Suzhou River (2000) User Reviews

Longing and Unfulfillment

[howard.schumann · 8/10 · 21 May 2007]

A deep sense of longing and unfulfillment pervades Ye Lou's Suzhou River, a longing perhaps for the perfect love that is unattainable. Originally filmed as two 37-minute episodes for the television show Supercities, Suzhou River pays a colorful homage to Westernized film noir and adds modern stylistic touches reminiscent of Wong Kar-wai to produce a satisfying if not overly deep cinematic experience. The film was banned in China for two years because it did not receive approval from the proper authorities and Lou has been prohibited from making films in China for five years because his latest work, Summer Palace, was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival without official approval.

Like the Ganges in India, the polluted Suzhou River in Shanghai defines the life of the people who live and work in its dingy environment, a life of struggle for economic survival. The story is told through the eyes of the narrator, an unnamed videographer who, like a silent voyeur, travels up and down the river looking for stories to film, spray painting advertisements of his work on street-corner walls. The only bright spot in his life is his relationship with Meimei (Zhou Xun), a performer of a mermaid act at the Happy Tavern nightclub.

The narrator tells us that Meimei, however, has unexpected periods of silence and often disappears for days at a time without explanation. He relates how his moments of sadness turn to joy when he sees her though his open window walking across the bridge with her arms folded across her chest. When Meimei asks him if he would look for her forever if she disappeared, he answers yes then tells the story of a motorcycle courier named Mardar (Jia Hongsheng) who was involved in an intense relationship with Moudan, a sixteen year-old girl. Moudan also played by Zhou Xun bears a striking resemblance to Meimei in the vein of Hitchcock's Vertigo.

One of Mardar's odd jobs working for Shanghai gangsters was to transport Moudan to her aunt's house when her father was having an affair. He falls in love with her, however, and gives her a mermaid doll on her birthday but betrays her trust by kidnapping her at the bequest of the mobsters and holds her in an abandoned warehouse until the ransom is received. When Moudan realizes her betrayal and is upset about the sum received, clutching her mermaid doll, she jumps into the Suzhou River, telling Mardar she will return as a mermaid. After Mardar is released from prison after serving three years, he finds the look-alike Meimei at the Happy Tavern and is convinced that she is the love he tragically lost.

Enigmatic to the end, the rest of the story is better left for the viewer to discover and it is open to different interpretations. Suzhou River may not be the masterpiece that some claim but it has a brooding dreamlike quality that touches a responsive chord of longing in those who have sought but not yet found the perfect love. Like Kim Novak in Vertigo, Zhou Xun's sparkling eyes and expressive features will remain in your memory.

Evocative and unusual

[Chris_Docker · 6/10 · 10 February 2001]

Set in Shanghai on the banks of the Suzhou River, the story follows a motorcycle courier who one day is asked to deliver a 16yr old girl to her aunt. from this simple yet mysterious beginning a complex and unusual story of lost love and mistaken personality grows. Refreshing and evocative.

Suzhou River

[jackson_ro · 7/10 · 20 July 2021]

A gorgeous noir film that features an up and coming Zhou Xun. Suzhou River evokes the artistic brilliancy of Wong Kar-Wai, and remakes a very familiar location into a fictional sin city in my beloved city. Easily a one of a kind movie in mandarin cinematography, and the avant garde narration makes the film that much more romantic. You have to watch it to feel it.

Sublime hymn to Hitchcock and storytelling.

[the red duchess · 9/10 · 10 January 2001]

Imagine 'Vertigo' remade by Chris Marker in the style of Wong Kar-Wai. And yeah, it nearly is THAT good. Most people have noted the allusions to Hitchcock's film, from the obsessively searching protagonist and certain plot similarities to the echoes of that most achingly romantic of film scores and the overall mood of romantic fatalism. But it is a 'Vertigo' filtered through the Marker of 'La Jetee' and 'Sans Soleil', one that moves it away from its Hollywood or generic context and admires its metaphysical reach, sophisticated narratology and formal complexity.

