Review

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The story of Suzhou River is about four people: Meimei, Mudan, Mardar and a videographer from whose subjective view the film is made.

A lonely videographer lives nearby the Suzhou River falls in love with Meimei, a performer as a mermaid at a night club, who is used to disappearing for days and then showing up again without a word.

One day the videographer gets to know Mardar, a motorcycle courier. Mardar tells a strange story about his kidnapping his girlfriend Mudan who was later so heart-broken that she jumped into the Suzhou River. Mardar is convinced that Mudan's still alive and keeps seeking her for years after he's been out of jail. He believes that Meimei must be Mudan and keeps seeing Meimei.

Something between the videographer and Meimei is changing little by little. Finally Mardar finds Mudan by chance but soon their bodies are hauled out of the Suzhou River after a drunken motorcycle crash. The videographer is asked to identify the bodies. Mudan is identical to Meimei!

Meimei finds out what Mardar told them is true, she is too stunned by such a love story to keep staying with her lover, the videographer, in such a common life. She left him at last with a question:" If I leave you someday, would you look for me, like Mardar looking for Mudan?"

The story is not complex, but people can easily get stuck in Karl Riedl's loose, jumpy editing and Wang Yu's rough-hewn shooting of the grimy city and its chaotically built-up riverside architecture.

Such sceneries along with an estheticism story and some depraved characters frequently appear in the works of the 6th generation of Chinese mainland and always dissatisfy the censors who prefer something more instructive and inspiring to the somber ones, which has made it difficult for the films to be allowed to be shown in the country.

Anyway, nothing compares to a compelling love story. Lou Ye used the same actress to star two different characters whom are loved by two young men in different ways. The videographer loves Meimei, her sudden disappearing act leaves him melancholy and prone to wistfully inventing stories about the human traffic that passes beneath his window. When he finds that Meimei is a little bit touched by Mardar, he simply asks:"Do we have problems now? Shall we say goodbye at this moment or just after making love?"

Maybe Meimei was used to such kind of modern love before, but not any more since Mardar's breaking into her life, taking her for his lost lover Mudan. She is irrevocably changed by the encounter with the sad Mardar, prompting her to test the limits of the videographer's devotion. She's envious of Mudan, even if the latter is dead. Meimei disappears again, perhaps this is the last time she plays the game, for she'll never show up unless the videographer trys his best to look for her, possibly all his whole life.

With the voice-over at the beginning, the strong love hidden in the bodies of ordinary people and the death in a river, the film is more like Truffault's Jules et Jim rather than something of Hitchcock or of Wong Kar-wai. While at first glance, the visual style seems to belong to the oft-imitated Wong Kar-wai school, it feels dictated not by modish concerns but by the story itself.

Lou Ye has said that although Shanghai he presented in Suzhou River is a city of criminals, smugglers and seedy night-clubs, he considerd that every city, like every person, wears different masks. Who is to say which one is the real one? Shanghai is something people simply get caught up in, like jelly. The only constant in the city is the Suzhou River. It feeds the city, like the artery feeds the heart. The water is the blood of the city. The Suzhou River has always fed Shanghai, but now it doesn't feed it so much literally "with food from the interior of China" but feeds it metaphorically. And Lou Ye stresses that he believes in true love.

FilmFestivals.com reporter
Fanfan Ko