Suzhou River

Customer Reviews:

a very bad screenplay .......2007-04-12

on a elementary school level. the narrator did even a worse job. shaky camera, bad storyline, boring scripted dialogs, terrible performance. trying very hard to be deep but turned out just too flat to get viewer like me connected.
maybe good for high school leveled students who'd fall more easily for such a deadbeat romance. a big yawn from a dirty river in china.

SUZHOU WILL GOING ONTO MY 100-BEST LIST.......2006-08-13

Other reviews say mostly what I'd say. I'll just say everything is miles above what I expected. The complexity of the characters and the many-layered script constantly surprised and drew me in and on. It's a complex, sophisticated film while still accessible and fascinating.

As a rabid movie collector I recommend this fine, amazing movie.
It could become a cult classic given enough exposure.

a visually compelling film.......2006-05-20

First, some geography. Suzhou River runs from the city of Suzhou (which I have visited several times) down through Shanghai (which I have also visited several times), where it forms the north border of the city's old commercial hub, the Bund. The opening sequence of the film is a strikingly accurate montage of Shanghai river life: filty water, lined with decaying old buildings in places, and peopled by poor boat and barge operators who live in small quarters on their rivercraft. This is the China not of glossy chic stores but of the gritty realities of industrialization and large-scale poverty.

Stylistically, the film employs "new cinema" techniques such as hand-held cameras and saturated reds and greens reminiscient of Wong Kar-Wai's use of color and composition. The movie is categorized, for lack of a better label, as "noir," as the grittiness, sleazy night life and depiction of low-life criminals harkens back to the film noir popular in the 1950s.

The core of the movie, however, is a well-used plot gimmick most famously explored by the Hitchcock classic "Vertigo": a question of identity. This is not to say that such derivative plots are bad--it's just that the treatment has to be fresh or we end up feeling that we've seen the film before. On top of this basic plot--is this beautiful young woman the girl who the bike messenger betrayed years before?--is layered another cinematic technique: the POV (point of view), in which the film is narrated by a low-end video producer. Indeed, we never see him, as the camera angle is POV throughout, e.g. we see what he sees, as if his eyes were the camera.

The narrator tells his own tale of meeting and falling into a relationship with the gorgeous young woman (Xun Zhou) who performs as a mermaid in a neon-lit bar for a living, and then introduces the story of the motorbike messenger and his doomed relationship with a teenaged girl who has a crush on him. For reasons which are left murky (shall we just call it slapdash?), the messenger gets involved in a kidnap/ransom scheme in which he kidnaps the girl. Once freed, she jumps into the Suzhou River and promptly disappears.

At this point, he turns the narration over to Mardar, the messenger, and retreats until the final reel in which he has Mardar beaten up as a rival for the affection of the beautiful young woman. Confused yet? The problem with the film isn't the complicated narrative and POV--it's that we don't believe the characters are real. They are players in a noir fairy tale of sorts, perhaps, but not real people with emotions we can grasp. Indeed, the lead actors and actress are expressionless.

Why did Mardar betray the girl who loved him? Did he have no other choice? It seems he had plenty of other options: escape with her, betray the crooks, etc. So having betrayed her, he seeks redemption through finding her again. But then when he apparently does find her, the couple is found dead in the Suzhou River: accident or suicide, we have no clue, but again it seems like a contrivance rather than something integral to the characters.

Equally improbably, we're told the beautiful woman leaves the narrator for days on end without explanation, and though this "drives him crazy," he never asks her about it, follows her, etc. The characters are strangely detached from real-life motivations, desires, and emotions. As a result, we are left with a certain dissatisfaction with characters whose internal traits and experiences do not seem consistent or "real." Contrast this with the characters in "Blue," who are at a minimum consistent with what we've been shown, and consistent with emotions and reactions we can understand.

Though "Suzhou River" is a visually compelling movie, with first-rate cinematography and technique, a noir assembly does not a character or film make.

Wierd movie........2005-09-08

I purchased this movie because it was directed by the same man who directed one of my favorite movies called Purple Butterfly. This movie, Suzhou River, was not near as good as Purple Butterfly but I like it. You can tell that it's the same director with it's rough editing and home movie style camera work. This movie would seem to be Ye Lou's first effort, being done on a very low budget. You can feel the heart put into this movie but it is far from a masterpiece. However, seeing where Ye Lou's films have gone from this point make me respect him even more, and in a strange way gives me a deep appreciation for this bizarre movie. I look forward to more films from this brilliant, and underappreciated, director.

Haunting .......2005-03-31

This movie also reminds me of Wong Kar Wai's work but it is more gritty, more quirky, and darker. Like Wong Kar Wai's films it manages to touch a place somewhere in between reality and fantasy that probably most of us have visited at some time but find difficult to express. Some of the shots and sequences while appearing rough, spontaneous and improvised are genuinely striking and even often beautiful. The cameos of life on the river and oblique suggestiveness of the mermaid sightings are brilliantly done. The film sucks you into a story where reality and fantasy intertwine with a sense of ultimate futility, helped by the alternately gamine and broody Zhu Xun. I have seen it twice and will probably see it several more times. It is difficult to forget a film like this.

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