Country: China
Director: Lou Ye
Time: 1 hour and 22 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription); Amazon ($4.99 to rent)
Lou Ye’s Suzhou River is first and foremost a film about narrative construction. Of course, it has a plot and characters and suspense and striking visuals, but mostly it aims to examine the mechanics of storytelling. Within this broad remit, it also explores the particular stories individuals choose to tell about themselves and the world, as well as the ways in which epistemological ellipses and narrative breaks generate forms of uncertainty liable to de-stabilize the projects that determine our lives. Throughout the film, characters fashion tales that are contingent, highly flexible, and forever adaptable. Identities are never fixed. Meaning gets made within interstitial spaces where a dearth of facts and observations force intuition, imagination, and desire to fill in the blanks.
Shot on a shoestring budget in disadvantaged Shanghai neighborhoods along the banks of the film’s titular waterway, Suzhou River tells the story of a videographer (never seen on camera) who falls in love with Meimei, a performer at an underground bar in Shanghai. Over the course of their romance, she tells her paramour the story of a motorcycle courier named Mardar, who once fell in love with Moudan, a young woman whom he had been charged with transporting from her wealthy father’s house to her aunt’s home anytime her father brought home a mistress. But Mardar is young, foolish, and callous. He’s also connected to the Shanghai underworld. In turn, those underworld connections hatch a plan (to which he accedes) to kidnap Moudan and hold her for ransom. The plan goes awry and Mardar gets sent to prison. Upon his release, he prowls Shanghai looking for her—guilt and desire commingled. One day, he wanders into the bar in which Meimei performs. Struck by their uncanny resemblance, Mardar believes he has found Moudan (now Meimei) and begins to follow her. Subsequently, the videographer works to unravel the the film’s central mystery: are Meimei and Moudan the same person? This layered narrative, which includes flashback scenes of uncertain authorship, generates a stylish neo-noir that self-consciously highlights film’s central techniques in order to subvert traditional methods of cinematic storytelling.
In some meaningful sense, all film is about film. In particular, Suzhou River’s use of jump cuts, handheld cameras, voice over narration, visible light sources, a central protagonist who himself manipulates the camera, characters who are themselves performers, and direct quotations from other films (Vertigo, unsurprisingly given questions concerning the possible re-surfacing of characters under different identities, but also Godard and Chris Marker) highlight the medium’s methods of narrative construction and reinforce the central story’s layered nature.
All films, like the stories we tell ourselves, impose structure and meaning on an unruly and partially perceived world. On Suzhou River’s terms, these methods fail to capture the totalizing organic unities that comprise existence. They remain provisional and incomplete, incapable of encompassing what Kant called the thing-in-itself. As a result, the film emerges a cohesive work about what doesn’t quite cohere. Throughout, the contingent remains central to the film’s plot construction: chance encounters forward tentative plot points. Narrative grasps and incorporates whatever it encounters. As the videographer tell us the story of Mardar and Moudan, its contours begin to appear improvisatory: Who exactly is telling us this story? Who can claim authorship? To what extend does it matter?
Suzhou River encapsulates many of the central concerns of China’s Sixth Generation filmmakers—cf. the previously discussed Blind Shaft (Yi Lang, 2003) and Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006)—a collection of directors who emerged in the early 2000s and signaled a radical departure from their Fifth Generation forbearers. The Fifth Generation, which somewhat confusingly was the first generation to receive a collective moniker—previous “generations” got retroactively constructed by Chinese film critics in the 1980s—began releasing films in the 1980s and 1990s after graduating from a re-invigorated Beijing Film Academy, which had fallen into something resembling complete desuetude during the Cultural Revolution. Following the overthrow of the Gang of Four in 1976, which unhappily for cinema had included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a former actress whose exacting and ideologically driven micromanagement of the Chinese film industry became the stuff of legend (forced re-shoots, intrusive script revisions, very strange obsessions with color treatment), professors who had formerly been expelled from the Academy returned to their positions and a wave of European films previously banned became accessible to students. In lieu of the blatantly propagandistic “boy loves tractor” films that had dominated Chinese cinema under Mao, the 80s and 90s witnessed an explosion of lush, highly stylized, state-funded films made by the Academy’s recent graduates—soon named “the Fifth Generation”—which addressed the country’s past in more or less sensitive ways by obliquely tackling issues concerning rural-urban divides, the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Civil War, and endemic and lingering forms of poverty. For those interested, Yellow Earth (1984) and Farewell My Concubine (1993) are two excellent examples.
The Sixth Generation, also graduates of the Bejing Film Academy, came of age during the subsequent commercialization of the Chinese film industry, which followed Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour. Instead of state funding, financing became the purview of profit-seeking producers. Commercial pressures brooked radical innovation. In addition, China’s censorship regime began to shift. In order to have Chinese films released in Chinese cinemas, scripts need to be submitted prior to shooting and finished films needed to be screened for censors prior to their release. (This system continues to this day.) Largely because censors might decide to ban a film after filming and post-production had finished, producers had little incentive to take on projects that might run afoul of the state’s dictates. In contrast to the grand, ornamental, and lush Fifth Generation works, the Sixth Generation tended to make smaller budget, “underground” films. (Underground here means that state censors did not approve the film for release.) At the same time, in part because the Fifth Generation’s works had found audiences outside China on the international festival circuit, international funding and distribution occasionally substituted for domestic release and financing. (For instance, Suzhou River never played in China and Lou Ye received a two-year ban for not submitting the work to censors prior to its international release.) These films’ microscopic budgets led to (generative?) constraints, forcing directors to use non-professional actors, digital or 16mm film, and natural lighting, all cinematic techniques that facilitated a prior interest in social issues. As a group, their works often circulated on VHS or DVD within China. (Because bureaucracy, there are actually two different government bodies responsible for censoring what gets shown in cinemas and what gets legally sold on DVD.)
Since the Sixth Generation’s heyday in the 2000s, the collective monikers have disappeared in the face of an increasing number of film academies and institutions training directors. Further, tightening censorship and an increasingly strident emphasis on nationalistic films—as well as continued economic growth and urbanization, both good for cinema revenues—have continued to change Chinese cinema. Films like Wolf Warrior 2 (2017)—which birthed the nickname for aggressive Chinese diplomacy—and The 800 (2020) are in. Works even obliquely critical of lingering inequalities and corruption are out. As Professor Chris Berry has pointed out, high concept Chinese “art house” films like Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues (2015) have managed to continue getting made, while films touching on social issues have become almost impossible to finance and distribute. Like the USSR under Brezhnev, the state can countenance conceptually avant-garde directors intrigued by interiority (think Tarkovsky), but representing society’s less savory aspects back onto itself can land filmmakers in serious trouble.
Within this context, the state works to contour its own preferred narratives using the techniques and means at its disposal. It’s something Lou Ye knows all about.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Lou Ye — Summer Palace (2006)
Lou Ye — The Shadow Play (2016)