It's impossible to write of this extraordinary modern Chinese film without mentioning Hitchcock's Vertigo.
Lou Ye, its writer-director, uses a similar structure of a morbidly romantic quest by an obsessive and guilt-ridden lover for the woman he lost to a self-inflicted death some years earlier.
Set in and around Shanghai's heavily industrialised Suzhou River, its hero this time is no ageing tec like James Stewart, but a young motorcycle courier (Jia Hongsheng) who's hired to ferry the daughter of a racketeer to her aunt's home every week. He hatches a kidnap plot: it misfires and the girl (Zhou Xun), in shame at the lowly sum asked for her safe return, throws herself off the bridge. All this is related by an unseen narrator. Then the courier, out of jail, takes up the story and meets a girl, now employed in a mermaid act in a drinking club, who reminds him eerily of his lost love. The makeover obsession engulfs him. Even so, the story ends in an even greater ambiguity that causes one to question all that's gone before, including the reliability (or sobriety) of narrators. Mermaids are not found in Chinese folklore and in other ways this romance plays to the tempo of the West, not Beijing; perhaps because Dutch and German money called the tune.
I should guess Lou Ye admires not only Vertigo, but Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, which has some of the same convoluted structure and teasing uncertainties. Its most radical feature is the restless, hand-held camera, subjective viewpoint and eye-blink editing that suggest the fretfulness and desperation of the lovers and the congested vitality of Shanghai. A curious little hybrid.
Suzhou River (Suzhou He)
Cert: 12A
