Vertigo

Two women, identical but unrelated, are obsessed over but hardly known in Suzhou River (2000). In Lou Ye’s Vertigo (1958)-evoking second feature, Zhou Xun plays Moudan and Meimei, alternatingly objects of affection for Mardar (Jia Hongsheng), a motorcycle courier of about 26, and a man we’ll know only as The Videographer (an uncredited Zhang Ming Fong), who narrates the film but is never seen. (The movie’s acutely roving cameras see from his vantage in scenes grounded in his perspective.) 

The Videographer’s happening upon Meimei sets the dreamy, seductive Suzhou River into motion. A freelancer who will agree to shoot nearly anything he’s asked to, he spray-paints in black advertisements for his small-time business all around the battered part of Shanghai where he lives. One day, amid a particularly slow period of work, he receives a query from a tavern owner looking to promote a new gimmick he’s introducing to the business’s model: a big tank in the center of the dining area in which a woman, dressed as a mermaid, will coyly splash around. The just-tapped aquatic performer, Meimei, wears a chintzy blond wig and a sparkly pink fin for the part; she’s fallen in love with the second she’s first seen in the water by The Videographer, whose infatuation is best captured in the endless videos and photos he takes of a woman with whom he will come to spend most of his waking hours.

The rush of romance is dulled by Meimei’s propensity to disappear for days on end without a word. She doesn’t offer much of an explanation when she returns. Meimei idealizes the grey fate of a relationship that has come to be something of a local legend on the stretch of the film’s namesake river she and The Videographer live near: the seemingly doomed one between Mardar and Moudan, the daughter of a powerful liquor importer he’s initially hired to protect before he gets wrapped up in a kidnapping scheme with a high ransom. The betrayal causes Moudan to disappear without a trace; a remorseful Mardar spends years restlessly looking for her, unsatisfied with reasonable explanations that she is probably dead. (The last thing he saw his former flame do was jump into the river’s browned waters, legendarily polluted with “a century’s worth of stories here and rubbish.”) “Would you look for me forever?” Meimei wonders early on in the movie to The Videographer, who assures her he would in a voice whose confidence does not sound total. 

From Suzhou River.

Taking up most of Suzhou River’s middle half, Mardar and Moudan’s story is recounted in voiceover by The Videographer, like most else is in the movie. The implication, for a time, is that this is how he imagined this romance he’s read about in the news went. But Mardar will eventually enter the lives of The Videographer and Meimei, whom he has a hard time believing is not his long-lost love. Meimei seems to take some enjoyment in toying with this man whose inability to move on only encourages a new, delusional love.

“The story’s not so simple,” The Videographer will say of everything we’re seeing in the middle of a movie where we presume so anyway. Suzhou River is so immersed in the hazy, tormented points of view of men lamenting love that’s either gone or slipping away that we watch everything with some distrust. The still-entrancing Meimei’s and Moudan’s opaqueness ensures we don’t know much of their inner lives and the decision-making behind the disappearances that leave broken men in their wakes. The explicit presence of The Videographer’s camera generates more distance between reality and what’s depicted. Like the mind, a camera will always editorialize whether it’s intentional or not.

Zhou Xun in Suzhou River.

The Videographer likes to take his camera around the Suzhou River and, as he puts it, just drift. The movie’s restiveness makes tangible how agitated and searching a mind becomes either in the middle of or after a foredoomed romance, where satisfying answers are cursed to never be found inside of memories that only continue, with time, to be tainted with sometimes contrite, sometimes contemptuous feelings. As framed by Ye — whose cinematographer, Wang Yu, lenses the movie in gritty 16mm — this setting, with its crumbling buildings, pervasiveness of poverty, and watery nucleus of a dirty river, does not appear to be a place for which happiness is built. The constant movement of the river further underpins “the transient nature of the lives in the story that unfolds,” the critic Lizzie Francke has written. 

Suzhou River’s romantic myopia feels timeless. It’s otherwise obviously tethered to the time and place in which it was made. It’s a product made by someone who’s part of what’s now referred to as the Sixth Generation of Chinese Filmmakers, which introduced itself in the 1990s with movies that presented contemporary urban China in a realistically cynical light. 

Ye was banned by the government from making movies for two years after Suzhou River’s release, not because of how unflatteringly it dramatizes life in the pocket of decidedly unglamorous Shanghai where it’s set, but because it premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam without the proper clearance. This not-very-juicy reason for a temporary banishment nevertheless speaks to part of what makes Ye’s work immediately intoxicating: it springs from a filmmaker more preoccupied with his expectations and visions than anything else.