AKA: Suzhou River.
Director: Lou Ye.
Language: Mandarin.
Release Year: 2000.
Rating: * * * *
I had heard quite a bit about the movie, thereby piquing my curiosity. Even in the absence of this urge, I still would’ve proceeded to watch the movie, simply because it had Zhou Xun: the actor who continues to enchant and amaze me. A rather uniquely told, the movie has a simple yet, an unconventional story, dragged through the mire and grime infesting the titular river bank.
The film is almost a monologue, seen through the eyes of a nameless and a faceless narrator, who works as a videographer, doling out his services to anyone interested in capturing the stark and unadulterated slice of their lives. One such job leads him to a dingy bar, where the owner asks him to shoot a special attraction he provides for his customers. The bar holds a huge water tank, and Meimei (Zhou Xun) performs in it, dressed as a mermaid. The boss wants the narrator to shoot one such performance for reasons unknown. The narrator loses his heart to this lovely lady the very first time he sees her, and they soon start to go out. Temperamentally inclined, Meimei keeps the relationship physical, with only occasional burst of feelings from her side. She arrives at the narrator’s doorstep as an unannounced guest whenever she sees fit, and vanishes with an equally discourteous abruptness. This erratic nature of the relationship keeps the narrator guessing about her true intentions, with the fear of she never returning, constantly gnawing at him. Meimei’s past remains a mystery to the narrator, and she makes sure it stays that way. The narrator doesn’t try to read too much between the lines, poring only on the beautiful present he’s getting to share with her.
On one such random moment between the two, Meimei asks the narrator if he’d hunt for her if she were to disappear some day for good, just like a certain, fabled lover Mardar (Hongshen Jia), who’d comb the city looking for his long-lost love Moudan. From that point on, the movie takes an acute turn, where the narrator decides to withdraw from the present narrative, and digress into an impromptu fictional world of the star-crossed lovers Mardar and Moudan. The narrator depicts Mardar as a handsome, thirty-ish guy, bearing a poker-face and an austere attitude, making his living as a courier. During one such assignment, Mardar is asked to take a twenty-something girl, Moudan (Zhou Xun) to her aunt’s, while her father satisfies his capricious carnal urges. Moudan is quite an animated character, with a typical teenage zest, and in anticipation of being discovered and loved.
After a couple of outings with Mardar as a part of his assignment, Moudan starts to fall for this enigmatic fellow, but Mardar keeps her at arm’s length. Deciding not to mix business with pleasure, Mardar meets Moudan’s advances with disappointment more than a couple of times, leaving her heartbroken, but not beaten. The narrator continues to add details and twists as he goes along with the narration, which later becomes a scene of kidnapping, the tragedy that ensues, and Mardar pounding the pavement looking for his lost love.
Seamlessly insinuating details from his own life, characters and situations, to spice up the simmering alternate story, the narrator fuses reality with the tale he fabricated. At this point and thereafter, the movie’s reality becomes pretty hazy, as the collage of two different worlds are juxtaposed, blending an action from one with the consequence into another. This makes for a very engaging and an interesting viewing, sometimes heartrending, but always something fresh on offer. The narrator decides to end his story on a “punch-to-your-gut” note, albeit not without a final deft blow to the chin, which also serves as the finale of the movie itself.
Almost the entire movie is seen through the eyes of the narrator’s handheld camera, featuring the ever-pervasive jerk effect. The cinematography is up close and personal, bringing out the deformed texture of the rundown habitat the movie festers on, with the dark, dour omnipresence of an unseen underbelly flanking the eponymous river, sprouting lives on the edges. The opening shot could easily be mistaken for a typical Dharavi sewer that any guy from Mumbai could spot blindfolded. The camera is seen floating above the filth and through the haggard lives surviving on them by the river. The loud staccato of drums bring out a brooding sense of a grand melancholia, and desperation and the will to exist in the face of degrading, isolated lives. The natural production aesthetics, including the ubiquitous shots of the river, stands out as another character, against which lives are stacked, pinned and tested.
The direction to me seemed like a concoction of Steven Soderberg’s gritty realism, Chris Marker’s solemn narration rife with soliloquies, Wong Kar Wai’s meandering yet, beautiful imagery and mood, with a hint of Hitchcock-esque obsession in uncovering the facts underneath all the dirt and masquerade. All these traits permeated the movie, treating its viewers to a many-lobed execution, all for the price of one. Coming to the performances, Hongshen Jia, with his impassive portrayal of Mardar, wearing his cold heart on his sleeves when confronted with Moudan’s love, and later, exhibiting a steadfast resolve while perusing the crowd for a face lost, just to redeem himself, and finally, melting away when his efforts pay off, only to meet an abrupt, spiral decline.
The real star of the movie, however, is Zhou Xun with who portrays two diametrically disparate individuals. Meimei, with her unflinching survival instincts, languishing eternally for something not expressed, and finding some reprieve and love in the narrator’s arms and later on, in Mardar’s, is exactly what brilliant performances are made of. Moudan, on the other hands, packs in that impish and naïve appeal that one can expect from a typical teenage girl, who’s oblivious to the cogs and wheels that make up the mean machinery of life around her. Zhou balances the two sides of the coin, giving each of her character their own distinct style and emotional baggage. With such an offbeat and unique blend of storytelling, propelled to a great height by the performances from its leads, especially Zhou Xun's, the movie is an exercise in existential cinema, with an occasional and surreal touch of crude reality, all coming together to deliver an extremely palatable and an unprecedented piece of art.
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