Although 'Suzhou River''s plot seems banal enough, with its mixing of burgeoning love story and crime genre, the treatment of it transcends the mundane. This is achieved in a number of ways - in the sickly, Hitchcockian colour, making fantastic the grimly everyday; the restless, yet elegant camerawork, seemingly wired to the overflowing emotional lives of the characters; the choppy, elliptical editing, that alternately creates a more urgent sense of reality, of how life is lived by people whose sensibility is alive and alert, and less realistic, by drawing attention to the film's formalism, the idea that someone is pulling strings, ordering this 'reality'.

It is the shadowy narrator that is at the heart of the film's mystery, not the missing woman Mardar seeks. It is his narration that is most reminiscent of Marker - in its mix of observation and speculation he turns the everyday into science fiction as he compresses, dilates, plays with distinctions of time and space, even of genre: the opening sequence could quite plausibly belong to a documentary. As with Marker, via Benjamin, the narrator is trying to create a history, an alternative history to the official one, one that sifts through rubbish, rumours and ephemera, reads and connects random signs.

At first we assume the story is his, the narrative of his romance with Meimei; that the story of Mardar and Moudan is a digression, almost a move into urban legend. Eventually, we realise that this latter is the body of the film, and that the narrator has marginalised himself from his own narrative, let it slip away from him, just as Moudan does Mardar, Meimei herself does the narrator, Maddie/Judy does Scottie in 'Vertigo'. When it finally comes back to him in an audacious narrative loop, his privileging has been displaced, and he has become the villain, the hood who has the new hero beaten up.

It is here we recognise that 'Suzhou' is one of the great river films, like 'Boudu saved from drowning' or 'L'Atalante'; not only in its blurring of opposites - land and water, truth and story, documentary and fiction, male and female, human and mythic creature, history and memory, life and death, fate and free will - or in the idea that there are stories, histories, destinies that are subsumed, literally under water, unseen by the 'real' world, but unconsciously shaping it; but also in its narrative logic, its relentless circularity, its tributaries branching off from the main narrative river and finally flooding it. The fact that the narrator is a stand-in for both the director AND the viewer, through his disembodied point of view, and who nevertheless expresses himself through an unseen body (sex, violence etc.) only complicates his inexplicable motivations.

Like Wong Kar-Wai, this is a rare, total cinema experience, where acting, form, style, mood, colour, music, location, plot all cohere to overwhelm both heart and mind; a film that shows that the urge to tell stories is linked to death (in that they begin and end), sex (in that they lead progressively to climax and release) and a control (in that they order and remake experience) that combines both, just as Hitchcock revealed in 'Vertigo' over 40 years ago through the figure of Scottie Ferguson.

Stylishly unconventional

[Richie-33 · 5 February 2001]

Most of this film is shot directly from the point of view of the narrator, an unseen videographer who travels the titular river recording the myriad stories played out on its banks and vessels. Even the scenes in which he is not involved could well be his thoughts of events as he recounts what he has been told by others and it is this that is initially the most striking element of Suzhou River. It makes the viewer feel much more involved in the unfolding tale, although at times the rapid cuts and shaky camera are unnecessarily disorientating.

The narrator begins to tell us about his life - his job, his girlfriend Meimei who he obsessively videos and his fascination with the people of Suzhou River. But then this takes a back seat to his recounting of one of the many tales infamous within the community, of Mardar the motorcycle courier who is relentlessly searching the city for his lost love, Mudan. Her body was never found after she threw herself into the river from a bridge when Mardar was forced into kidnapping her by his gangland boss. But then this tragic story collides with our own narrator's as Mardar is convinced that he has finally found his long lost love and that she is Meimei. Obvious comparisons have been drawn to Vertigo's plot of a man undone by his lover's suicide and determined that he has found her again.

