Flak Magazine: Review of Suzhou River, 4-27-01

Suzhou River opens on this question, as asked to Lao (Zhongkai Hua) by Meimei (Xun Zhou). Lao says he would; Meimei says he's lying. From this exchange, director Lou Ye spins one of the most hypnotic love stories since … well, In the Mood for Love, probably, but I don't know of a recent American movie that's been both as swooning and lush and as brash and cynical as Suzhou River. It's not that it's a portrait of perfect love; think instead of bright splashes of obsession against the massive negative space of the human capacity to make bad decisions. Like an abstract painting, you're more likely to uncover its deepest truths thinking about it than looking at it ... even though you can't take your eyes off it.

We meet Lao through one of the rarest of birds — a well-made non-documentarian first-person sequence, i.e., one in which the narrator's eyes are the camera. (Think Strange Days.) That said, even though Lao is a videographer in Beijing, we're seeing what he's seeing, not watching what he's taped — that said, we are supposed to conclude that the narrator, Lao, and the director, Lou, are pretty much interchangeable, and Lou is of course filming everything. The subjective cinematography means we share Lou's viewpoint, an important factor in setting up the movie's truly dizzying structure.

It goes like this: Lao met Meimei when he was hired to record the opening of the Happy Tavern, at which Meimei is a mermaid-costumed performer. The two fall into a familiarly disaffected sort of love, and it's under these auspices that Meimei asks the question. Mardar, Lao informs us, is something of a recently minted urban legend he read about in the newspaper — a motorbike courier whose love, Moudan, leapt into the Suzhou River, leaving Mardar to wander the city looking for her.

Pondering why it is that women pose such ardently romantic questions, Lao starts to postulate his own version of the Mardar story, embellishing the modern myth with some decidedly nonromantic sensibilities. Mardar, as he tells it — or, rather, shows it, as the point of view switches from the narrator's eyes to his imagination — is a laconic, hard-edged figure, differentiated from the legions of Beijing couriers by his track record of handling delicate matters and keeping confidences. He'd been romantically involved with a female crimelord who sets Mardar up with his fateful charge of ferrying Moudan, daughter of a prominent distiller/distributor, away from her father whenever he has a mistress to entertain. The pig-tailed, ebullient Moudan is quickly smitten with Mardar (Hongshen Jia is strangely reminiscent of John Cusack — warm but pensive, charming but socially awkward), but Mardar is slow to return her ardor. When the crimelord and a cohort plot to hold Moudan for ransom, Mardar complies, and it's the culmination of this that causes Moudan to take the dive.

Or so Lao speculates. His frequent narration of Mardar's story, as he explicitly considers and refines certain details, keeps the whole sub-story clearly marked as fiction. Frustrated with it and not appreciably closer to understanding Meimei, Lao gives up on the story — unless, he says, Mardar has his own telling to do. And now we're with Mardar, wandering the streets of Beijing until he ends up at the Happy Tavern, where — I presume you saw this coming — he sees Meimei, who is the spitting image of Moudan.

Lou is unabashedly riffing on, but not ripping off, Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock's purloined tale of obsession, of selfishness meeting at cross purposes with love, and of the destructive power when those three elements are mixed. The score samples the most beautiful, evocative measures from Bernard Herrman's Vertigo score, counterpointing its predecessor's smothering romanticism with its own spare original orchestration. Such obvious overtones are coupled with a bevy of smaller touches — Meimei's blond wig, Moudan's watery plunge, the flawless "casting" of its setting.

This last point is particularly noteworthy. Beijing is as perfect for Suzhou River as San Francisco was for Vertigo, and if that doesn't mean anything to you, try imagining Vertigo set anyplace else. The Beijing of the film is abandoned warehouses, miniature boxes of apartments, vibrant interiors behind colorless façades, bridges buried in pedestrians and cars, and, of course, the Suzhou River, with its glassy mirrored surface and centuries of the waste of civilization beneath.

Suzhou River is by no means a remake of Hitchcock's film — Lou has his own ideas, and his film is at most a rumination on Vertigo in the same way that the narrator ruminates on Mardar's story. The last major touchstone is Mardar's first meeting with Meimei, and from that point on, Lou is very much on his own territory, but the ensuing story is nearly as gripping and moving as the best Hitchcock. Lou has crafted a tremendous romance for the new millennium; its themes start with how what we think about our lovers shapes the reality of our relationship and spin off from there. Haunting and poetic, Suzhou River does right both by its heritage and by an audience looking to have its mind a little blown.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)