When first shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, Summer Palace (頤和園) caused the Chinese government to ban director Lou Ye (婁燁) from making films for five years because he brought the movie to France without official permission.
A candid story about politics and sex, Summer Palace irked Beijing not because it has plenty of full-frontal nudity and sex scenes so much as because it directly addresses the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in an intricate and gripping tale that chronicles 14 years, from 1987 to 2001, in the life of a woman named Yu Hong.
It is the fall of 1987 when Yu Hong (Hao Lei), a soulful young woman from a provincial town in northern China, arrives at Beijing University with a reckless appetite for new experiences. Yu’s longing to live with maximum intensity, as she confides in her diary, is met through newfound friendships, a series of flings and, especially, her passionate relationship with Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), a fellow student and the love of her life.
Her group of friends goes about exploring the city and themselves, reveling in a world that suddenly seems wide open. These feelings of freedom and youthful euphoria in late-1980s China make anything seem possible.
The sexual and emotional upheavals come to an abrupt end on June 4, 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army shoots its way through Beijing to quash the pro-democracy demonstrations centered around Tiananmen Square.
In the aftermath, Zhou joins some of his university friends as an expatriate in Berlin. Yu drops out of school, roaming from city to city, working mundane jobs while clinging to the belief that something poignant and far more than ordinary will someday happen in her life.
Zhou returns to China a decade later and finds Yu. The old lovers arrange a meeting, knowing, however, that they are not the people they once were, and that the world has changed and become almost unrecognizable.
Apparently autobiographical, the film doesn’t merely summarize the important events of a troubling recent past. It paints a feverish swirl of emotions, desires and impulses against a backdrop of sociopolitical unrest, and it does so with a sense of personal immediacy and epic grandeur. Lou’s breathless handheld camera, jump cuts and tracking shots recall the cinema of the French New Wave and capture well the outburst of freedom and youthful idealism that sweeps his protagonists (and, indeed, his entire generation) in the film’s heady first half.
The second half of the film shows the compromises and disappointments that leave this generation of Chinese youth feeling defeated and disillusioned, as Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are seen wandering through the mundane landscape of their lives after an extraordinary moment in history, both personal and collective, has long vanished. Though Summer Palace’s running time is close to two-and-half hours, no scene in this well-structured and constantly shifting narrative is excessive, no flourish is superfluous.
Hao Lei is unquestionably the strongest presence in the film. As if without effort, the uninhibited actress becomes a character who is complex and headstrong, and yet at the same time vulnerable.
As discussion of the 1989 massacre is still taboo in China, Tiananmen Square can only be represented by the sound of a gunshot in the distance and a spectacle that Lou’s protagonists happen upon as innocent bystanders. The momentous event is like a phantom looming in the background, unable to speak because it has yet to be named.
Nonetheless, history reveals itself in fleeting images of violence and passion, much in the same way as love is sketched in the film. Scenes such as sweaty sex in a dorm room, blurred bodies and faces in nightclub, and a rowboat at sunset convey impressions rather than narrative meaning. Love doesn’t have motives. It shows itself in strokes of poetry, conjuring up fragments of a distant memory that belong not so much to the characters as to us, the audience.
Summer Palace tells a tale in which love and sex intersect with politics. The motifs run parallel, reflect and resonate with each other to summon a collective memory that has yet to be defined and articulated.
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