Summer Palace
Palm Pictures, $24.99Writer/director Lou Ye is no stranger to controversy. His first film, 1995's Weekend Lover, was banned by Chinese censors for two years, and his second, 2000's Suzhou River, isn't permitted to screen in the People's Republic to this day. So it was probably no shock for Ye to learn, on returning from the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, that the film he had gone there to premiere, Summer Palace, wouldn't be showing in China anytime soon and that he was forbidden by the government from making movies for five years. On the contrary, he was probably surprised to find he hadn't been banned from watching movies for five years, a punishment sure to result from the release of whatever movie he plans to start shooting in 2011. The government's concerns over Summer Palace were understandable, if a thousand light years away from justifiable: The film's plot tilts on the events leading up to and resulting from the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 – arguably communist China's darkest hour – which started out as peaceful demonstrations by a coalition of students, labor advocates, and academics calling for democratic reforms but resulted in a brutal military crackdown, heightened government suppression, and the deaths of nearly 1,000 citizens. Ye confronts the Tiananmen Square massacre, the world from which it sprang, and the world it made, obliquely, by blending historical news footage with the tragic story of a discontented small-town university student named Yu Hong and her lover, Zhou Wei, two lost souls caught up in the tide of history. It's an affair full of hope, jealousy, betrayal, disillusion, madness, and explicit sex that spans nearly 20 years and several countries, paralleling in all its fraught melodrama and passionate self-delusion the upheavals of the outside world, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the 1997 British hand-over of Hong Kong. Though the film gets bogged down in its own sense of political and cinematic importance (and is shot with all the visual subtlety of a European chewing-gum commercial), there's no denying the emotional power of its subject matter. An accompanying documentary on the censoring of the film takes viewers inside Ye's topsy-turvy world, a world where artists who take issue with the banning of subversive art by repressive governments get banned by repressive governments for being subversive. Authoritarian regimes, apparently, have no taste for irony.
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