Summer Palace (2006)

It's not often you come across a Chinese Indie-style art house film in Korea. Most of the smaller-budget ‘indie’ films I’ve seen here have been primarily Japanese or European. Therefore, you can imagine my excitement at finding out that there was going to be a Chinese film shown here in Seoul which didn’t belong in the martial arts/big blockbuster/action categories.

Director Lou Ye’s Summer Palace (2006), or Yi He Yuan in Chinese, is a breathtaking film. From start to end, I was mesmerized. The actors and actresses, all looking natural and bare-faced, shone brightly from the screen with a very real, very bold radiance.

The film spans the years from the 80s to more than a decade later and we are taken back into our days of youth -- the days of bewilderment and confusion and romance and dreams.

These are all words which we can associate with Yu Hong, the main character in the film. Yu Hong leaves her boyfriend and her hometown along the North Korean border behind to pursue her studies in the capital. At university she meets and falls madly in love with Zhou Wei, and the two plunge into one dark bottomless hole of Love, Passion and Obsession. “The moment I met him, he became my life.”, says Yu Hong.

Yu Hong’s university days evolve around a heady combination of Zhou Wei, freedom, experimentation, love, loss, betrayal, helplessness and constant unrest. All these of course may be linked to the political and social unrest in China during that period. The Tiananmen Square incidents form a significant and dynamic weighting in the film, and we can pick up the direct correlations between these incidents and the characters’ relationships.

The main character’s helplessness can be felt in this part of the dialogue:

Yu Hong: “Let’s break up.”

Zhou Wei: “Why?”

Yu Hong: “Because I can’t leave you.”

Yu Hong moves from one man to another, hoping to show them her ‘gentle side’ through sex and possibly hoping to find her own self and love. But after Zhou Wei, this yearning for love cannot be satisfied.

Yu Hong is not the only character who is lost and helpless. Yu Hong, Zhou Wei, Yu Hong’s close girlfriend Li Ti and her boyfriend Ruo Gu -- all the main characters in the film appear to be rootless branches growing in separate directions. Their confusing relationships -- as friends, as lovers – pull us into a pool of tension and sense of danger.

We follow the characters through the film and through their years. We can see their love, their pain, their raw feelings. The characters reach out desperately for each other, perhaps because they feel that through one another, they will somehow be able to find themselves.

As an audience, we can feel their agitation and frustration. We share their pain and reminiscence. As time flows by and the film travels to a decade later, we can feel the helplessness of the characters, who have lost their youth and their passion and their dreams. We are left with a gently sad feeling and a slight dull ache in our hearts. In the same way that summer leaves us with a cooler autumn and shorter days, as the credits go up and the cinema lights come back on, Summer Palace leaves us with nostalgia and longing.