For a director who has just been slapped with a five-year film-making ban, Lou Ye (婁燁) appears remarkably unperturbed as he describes how he was hauled before the Chinese censors earlier this month for a dressing-down that made headlines around the world.
“I thought there would be some trouble, though not this bad,” he says. “When I heard their decision, I couldn’t help a bitter smile. It was the same thing that happened to me in the past, the same thing that many directors have experienced. I bet even the official who made the announcement was bored.”
Punishment can hardly have been unexpected. Lou has had two previous films banned. His first film Weekend Lover (周末情人), which was banned for two years and then released, and Suzhou River (蘇州河), which is still prohibited. But he has gone even further in his latest work, Summer Palace (頤和園), which critics have described as one of the most controversial films to come out of the China in the past 50 years. A contemporary story of love and disillusionment, it follows a female student over 15 years from her home in a northeastern province to Beijing University — where she meets her soulmate — and out into the wider world. In the process, Lou shatters sexual and political taboos. As well as having several sex scenes, Summer Palace is the first Chinese film to show male and female full-frontal nudity.
Perhaps more significantly, he also challenges one of the basic tenets of political correctness in communist China — “don’t mention the massacre” — by scripting a plot that pivots around the events of 1989, when People’s Liberation Army tanks and troops fired on protesters after a pro-democracy demonstration by students in Tiananmen Square.
If that was not enough to give the censor a coronary, Lou took the film overseas without permission for a premiere at this year’s Cannes festival. By Chinese standards, this is not so much pushing the envelope as ripping it to shreds. There was never any doubt that the authorities would be angry. So why did he do it?
“I have been wanting to make a movie like this since 1989. I was a college student in that year. Many things happened around me. It was a year of great impulsiveness.”
He recalls that almost every student in Beijing was involved in the demonstration. Friends were hurt. Students in other universities were killed. It was an experience that he needed a long time to digest.
“The background of the 1980s is very complicated. I thought if I walk some distance, I would be able to see it more clearly. And I wanted to look beyond 1989 to see how the events of that year changed society afterwards.”
He feels China, generally, is a better place than it was then. “The political system is more flexible, the economy is growing fast and the relationship between people is more equal.”
But there is a great sense of loss, too. “In my story, I tried to show that it is easier to change the outside than the inside. The pain caused in the 1980s continued to be felt in the 1990s and beyond. The confusion in people’s hearts is not given enough attention when we weigh up social change.”
Other artists of his generation have expressed similar feelings. For them, 1989 was the most important year of their lives, something that has been the preoccupation of their work ever since.
“It was like falling in love,” he says. “And then after 1989, people felt like they had lost something, like they had broken up with a lover.”
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