Spring Fever (dir. Lou Ye)

In The New York Times, critic Dennis Lim profiled Chinese director Lou Ye and his film Spring Fever, which opens in New York this weekend. Spring Fever won the best screenplay at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. It centers on the story of a married man’s extramarital relationship with another man; the drama also involves his wife, a private detector, and the detector’s girlfriend.

Sex is an indispensable part of a natural human being. Starting from sex, each individual human being can learn how to frankly face himself and the freedom he has, and learn how to listen to and follow himself instead of others.

Ninety years ago politicians told us we had to believe in Marxism and Leninism. Fifty years ago they told us we had to follow Chairman Mao’s words and join the Cultural Revolution with passion. Thirty years ago they told us we had to reform and open up. Ten years ago they told us that making money was of great importance, while two years ago they told us everything was for the Olympics. We’ve always lived a life designated as without any consciousness. Maybe we could try to treat politics and history in the same way as we treat our daily sex life, with some frankness.

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Translation by Yuqian Yan

IV. New Theaters

Another aspect of capital operation is the development of new theaters and their surroundings. A significant trend is that after international capital was fully withdrawn from China due to policy reasons, the newly raised major players are all domestic partnerships.

Megabox Sanlitun Theater, Beijing

Withdrawn capital is mainly from the States and Europe, but those from Hong Kong or Korea are allowed to stay. Even though according to government policy, Hong Kong and Korean capital can only account for a small proportion, their existence allows theaters to maintain their original status as international chain brands. For example, the new theater built in the middle of Sanlitun, Beijing uses a Korean theater brand. One reason is that Hong Kong and Korean investors sometimes agree to disguise international capital under the name of domestic capital through an intermediary, whereas European and American investors always hesitate to make such a suspicious deal. For instance, Warner has stopped expanding its business in China for years. But European and American giants are just waiting for new policies that will offer better opportunities. In the long run, more than half of the Chinese theaters will be controlled by American capital in the future.

Most domestic giants are tightly integrated with the reals state industry. Most noticeable is Wanda’s general success. They manage to cover almost all the new development zones which didn’t exist in the formal cultural map of China. In big cities, these development zones have hundreds of thousands population. Moreover, the residents are mainly young, white-collars, (Blue-collars don’t buy houses. Mid-age white-collars tend to choose better developed neighborhood, and they don’t go to cinema.) such as the North District in Kunming.

Broadway Cinematheque MOMA, Beijing

Another remarkable theater development is the establishment of the Film Culture Center (Broadway Cinematheque MOMA) by Anle on the second ring road of Beijing. This is an isolated incident and its uniqueness is worth careful analysis and expectation.

Some theater businessmen study the mode of film history again and again, and hope to apply it to their own cinema, but it is too difficult to realize in practice. Moreover, commercial blockbusters are still profitable at the moment (the payback period for new theaters is about 3 years, hardware deprecation is about 7 to 8 years, real estate contracts last about 10 years in general). There’s no need for business to take the risk to start a new path.

But since theaters have such high returns, and the ready-made experience is so attractive, investment in theaters are expected to continue to increase. How much is the room for growth? It depends on the community on the one hand, and programing on the other hand. Because of the shortage of theaters in the past 20 years, and the commercial operation mode for blockbusters in the past 10 years, investors and audiences have forgotten about the lack of programs. American blockbusters saturated the market several years ago, which widened the gap between blockbusters shown in China. Now there are only two or three super blockbusters each year. I’m afraid that domestic blockbusters will also reach its saturation sometime in the future. By that time, we merely have two or three films a year in a real sense.

The scarcity of programming, in my own anticipation, will result a considerable percentage of empty seats in new cinemas in three years. This percentage will reach an unacceptable peak in five or six years, and the development will start to reverse, such as converting cinemas into billiard halls.

Art cinema, which has been criticized as impossible to form, will be realized independent from the will of scholars and intellectuals, but on the reality of the high rate of empty cinema seats. Some cinemas will have to depend on blockbusters to make money, others will rely on cultural activities and artworks to survive. The relation between the two will probably be balanced and harmonious by the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Republic, if we can keep on developing “normally” in the next ten years.