This debut feature from Chinese director Lou Ye benefits greatly from his unconventional style which seems to make the events more tangible. He portrays the river itself as a metaphor for life, its swirling eddies and undercurrents the many stories it keeps within its deep mysterious heart, with no effect on the mass flow of life, but turning the individual lives of those involved upside down. The parts of the film dealing with the burgeoning affections of Mardar and Mudan are excellent (particularly for Zhou Xin, who plays both of the two vastly different lead female roles equally well) , however I felt the events gathered pace a little too quickly towards the end, rushing the story of the narrator and Meimei in comparison to that of Mardar and Mudan. The result of this was an ending which seemed a tad abrupt and so the empathy for the narrator was not as heightened as it might have been, even with the great device of us seeing everything through his eyes. Despite this Suzhou River is a stylishly original tale who's depth and undercurrents make it stand out from the majority of the flotsam and jetsam our video stores carry.

subtle poetry

[hbraun · 9/10 · 29 November 2001]

Although I enjoyed watching the movie, I thought sometimes if there's enough substance beneath the beautiful and sometimes poetic pictures. Thinking about this interesting movie and remembering scenes for one day - yes I think there is. The two melancholic love stories are indeed intelligently combined. Surely nothing for the typical popcorn-eaters, but highly recommended for people looking for 'real cinema'.

A really good film borne from an unoriginal director, but at least he stole from the best

[JoeMonco · 6/10 · 19 March 2006]

Water and the color yellow pervade Suzhou River almost as much as the grime and decay that seems to seep out of present-day Shanghai. The Suzhou River itself, rainy sequences from an early scene of Meimei undressing to when Mardar is beaten to when Mardar's and Moudan's bodies are fished from the river, the water tank where Meimei performs, and flooded streets all give Suzhou River a feeling of washed out stagnancy. Most of the light in Suzhou River has a yellowish tinge (like the recurring yellow light bulb motif); Meimei's houseboat/crane/home, ashtrays, phone booths, beer glasses, neon lights, nightclub chairs, shadowy alleyways, rain coats, Meimei's blonde wig– all of these things infuse the film with a "yellowed feeling," like an old photograph or an aged videotape. Ye Lou's use of water and yellow infuse the film with a surrealism of sorts, something with often clashes with the documentary style. The fragmented narrative, flickering lightbulbs, myriad flashbacks, and hand-held cameras allow Ye Lou to present a twisted vision of reality, full of metaphysical complexity. Out of the fragmentation, Ye Lou constructs an order somewhere between magic realism, a documentary, and surrealism. Not unlike Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo combined with Chris Marker's fictional-documentary style (Sans Soleil, La Jeteé) and completed with Lars von Trier's famed Dogme 95 style (the monochromatic, dystopic Element of Crime, The Idiots), Le You's Suzhou River comes across as a brilliant fragmentation, and a fascinating meditation on fleeting moments lost to time. Le You truly distances his film from the films of the Fifth Generation (it could not be more different from Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum or Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth), and truly infuses the so- called Sixth Generation with a style of their own.

Le You creates a dystopia somewhere between the surreal and the nonfictional. With a uniformity of dereliction, Le You presents Shanghai as something of a degraded industrial trash dump, full of decaying tableaux and stagnant water, but with the occasional glimpse of the divine (the mermaid imagery). In this world, we never see the videographer (who could, of course, be a "stand-in" for the director), who spends his time drinking, smoking, videotaping whatever he can, spray-painting his advertisement on concrete rubble, and sitting at home watching old videotapes. He could not be more alienated from his environment, as we are never even afforded a glimpse of his face. Though he and Mardar romance the "same" woman, the videographer's life lacks the romance and larger-than-life intrigue that makes Mardar's story epic and worth retelling. In the conversation with Meimei (which is repeated twice), she realizes that the videographer wants to live a romantic lie– she says that events like Mardar's story only happen in love stories (before she disappears the next day). The videographer, like the modern-day filmmaker, is condemned to "watch." "Nothing lasts forever," says the videographer at the story's end..."I take another drink and close my eyes, waiting for the next story." It seems that the videographer represents the filmmaker's crisis– endowed with the gift of storytelling, the videographer is doomed to tell the stories of people like Mardar and Moudan instead of living them. Though at times the line between Mardar/ the videographer and Moudan/Meimei seems blurred, in the end, the videographer and Meimei lose their identities when Mardar and Moudan's story reaches its violent conclusion.

