Directed by Lou Ye
Written by Lou Ye
Starring Zhou Xun
Jia Hongshen
Distributed by Strand Releasing (U.S.)
Release date(s) September 7, 2000
Running time 83 min.
Language Mandarin
Suzhou River (Simplified Chinese: 苏州河; Traditional Chinese: 蘇州河; Pinyin: Sūzhōu hé) (2000) is a film noir by Lou Ye about a tragic love story set in contemporary Shanghai. The film is typical of "Sixth Generation" Chinese filmmakers in its subject matter and style.
Writer-director Lou Ye's second film, Suzhou River takes as its background the chaotically built-up riverside architecture of factory buildings and abandoned warehouses along the Suzhou River, rather than the glitzy new face of Shanghai.
The story follows the transient lives of four people at the margins of Chinese society. An anonymous videographer follows the story of Mardar (Jia Hongsheng), a small-time crook and motorcycle courier; and Moudan (Zhou Xun), the daughter of a rich businessman, whom Mardar is hired to ferry around town. Mardar and Moudan fall in love but when Mardar gets involved in a botched attempt to kidnap her, Moudan commits suicide. Devastated, Mardar catches sight of Meimei, the videographer's elusive girlfriend (also played by Zhou Xun) and becomes convinced she's his lost love.
Building the narrative from chance encounters and interconnected lives, Lou hints toward Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express. Stylistically the film also owes something to Wong's restless visual sensibility: jump cuts abound and director of photography Wang Yu's dextrous handheld camerawork snakes like the river itself. One of the most memorable images in the film is that of Moudan dressed as a mermaid, bathed in a pool of warm golden light, her tail sunk in the murky waters of the Suzhou. Lou's decision to use the figure of the mermaid - which is not part of Chinese folklore - is characteristic of the global outlook of his sixth generation film-making contemporaries.
Similarly he markedly embraces what was presumably illicit cinema history by what most critics and scholars have seen as paying a clear stylistic debt to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.The river, the bridge, the obsessive, haunted protagonist and the girl who might not be quite who she seems: this shares elements that have figured in countless movies inspired by Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece.
