He has been labeled as another Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) and his work has been compared to that of Krzysztof Kieslowski. He is Lou Ye, one of the most charismatic of China's sixth generation filmmakers.
Compared to contemporaries Jia Zhangke (
PHOTO: YU SEN-LUN, TAIPEI TIMES
Lou pays lots of attention to the light and color in his films, and his stories are more likely to revolve around topics like love and fate, coincidences and possibility.
Suzhou River, Lou's previous film, tells such a story of a man encountering two mysterious women who look almost identical. One is an ordinary little girl, the other a bar performer who wears a mermaid costume. At different times and in places, he falls for each of them, and they proceed to change his life and that of the people around him. The film was selected by Time magazine as one of the best films of 2000.
In Purple Butterfly, Lou uses non-lineal narration and handheld camera to tell a story of the glamor of Shanghai between the wars. Purple Butterfly fails to knit together as well as Suzhou River, and Lou gets a little self-indulgent in exploring how fate manipulates people, a preoccupation that he pursues at the expense of building characters we can believe in. Ultimately, it is more visually impressive that narratively effective.
For all that, Lou has managed, in just three films, to establish himself as an important Chinese filmmaker. No mean feat.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
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