Greatest lovestory at Mifed 2000

[Killer-40 · 9/10 · 5 November 2000]

The first five minutes of Suzhou were hard to stand for me because I don't go for an overnervous handcamera. From than on one of the most sophisticated and touching lovestories was unfolded in the scenery of Shanghai where the director could only film unofficially. This makes Suzhou look half-documentary and helps to transmit the cold truth of betrayed love as well as the disturbing search for a warm reunion with the lost lover. You'll not only be surprised by the end. It will deeply move you.

7.5/10. Recommended

[athanasiosze · 7/10 · 17 February 2024]

So (Asian) 00's it hurts, i mean, anyone who has watched these amazing Wong Kar-Wai movies of this era, for sure he will travel back, mentally, in time. Identity, existential crisis, desperately trying to find love in some hopeless places. As usually, there is a crime element in drama/romance movies like these. But this element is just supplementary and subordinate. This is a drama romance movie. Broken people in the midst of an existential crisis trying to find their way through life, even though the external difficulties and their inside walls are preventing them to do so.

It's a very good movie with some interesting turns. Not difficult to watch but still you've got to pay attention because things are not as they seem, at first. It's not a masterpiece. There are signs of brilliance but it's not brilliant nor mindblowing. So, if you find it interesting as it was described, watch it.

A dazzling film for the millennium

[jandesimpson · 9/10 · 19 August 2002]

It is possible to chart the history of post World War II cinema as a series of national waves each peaking in different decades, for instance Italy in the '40's, Japan in the '50's, France in the '60's and '70's and China and Taiwan in the '90's. A case has been made out for Iran in the '90's but examples I have seen, however fine, have seemed to me to be rather small in scale when compared with the rich offerings from the far East. China entered the millennium with a tremendous bang with Ye Lou's brilliant "Suzhou River", the impact of which has left me reeling. Although I had become accustomed to the uniform excellence of the work of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and their contemporaries, nothing had quite prepared me for the dazzling narrative brilliance of this new work. Although Chinese cinema is often innovative in subject matter, the finest examples such as "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Temptress Moon" tend to be fairly straightforward in their sense of narrative flow. "Suzhou River" however, as far as I am aware, has no precedent in its fascinatingly oblique approach to storytelling, a quality it shares with the Canadian, Robert LePage's "Le Confessional". The two films have another feature in common, both being inspired by Hitchcock. Although "Hitchcockian" is a loose generic term used to describe films that employ the Master's approach to suspense, both "Le Confessional" and "Suzhou River" go one step further in concentrating on a a single Hitchcock work for their inspiration, in the case of the former, "I Confess" and in the latter, "Vertigo". But at this point similarity ends. "Le Confessional" is very much an imaginative meditation on "I Confess". Some scenes deal with the making of the film and subtly contrast the original situation with a Quebec family facing a similar dilemma of conscience and its consequences a generation forward in time. The Chinese film is very different insofar as "Vertigo" is never mentioned. It takes a "Vertigo"-like situation and proceeds to tease the audience with outcomes that are subtly different. Stylistically it bears no similarity as it employs a frenetic hand-held camera technique that would have been alien to Hitchcock's obsession with studied visual balance. However there is a wonderful technical bonus that Hitchcock would undoubtedly have admired, where one of the characters -the director probably - remains unseen throughout but uses the camera as his eyes. The device is not new - it was used by Robert Montgomery in "Lady in the Lake" - but what was there something of a gimmick is here subsumed into the narrative in a way that is deeply satisfying. The most direct reference to "Vertigo" is reserved for Jorg Lemberg's score with its sighing string phrases - pure Bernard Herrmann pastiche. "Suzhou River" is one of those very rare events, a film I immediately had to see again. Although works such as the Belgian "La Promesse" and the Japanese "After Life" have far deeper resonances of meaning, few films have excited me so much in recent years from the point of view of sheer technical bravura.

