July 29, 2007
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.
