Not every day you have the opportunity to watch a nationwide forbidden movie directly in a theater. Even in fewer days this opportunity comes, no more and no less, restored in 4K. I read in the brochure I picked the interview to the director after delighting myself in this lovely film, but the reasons for its censoring were not very clear. In either case, it gives it a romantic vibe.
Suzhou River is named by the homonimous Suzhou He, the fluvial mother that bears Shanghai. By the director Lou Ye’s words, the Suzhou river contains a century worth of garbage, dirt, rests from a colonial past, lumpen and criminals of many kinds – but also holds a special place in his heart, since he grew up by its side. Films inspired by locations and places are not an unfrequent view and please do not make me say the cheesy phrase of “the location is the true protagonist”, but it is difficult to call Su Zhou River a love letter to Shanghai. While it is true that the location inspires the story and the movie, it does not feel like a three-dimensional additional character more than an ambiance that conditions the story to happen.
The story premise is simple – the promise of a budding love between two solitary individuals in their own particular way, but life happens, with the disenchanting consequences you may imagine. There is a bit of Kar-Wai Wong in this. However, the true marvel that this film achieves consists in the narrative. We have a first-person narrator – probably a persona of the own director, given the small details he incorporates-, and the movie is seen from his point of view, including moving the camera to dizzy extremes. Nevertheless, some minutes into the movie, he proceeds to narrate the love story between the main characters as a story-within-the-story… until, unexpectedly, the character meets the narrator and the public gets an oddly charming reality-fiction mishmash where doppelgängers, parallel lifes, dramatic violence, Hitchcock-tier McGuffins and -especially- charming innocence that shines like a pearl succeed in an eye-feasting ruckus.
The ending, as cliché as unexpected, returns us to the harsh reality, where we get to witness things from the narrator’s eye camera again and we are explicitly told that these stories always happen in fiction. But in real life, nothing is forever and there is always something new to catch us.
On a visual aspect, the parallelisms with Kar-Wai Wong are more evident, with a dirty but colourful palette, a vintage Super 16 grain that enhances the delicious 90s aesthetic in the characters and their blunt but overly cool attitudes, and especially, the quasi-Bergmanesque monotonous shots that transmit us the struggle and raw emotions of the characters only by looking at their expressions for some seconds.
I remember having read in a satyrical magazine that the New Wave cinema (Truffaut, Resnais and so) was characterized by cheap, mold-breaking and spontaneous films. I swear that this an accurate definition for Su Zhou River, if you blend it together with 90s cool and Eastern gusto for the detail and human drama. Please do not miss this one and if this does not convince you, see that the main actress is insanely cute