Good act one, but...

[zetes · 7/10 · 3 February 2001]

Suzhou River's beginning represents an extremely compelling film. It has it all - a great narrative, great acting, great score, and it is emotionally involving. But the director/screenwriter throws it all away when he decides simply to revert back to Sir Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Vertigo is one of those films that is impossible to top, so it is just a waste of time to try.

Here is my experience during Suzhou River, after having enjoyed the first 30 minutes or so immensely: I hear the score sampling Bernard Herrmann's Vertiginous theme, and see the camera quoting the film, and my mind immediately jumped back on my dreamlike memories of Vertigo. It's as if Suzhou River disappeared. Near the end, the film started to become a little more original, and my daydreams faded, but I was pretty lost at that point.

Don't get me wrong. Suzhou River is still a fine film. I would actually like someone to remake most of it, taking out the Vertigo homage and inserting something more original. 7/10

Beautiful

[Puppetmister · 9/10 · 20 June 2001]

This movie offers a sharp contrast to the historical revisionism of Zhang Yimou and others of the Fifth Generation of Chinese directors who seem happy to peddle a lot of costume dramas, which, fine as they are, are hardly progressive. Sushou River shows us parts of Shanghai which rarely make it onto Western screens, and there's isn't a peasant, an emperor, a concubine or a red lantern in sight. Xun Zhou is extraordinary in a star-making role on a par with Zhang Yiyi's in Crouching Tiger... Ye Lou is clearly the one to watch from the 6th Generation, a true romantic with more in common with Wong Kar-Wai than Chen Kaige. Er...that's a compliment.

Interesting philosophy in this movie

[euroasiangenetic · 7/10 · 5 December 2018]

Lu Ye made himself infamous for the Chinese government by making dark side of China movies. And Suzhou River is no exception and we love him for it.

We follow the narrator around the Suzhou river while he is searching for a job as a photographer for a strip club. While there he falls inlove with a stripper named Mei Mei, while they are dating, another couple is dating at the same time, Mardar and Moudan, the two girls Mardar and Moudan has one thing in common, they have the same face.

This movie is ment to be a society critic movie, and why not since we are use to see a beautiful side of China some times an overdoing side. So why not show a hiding side. Even though it's difficult when we follow the eyes of the nameless narrator and never see his face but then again it's from 2000 most movies at that time were experimental which ended in 2008. But the story is intriguing and you can feel the atmosphere like you are there, 7/10.

Shallow, Cliché-Ridden

[Magma_Flow · 3/10 · 21 August 2023]

The film's premise is promising: a tale whose events may be partially or entirely invented by a dreamy narrator under the influence of his colorful locality.

But in its execution, the film has all the depth of a music video or a perfume commercial. The story is a melodrama enacted by cartoon characters. Meimei and Moudan (mindless dolls who alternately tease and surrender to the protagonist) are mere projections of male adolescent fantasy. Mardar is similarly one-dimensional, shifting from kidnapper to romantic but revealing no inner life.

The film has two redeeming features. The cinematography beautifully depicts dilapidated aspects of Shanghai in faded colors. And the musical score provides an unusually varied and effective complement to the action.

Palpitations

[chaos-rampant · 22 June 2016]

Told through flickering cameras, jump cuts, fluorescent lights, visual fragments and burnt colors, this is a romance within a romance, a narrator within a narrator searching for a girl he lost. He's a cameraman, someone tasked with seeing; he watches her every day as she comes along the bridge to an apartment they share. As he waits he imagines a story she told him about a man who spent his life searching for a girl he lost. Imagines her in the girl within the story's place, until that girl disappeared in the river. His own girl emerged from water the first time he saw her, mermaid in the club aquarium.

