Review: Summer Palace (2006)
Restless passion set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square protests
Summer Palace (2006)
Directed by Lou Ye
I caught a showing of this film at my beloved Roxie Theater in San Francisco in the middle of a Lou Le festival. It’s the only one I have time to see, as I drove in from Reno in the morning, have church this evening, and leave for the Mojave Desert in the morning. I’ll publish a quick review for now, but later I want to compare “Summer Palace” to Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers.” That film similarly sets a passionate love triangle against a scene of revolution, in its case Paris 1968. “The Dreamers” seems to be impossible to see on any streaming service at the moment, so I’ve gone so far as to order a DVD.
“Summer Palace” centers on youths who are students at Beijing University during the student-led, ill-fated freedom movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But the freedom revolution is a mere backdrop to the primary story, in which a girl from a remote town near the North Korean border decides to lead a life of intense excitement. Yu Hong (Lei Hao) commences a passionate though platonic friendship with a girl who lives down the hall in her dorm, Wang Bo (Xueyun Bai), but really finds her groove in an affair with an older male student, Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). Their constant fucking makes them the talk of the campus, allegedly, and earned the disapproval of real-life Chinese authorities.
But all the sex — and there’s a lot of it — isn’t what earned director Lou Ye a five-year ban from filmmaking in China. What really pissed them off was the depiction of the Tiananmen Square movement. At first it’s just discussions in classes led by liberal-minded professors, but as 1988 turn to 1989 and spring arrives, the movement really starts rolling. At first the movie shows students marching in the background, or seen through a window; as the movement intensifies — Lou mixes documentary footage taken in 1989 with staged scenes — the movement shifts into the foreground. These scenes are what earned Lou a five-year ban on filmmaking.
But don’t expect a clear account of the movement, or the day when Chinese troops crushed it by massacring many hundreds of protesters in Tiananmen Square. Even when these scenes are in the foreground, Lou depicts the events in an impressionistic, almost chaotic fashion. The handheld cameras employed throughout the film take on the point of view of a confused bystander lost in a mêlée, while at the same time the dozens of extras rush past in every direction. Even the school hallways are filled with people running to and fro. If nothing else, this approach communicates the sheer excitement of an undisciplined protest that almost became a revolution; it also dramatizes what was threatening about the movement, as far as the authorities were concerned. Authoritarians can’t bear the physical manifestation of a populace that is suddenly out of control.
Still, the 1989 scenes are merely the midpoint of the film. Before them, Yu Hong is the main focus; afterwards, the film follows her friends as well as her. But the thing is, Yu Hong’s character doesn’t develop; she has affairs with man after man, drowning herself in passion. Toward the end she starts to seem a little unbalanced, as would anyone whose rambunctious behavior is attractive when they’re young but sours ten and twenty years down the road.
Any film that earns the approbation of an authoritarian regime qualifies as anti-fascist, certainly — even if its critique is mostly in the background.
What I haven’t discussed is how Lou’s fluid camera and the script’s concentration on the dreamy, poetic aspects of romantic obsession makes for a very beautiful film. The viewer is tempted to sink into a woozy, dreamy state along with the protagonist. It made for a nice escape while outside in the afternoon, thousands of protesters against Trump filled the streets of San Francisco.