Summer Palace...everyone's on vacation
The Chinese film Summer Palace raised quite a cloud of dust at the Cannes film festival. It competed without the green light of the Chinese censorship bureau and back home, officials were quick to retaliate. A group of correspondents reporting on the festival was sent back to China. The director, Lou Ye, was banned from making films in the middle kingdom for five years.
All this news, of course, muffled the film in an aureole of hype. It was yet another concrete manifestation of Chinese dictatorship and a particularly public one at that.
What was so threatening about the Summer Palace? In Cannes, all the mediatic brouhaha suggested that the film was a romanced documentary of the 1989 Tian Anmen square massacre.
I saw the film last night at the Lincoln Center. It is far from a feature on Tian Anmen. Tian Anmen lasts ten minutes in the film, and those ten minutes are so confusing that both heads and tails of the event are buried in a marathon of fire, screams and impromptu gun shots.
I guess the montage accurately depicts the 1989 event from a Beida student's point of view: the exhilaration and then the panic of the unknown. Summer Palace adeptly paints emotions and atmosphere--timid dance steps in a crowded club, cold evening rays caught on pirouetting feathers--but it doesn't do much more than that. Throughout the whole movie, the camera is scotch-taped to a depressed (albeit gorgeous) college student. We watch her run, cry and smoke imported cigarettes; most of the time we watch her make breathless love to the school's pretty boy. They part ways. He goes to Germany, she becomes more depressed. He comes back, they meet, they don't like what little they see of each other and in the last shot, he is driving and purposefully ignores her slight figure on the side of the road.
The skeletal story happens in the interstices of the film's self-indulgent visual orchestrations and the characters remain distant and incomprehensible throughout.