It's about his girl who never came back one day, vanished into air. The whole is narrated from the end, with the nested story about heartbreak as wondering about love, how people can truly do it. The river standing in for transient life that carries away the past.

It's not quite Kar Wai, albeit in the same vein of languorous longing that stirs electrifying poetry out of streets. It's a bit loose in shape, pieces of daydream that float, and very much influenced by French notions of layered narrative.

Noir Meter: not a noir

SPOILERS!! An exploration of existentialism.

[ETCmodel02 · 9/10 · 23 October 2002]

SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!! SPOILERS!!

Beautiful to look at, touching to endure. The frequently POV and semi-handheld camera work is quirky but successful. The locations portraying Shanghai are deliciously chewed up, layered, soiled and water stained Pleasantly moist so to speak. Lurid and fetching the way Cyclo is, but delivers at a far faster pace like Swallowtail Butterfly, though without the humor generally. Really a nice though sardonic love yarn. Did I mention yet that many of the visuals in this need to be taught to our young ones IMMEDIATELY? The shot of the courier Mardar perched on the ladder leering down thoughtfully at unwitting hostage Moudan, their heads on diagonally opposite intersections of the grid, static yet breathing, a masterpiece to behold and a desktop wallpaper waiting to happen with the quiet disturbed power of Leon without quite the pedophiliac undertones (although perhaps not completely without). Excellent work, and some really interesting credits if you ever want to see how the Germans and the Chinese might work together to produce a tweaked out love story. Last note, really appreciate and respect the move to anchor the tale to a narrator that is a partial, biased yet generally passive voyeur. Certainly an exploration of existentialism, at least more candid and blatantly than most flicks, as truth be told all flicks are a degree of existentialist experience, the very notion of an audience of passive voyeurs vicariously living another's life through the medium. And so on.

A narrator tells the story a boy obsessed with a girl...

[artabarzangi · 8/10 · 7 April 2016]

The film starts with a black screen with voice over of two lovers talking to each other which, to some extent, reminded me of the opening scene of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). The black screen gradually turns into dirty water of Suzhou River, a tracking shot from a boat shows us the old industrial buildings around the river, people, ships and the filthy river (as the narrator calls it) itself. Cold colors like blue and green are most obvious ones in this sequence but grey is dominating the whole scene, perhaps emphasizing on filthiness of the river. The scene is shot with a hand-held camera but we are not seeing through the narrator's eyes, we are seeing through his own camera, and it's differentiated from his own POV shots (that we will see a lot later in the film) through the use of zoom and jerky turns and sudden cuts in this scene. This is not a movie with linear storyline and this is a different time line from the prologue conversation, it's the latest and the current time line of the film, and all others are prior to it. We even hear the ending of the movie in the beginning from the narrator: "I saw bodies of two lovers being dragged near the river by the police." After the movie title comes up the narrator starts introducing himself to us through his own voice and eyes, now we have POV shots from the narrator himself. He uses past tense verbs so it's clear that we are again in a different time line from the previous scene. Also in the bar, we don't see everything the boss tells the narrator because of multiple jump cuts and finally he tells us himself that the guy wanted him to shoot his mermaid show. And this is the standard of the movie in early scenes; we don't usually hear characters talking, instead the narrator tells us what they said. The narrator goes on in the same time line to meet Meimei, the "mermaid". Here there are information that will make us confused later on about Meimei's real identity like that the narrator didn't know anything about her past, that she suddenly disappeared for days and that she was a "mermaid". As the narrator is telling us about Mardar and looking out of his apartment's window, we see a girl with ponytails and a guy on a motorcycle among the crowd and then there is a cut to medium shot of the guy on the bike, who is Mardar and that was the transition between two different time lines. The camera isn't the narrator's POV shot anymore and we begin to hear him less and less in the following parts. There is a shot in Mardar's back story where we slowly zoom in to a light bulb in his room and then cut to a sunny exterior shot which resembles of the iconic match to sun cut in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). As Moudan enters the story, there are some changes in cinematography; the camera gradually comes off-hand and goes on tripod, we start to see shots where camera is placed behind Mardar's shoulder whenever he is following Moudan (or in a later scene Meimei). When Moudan and Mardar are riding on the bike, we see them from the front; they can't see each other but we see both their face Moudan is happy and cheerful and we get a close-up to emphasize that in her face but Mardar seems emotionless! This kind of staging and camera position happens again with Moudan and Mardar at his apartment and also with Mardar and the criminal woman. We are used to seeing Mardar and Moudan close together when they are in a shot; either riding on his bike or cuddling at his apartment so it stands out when they are each on one end of the frame in a long shot where Mardar is taking her as a hostage to get money from her father. Their emotional distance is conveyed through their physical distance in this scene. Later parts of the film the camera goes hand-held again and we have the narrator's POV shots again, the narrator who is supposedly the only one left from the film. Interior shots are usually full of yellow, either yellowish props or a yellow beam of light. Also the night scene with Mardar Meimei and Mardar is unusually blue but still has yellowish interiors. Exteriors (which are almost all around the river) have pale, grayish colors with low contrast and foggy weather (that causes a strong aerial perspective) probably caused by fumes of the industrial buildings surrounding the river. This overall setting gives the exterior shots a sick and somber feeling that reminds of that of the opening shots of Red Desert (1964). Also Mardar's obsession with Moudan and similarities of Moudan and Meimei reminded me of Vertigo (1958).

