Screening Log: Suzhou River (Lou Ye, 2000)

I'm reviewing Lou's troubled, flawed, moving Summer Palace for the upcoming issue of the L, but in the meantime I just caught up (via Netflix) with his feature debut, Suzhou River. Three films into his career (the endlessly gorgeous, endlessly frustrating Purple Butterfly being the middle one), I'm not convinced that Lou-the-writer is ever going to be better at parceling out narrative information: character traits are mentioned in voiceover before they show up onscreen, if at all; his chronologies leave the viewer behind; and so on. Suzhou River holds together better than his subsequent films, partly I imagine because it's built on a much smaller scale. And it's one of the more exciting films I've seen recently, from the opening sequence on.

That opening sequence takes place along the titular Shanghai waterway; as the narrator talks about the river and the stories it contains — and his own habit of floating down it, taking pictures — we see a montage, edited jaggedly (partly due to the limited amount of time anything shot from a moving boat can hold the frame) to a rising dissonant score. The camera picks out details and people (including some who'll show up later in the film) from the shore, bridges, and passing boats; they begin to seem like signs, and by the time the camera ducks under a bridge, darkening the screen for the title card as the music climaxes, the effect is of entire worlds lurking in the recesses of our field of vision. It's shoestring portentousness, I could watch it for days.

It's not clear at the time, though it becomes so quickly thereafter, that it's not just the narrator's footage we're looking at but his point-of-view. He's a videographer, he tells us, and he's unseen throughout the movie: when his character would be onscreen, the action unfolds in a handheld p.o.v. shot. It's an I Am a Camera device that can be gimmicky, but works here to emphasize the voyeuristic themes of the Hitchcock-lifting plot (which we'll get to).

It was partly, I imagine, a budget thing: Lou was then an unknown filmmaker shooting on the fly, around real locations; rather than burn daylight by putting together a series of camera set-ups and filming everything in shot-countershot, he races along the riverbed, picking up stray bits of texture, and then cobbles together a narrative in the editing room, caulking things together with a voice-over.

Anyway, maybe that's what Lou did; it's certainly what his narrator does. In one scene, he (and his/Lou's camera) watches from his balcony as his girlfriend heads off to work (she works in a bar with a water tank, donning a blond wig and swimming around in it, in mermaid gear; it's a really eerie touch, with echoes elsewhere in the plot). As the camera surveys the windows opposite and street below, in an obvious Rear Window homage; the camera then picks out two of the figures below, who turn out to be the key players in a lengthy story-within-the-film. How much of the story — its alluded to earlier in the film before eventually linking up with the main thread, and the girl is played by the enigmatic Zhou Xun, the same actress who plays the mermaid girl — is true, and how much is extrapolated from a few stray sights, is left unresolved; the idea, though, that runs through the film, is that we build the narratives of our lives out of a few selected images.

I mentioned Rear Window, but Lou takes most of his cues from the fetishistic implications of this kind of constructing, as explored in Vertigo. The plot is an obvious lift, as brazen as any of Brian De Palma's Hitch riffs, concerning a doubled female lead, with blonde-brunette switch-ups and various other instances of dress-up and re-creation (or reincarnation). It's fun to deconstruct, but Lou's at home with Vertigo's tone of obsession and mystery, too: stray moments from early in the film are replayed as parts of longer scenes later, as someone else's p.o.v.; stray snippets render the seedy, neon-tinted locations strange.

Anyway. A nifty little (as in like an hour and fifteen minute) movie, shot through with seedy beauty, with enough original and recycled ideas to chew on, inventively made, with suggestively unresolved bits sticking out and snagging in your head. I'm going to be thinking about this one for a while.

Seen on DVD. Lou's Summer Palace opens Friday, January 18th at Cinema Village.