Given the astounding commercial success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the fact that Suzhou River is in Mandarin with English subtitles should not deter potential viewers. But this is no nostalgic Chinese heritage fantasy. It is altogether more subtle and darker cinema, and comparisons with Crouching Tiger can serve only to underline the extent of the talent we can expect to see emerging from East Asia in coming years.
The vast brown Suzhou river storms through Shanghai's busy centre, but its murkiness also saturates the surrounding cityscape. Shanghai is composed from a palate of brown and grey, a hard industrial setting with a certain cultural anonymity. The camera does not pick out anything distinctively 'Chinese' about the city, and similarly, Suzhou River does not have culture-specific concerns. On the dirty banks of the river, which are illuminated only by the neon signs of seedy bars, writer and director Lou Ye finds a piercing love story, although one noirishly inflected.
"If I leave you some day," a female voice speaks out of the blackness of the opening credits, "will you look for me forever?" "Yes," a male voice replies. While this promises grand scale passion and longing, it also implies a dark tone of tragedy. And thus the male voice begins the narration of his story: his love for Meimei, who first appears to him as a Mermaid smiling serenely under water. Working as an aquatic attraction in a bar, her wiggling turquoise tail and flowing blonde wig captivate his videographer's gaze. The two embark on a relationship and he, fascinated by her exotic beauty, films her at every opportunity, but never quite believes she is his. One day she meets Mardar, who is convinced she is his long-lost girlfriend. Here, points of view begin to shift as the storytelling becomes layered and our nameless narrator privileges Mardar's story over his own. Mardar was a motorcycle courier who fell sweetly in love with a young girl in his charge. His involvement with a plan to kidnap her for ransom understandably soured her feelings and, hurt and betrayed, she jumps into the turbulent Suzhou, promising to haunt him forever as a mermaid. Meimei may or may not be the girl he has been searching for, and eventually the immeasurable flow of the river becomes the site of both death and rebirth, the generator of cyclical patterns of life, and the locus for secrets and truth, myth and grim reality.
Inevitably Suzhou River has been compared to the Hitchcock's Vertigo, but while its themes of obsessive sexual voyeurism and female duplicity are reminiscent of Hitchcock's masterpiece, its understated style contrasts Vertigo's grand set design and sophisticated technique. Suzhou River was filmed with hand-held cameras and uses naturalistic lighting throughout. Like the narrators habit of watching pedestrians on the street below his apartment, the film is a sometimes bleak observation of life on the riverbank. And while Vertigo's investigation of the supernatural is resolved by plot revelations, Suzhou River attempts to blur the line between the real and the imaginary by its vertiginous swirl of stories told by the unseen and perhaps untrustworthy narrator. This ambiguity is underscored by incongruous surreal moments that interrupt the ultra-real visual style: while hearing about local legend, we see Meimei's day-glo mermaid obliviously swishing her sequinned tail on the banks of the muddy, trafficked river.
Against a sound track that is alternatively pop then poignantly moody, the film benefits from an excellent cast. Zhou Xun simply glows as the elusive Meimei, demonstrating a promising breadth of talent, and is balanced by the subtle introversion of Jia Hongsheng's Mardar.
Although the pace slackens somewhat in the second half, this is a pleasing, cosmopolitan film that sifts through muddy depths of memory. It searches for the stories behind faces, and closes with the deadening realisation that you might not be the person your lover wants you to be. And the final shot is the narrator's view as he drifts along the eponymous river alone.
Reviewed by Martha Snowdon
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