True love is not a Sci-fi

[herrpasz · 10/10 · 17 June 2008]

Well the story is pretty simple but it is not the case, what i found the most important is that this is in my opinion the best movie about love. And not such love as in middle ages or fantasy worlds, not from the XIX century but the one the appears in present day. In this dirty and poor environment of suzhou river we are given chance to believe that true love is not one that vanish but the one that last. It is a must to see

Not everyone may like the acting, cause Asians always seem to be a little bit introvert but in the end i assure you, you will cry your eyes out

"if i would disappear would you look for me?

yes

Would you look for me forever?

yes

Your whole life?

yes

You are a liar..."

Trash heap flower

[oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx · 10/10 · 30 April 2023]

Suzhou River is a story about youthful love awry. An homage to Vertigo both textually and thematically, it doesn't make a meal out of the link and feels very much its own story / direction. The film is often shot how people see, in saccades, in absent mindedness, in a "this dream we call life" way. Structural interest is further enhanced by a protean narrator and riffing with the original story.

The subject matter is "male gaze", the obsessive attention that many men give to women and their appearances. A pungent moment for me was when Mei Mei applies a temporary tattoo of a flower to her inner thigh and then the camera pans up to her impassive glitter-masked face, grimly returning the viewer's gaze.

This is for those whose lives are like the eddies in Suzhou River, ephemeral, contorting, pulled into a personal orbit.

Chinese director Lou Ye has made a classic film which makes extensive use of video !!!!

[FilmCriticLalitRao · 10/10 · 22 March 2015]

Chinese film "Suzhou River" is a dramatic tale about a poor courier boy's love for a rich business man's daughter. It describes in detail how and why this relationship soured due to one of the partner's selfish motives. The use of Suzhou river is highly symbolic in this film. It helps viewers to identify the lovers' destinies which are inextricably linked to each other's fate. For this film, Chinese director Lou Ye has made an extensive use of video. This film was shot in year 2000, a time when any ordinary person interested in cinema in mainland China was forced to watch classics of cinema on bootleg video cassettes. It is also important to note that in "Suzhou River" the development of love story happens within the scope of customs of Chinese culture. Although there are some intimate scenes between young lovers but there is absolutely no scope for any kind of nudity even when the director wishes to depict scenes of physical relationship between two lovers. Suzhou River does not have any political stance associated with it. It appears to be honest in its depiction of the criminal milieu in China but doesn't make any value judgments about it. It would be remembered as a romantic film which has professionally mixed elements of suspense film genre.

