Film Review: Summer Palace

Yiheyuan, 2006. Dir: Ye Lou

I can see why this film was received well at Cannes: it has a Gallic approach to questioning love, life, and what’s it all about, in drawn-out sequences of talking, lovemaking, or both.

Four main characters drive the story: a woman who can’t show affection except through sex, a guy who can’t stay faithful, a woman who won’t let anyone show love for her, and a disengaged man who doesn’t show his emotions. Although there is potentially lots to work with here, the film rushes through events too quickly, without really letting us get to know the characters well enough; the result is that we don’t really engage with them, to the extent that a ’shock’ death late in the film doesn’t really move the audience.

The action of the film takes place in two broad chapters, with a short preamble that introduces us to the character who is the film’s prime focus. In the first section, the four are all young students at one of China’s top two universities, Beijing University [my own university, Tsinghua, is the other, and plainly the better of the two ]. Here, they cope with freedom, new experiences, and exploration of themselves and their own development. This process of growth takes place against the backdrop of a period of debate and political engagement, that eventually ends with the massacre in the summer of 1989.

Graduating that same summer, the foursome split up. The female lead begins a slow downward slide into poverty and emotional isolation; the others go to newly post-Wall Berlin, where they spend most of the next decade in arty, bohemian circles (what exactly they were doing wasn’t clear). Eventually, the male lead decides to return to China in order to seek some stability in his life. This sets in motion a chain of events that leads to a death, and to a new encounter with his unhappy ex-lover.

The film was shot on a small budget, and it shows in several ways. In an effort to keep out anachronisms, many of the outdoor scenes in the Beijing sequences are shot close-up; this has the unfortunate effect of giving us hardly any sense of the city – even the Summer Palace isn’t really shown, except for the lake. The budget issue also shows up in some of the sequences during the clampdown on the student protests; some sections here – such as the burning truck – do look a bit cheap. (To be fair, this may not have been a budget issue: obviously, a film touching on a topic which is still officially taboo would have to be shot quickly and without drawing too much attention).

The biggest problem with the film was the pacing, though; it was a bit too draggy, and spread over too long a time period. The repeated use of subtitles to summarize what happened during several years between scenes was a bit clunky, and not particularly engaging. Even so, the film dragged on rather too long; quite a few people walked out of the viewing I went to, and despite my best efforts, my attention wandered quite a few times.

So was there anything good about this film? In fact, quite a lot. The acting was natural, and I certainly know quite a lot of people just like these characters. Each of the two ‘chapters’ was strong. The university period had a very, very strong sense of place and period when the action moved into the crowded university dormitories, and to the student bars where political talk and activism rubbed shoulders with pool games, 80s disco, and folk music. There was a real feeling of idealistic youth discovering themselves and groping to discover the world. The second, more mature, segment, also had strong settings, and the melancholic feeling of getting a bit older, realizing that life hasn’t turned out as we imagined, and wondering what to do about it.

Unfortunately, neither segment was really given time to develop or breathe, and that’s the real failing of the film. The characters, settings and themes are strong enough to work; ideally, this would be two films – a Chinese version of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (and I love those films, so the comparison is a vote of confidence in Ye Lou’s basic material).

Overall: a good concept, that doesn’t quite work. I think I would like to see it again, as fragments of the music, of the conversation, and faces (especially actress Hu Ling!) keep on resurfacing. Don’t go to see it with too-high expectations, but do see it if – like me – you’re an angsty thirty-something with an interest in China!