Country girl Yu Hong leaves her village to study in Beijing. At university, she falls madly in love with fellow student Zho Wei. Driven by passion that neither can control, their relationship becomes ...( read more
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DVD Release Date: March 11, 2008
Stats: 147 reviews
"Because it is only when we make love that you understand that I'm gentle."
That's all the character development I need. This is an ambitious film about the stalled maturation of an idealistic but troubled young woman flanked by the Tiananmen Square protests, the collapse of th...( read more)
Not as ambitious as its story might suggest, this film about a group (maybe a generation) of college students who witnessed the Tiananmen massacre. It's filtered through a young woman and her relationship with another student along with their ups and downs. The film's second half...( read more)
Even thought I am rating this a 3 Star, its still a pretty good flix, more of a chick flix, about a young lady in china, and the movie is made from her diary. Some Nudity, so those girls under 18 hide your eyes, yea right, if you enjoy this one let me hear from you. bbcfloridabou...( read more)
well, I seriously don't see or noticed any artistic values in it behind the erotic scenes...to cope with sadness? depression? or loneliness of a woman? even so, can't see the point in it...
not good. beautifully shot, but storyline is insane and irrationally pornographic.
I cannot say I agree with the bad reviews for these and even from the critics themselves. Personally, even the sex scenes in this film has a rather stunning quality, it hardly gives it any impression of being controversial, it for the most part reflects the characters and their l...( read more)
Ye's back-and-forth storytelling insinuates that the lives of Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are incomplete without each other, but because their young love was never convincing in the first place, the bittersw... full review
SUMMER PALACE, is billed as the most daring film to come out of China. It is a sexually frank look at the lives of some university students set against tumultuous events taking place between 1988 and 2003, including the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. In June that year, after almost two months of protests, the military clamped down and there were widespread arrests by the government. Death toll figures are disputed and range from 200 to 300 to 2,000 to 3,000.
The film has been banned in China, but is passed uncut here with an R21 rating. Singapore is the second country to show it in general release after it opened in France last month. The director, Lou Ye and the producer, Nai An were slapped with a five-year ban by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television for having Summer Place shown at the Cannes Film Festival last year without the official go-ahead. The two founded Dream Factory in 1998, one of China's first independent film companies.
Lou Ye wrote the script and spent two months combing through 400 names before he found his lead actors: Jilin-born Hao Lei, 29 and Shandong-born Guo Xiaodong , 33 who play the lovelorn couple, Yu Hong and Zhou Wei, respectively. The two took on exacting roles which called for nudity and explicit love-making scenes. Asked whether the sex scenes were necessary, Lou's answer is affirmative: "Love is about the relationship between two people. It's a very complicated form of communication between two people and it cannot exclude sex." Lou sees Summer Palace as semi-autobiographical: "The university setting reflected my own as well as the scriptwriters' college days in the late 1980s. It forced the young people then to think about many things - about themselves, about others and about love. They had to think clearly about how they wanted to live as individuals. This is a good thing."
Still, the combo of sexual candour and the taboo topic of the Tiananmen protests proved too much for the Chinese authorities.
IT IS worth noting that the title of the film is Summer Palace, and not Tiananmen Square. Even though director Luo Ye conflates the personal with the political, it is the former that has his attention here. The story begins with Yu Hong (Hao Lei) leaving her border hometown of Tumen for Beijing, where she has been accepted at university. Lou paints in a few broad strokes the heady and intoxicating brew that is college life. When Yu meets fellow student Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), they share an intimate bonding moment on the grounds of the Summer Palace. This is something which Yu subsequently tries to recapture in the course of her life, but to no avail. At the same time, the young lovers' intensely emotional and physical relationship is being played out against the background of intellectual foment. Willy-nilly, Yu and Zhou are drawn into the student protests of mid-1989. Perhaps the most moving scene in the film is when Zhou Wei's room-mate lashes out in anger and frustration after a long, terrible night in which students are fired upon. Suddenly, personal relationships are dwarfed into insignificance. But despite the most momentous of upheavals, life goes on and the characters have to struggle with the quotidian business of living and loving. Hao gives a fearless performance as the vulnerable and temperamental Yu for whom sex is a means of revealing herself to the man she loves. She and Guo also share a chemistry that comes through on screen. Guo has less to work with given the somewhat enigmatic character of Zhuo. You wish, though, that the acting is in service to a stronger story. While there is a point to the anti-climactic feel of the latter half of the movie, it seems a little repetitive as Yu moves from one man to another, even as she knows that she will not find what she is looking for. By the time the denouement finally rolls around, the idealism and hope of summer has long passed and it seems that only a chilly and desolate winter lies ahead.
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