EASTERN INTEREST

[kevin c · 3/10 · 1 November 2002]

Very obvious nods to "Vertigo", but that shouldn't distract from a very good film. This is a film of beauty and comedy. You whirl through the streets of Hong Kong, and catch a very real sense of modern life in that part of the world.

If you like Wong Kar Wai then catch this.

Who Are You?

[skilsby · 15 April 2004]

"Suzhou River" is set in an off beat and low key Shanghai, unrecognisable as the Chinese city of bright lights. Shot from the perspective of an unseen narrator, Li Jiqian, "Suzhou He" toys wonderfully with the identity of its characters in a city filled to over flowing. Ma Da, a motor cycle courier is looking for Peony (Xun Zhou) a girl he lost years earlier. Has he found her in Meimei? Meimei asks "Am I the Peony your looking for?", half hopeful, half mocking. A pivotal moment in self awareness in a society held together for so long by conformity.

Hand held camera work, shot, it seems, mainly in natural light sets "Suzhou He" apart from many recent Chinese films released in the West, especially the beautiful, luminous films of the 'Fifth Generation' film makers so popular outside China. An interesting and arresting look at love, life and relationships of a new generation in China.

9.16.2023 MORE DRASTIC EMOTION THAN HITCHCOCK

[EasonVonn · 8/10 · 16 September 2023]

A lover vanishes in love with a look-alike, a continuation of Buffalo Grass Vodka. I like to call it "The Curse of the Oyster."

At the beginning of the movie I was deeply attracted by Lou Ye's so real with the emotional color of the lens, as he said in the movie, "My lens only captures the real". The real record of Suzhou Creek in the beginning reminds us of the influence of Italian neo-realism, which reflects the whole picture of Chinese society by not setting up scenes, and the life of the grassroots unfolds along Suzhou Creek and ends up reflecting Shanghai. ....

Meimei pretending to be Mudan Did Ma Da know or not? I think the answer is yes. When he realizes that she is not really Mudan, he blows up the whole bar. Because Meimei gave him redemption, but ruined it in the end.

Why is Meimei pretending to be Mudan again? What did she fall in love with Mudan without ever knowing him? I think there is a more real intense oppressive lust coming out of Mada than Meimei's boyfriend.

Why did Meimei leave her boyfriend? I think Meimei never got the love she wanted, but she got it in Mudan, which can be seen from the fact that she even pretended to be Mudan for the sake of it, but Mudan will eventually find out and die, while Meimei can't stop pursuing her love, and in the blink of an eye, she transforms into a real peony and leaves her boyfriend in a vain attempt to make him the next Mudan, has she succeeded? I think the monologue at the end tells us the answer!

Lou Ye's Suzhou River seems to have more homage to VERTIGO, such as observing Meimei through the curtains and nearly the same storyline, but this film has more tension than Hitchcock's lens of emotional and political value, with real such as neorealism to show the lust of different people, but also to show the life of the lower strata of society, and the last two people gazed at Shanghai and died together as the last glimmer of eulogy for the life of the lower strata of the people. In the end, both of them die together gazing at Shanghai as if they were the last touch of eulogy for the life of the lower class, and reach eternity through death on the road to love.

(Mudan jumped into the sea that one shot really sealed God, directly stand up and applaud)

Good for cinema students , Romeos and Juliettes.

[bruce_files_3 · 8/10 · 13 November 2005]

The only way a Chinese/Japanese/Korean film oh that kind can miss, is when its faith to simplicity makes it boring when it comes to the story and/or the storytelling.

But "Suzhou He" is far from getting you bored. The story is simple, but the storytelling really is unique (as far as I can remember anyway), and very interesting indeed.

One more thing that made me like this movie is the final lines..... (sorry but when you find out u think the same as the artist, it kinda makes go you easier on your judgment).

Anyway,its a must-see movie, if you care about cinema, and specially storytelling.