to hit the mark. ♦