Contemporary art has passed the Old Summer Palace period and is now in the 798 period. The polarization within the film industry means that film as entertainment can appear in the cheapest form, such as in parodies of big movies, or in the most expansive form. So it is very abnormal for film as culture or art to be always in the low-end state.

Anle’s Film Cultural Centre that started to operate this year would probably contribute to the elevation of film as an art form. Perhaps it’s just a beginning; perhaps policy and other investors would follow up in three or five years. Hopefully Anle’s experiment will survive until that point.

V. Ten Years of Independence

Spring Fever (dir. Lou Ye)

Among different ways of counting independent films, if we see the grassroots video movement as its starting point, this is exactly its tenth year of existence. That is to say it is not the same age as the Republic, but the same age as the new century.

How can I describe to you those films that you’ve never seen, my dear audience?

Our cultural map is the same as our elections. It’s a 99% vs. 1% relationship. How can I explain that this 1% is not self-marginalized?

So as a writer, what I should do is to arouse your curiosity. That’s all I can do. If you are interested, you can find details online. As for the must-see works, you can watch them at different independent film festivals. If you don’t want to travel beyond your own city, please wait for the travelling shows to arrive in your place.

I personally consider them to be among the best part of contemporary Chinese culture, and the only valuable thing in Chinese cinema.

I’ll list three narrative films and three documentaries here, as well as three informational websites.

Spring Fever, dir. Lou Ye: He loves her loves him loves her loves him …
Bride, dir. Zhang Ming: An old cow eating tender grass (i.e. old man marries a young woman).
Good Cats, dir. Ying Liang: Catching mice can make you rich.
Petition, dir. Zhao Liang: Hasn’t the asylum policy been canceled?
Wheat Harvest, dir. Xu Tong: About a goddess.
Buried, dir. Wang Libo: About the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake

www.fanhall.cn (editor’s note 4/5/10: Fanhall’s site has been shut down)
www.yunfest.org
www.chinaiff.org

Zhang Xianmin
December 20, 2009

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Some press dubbed the film “The Chinese Brokeback Mountain” for its frank depictions of same-sex relationships, though in actuality the sexual dynamic is more entangled than that.  Quoting Brian Brooks‘ synopsis for IndieWire:

Set in present-day Nanjing, Spring Fever is the story of Wang Ping (Wu Wei) whose wife suspects him of adultery. She hires Luo Haitao (Chen Sicheng) to spy on him and discovers that her husband’s ongoing trist is with a man, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao). Matters become more complicated when Luo Haitao and his girlfriend Li Jing (Tan Zhou) get entangled in a torrid love affair with Jiang Cheng.

Brooks’ article also has quotes from Lou Ye’s press conference following the Cannes premiere. The entire press conference can be watched at the Cannes website.  One quote by Lou which seems to draw a line in the sand as far as the purpose of his filmmaking (as well as many of his generation):

The point of Spring Fever was to portray individual emotions rather than social problems. The individual is more important than the group, but the last time the Chinese talked about individuals was back in the 1920s.

Arya Ponto at Just Press Play has taken the trouble of excerpting from several reviews, mostly from the American press.  We’ve excerpted from some others as well. If anyone knows of any Chinese language reviews, feel free to link in the comments section.

Beyond fests (especially gay ones) and the hardcore arthouse crowd, this overlong and very Euro-flavored “Spring” won’t make many B.O. wickets bloom… As Lou has seemingly catered more and more to Euro tastes (and Western sensibilities), his vision and imagination have become progressively more restricted.

- Derek Elley, Variety

A heterosexual man hired by a woman to spy on her husband’s homosexual liaisons becomes seduced by his subject of reconnaissance in Spring Fever, Lou Ye’s artistically uneven, emotionally strained but at times sullenly poetic depiction of a sexually confused love pentangle.  The first half intriguingly depicts the characters’ various stages of secrecy, denial and bewilderment. However, the second half lapses into dramatic impasses as Lou gets distracted by pretentious literary allusions.

Lou’s treatment of a supposedly taboo subject in China and its particular social context neither shocks nor surpasses seminal works like Lan Yu and East Palace, West Palace. The sex scenes, duskily lit in Lou’s characteristic style, and shot with a foggy, grainy texture, are a tame shadow of China’s cult queer auteur Cui Zi’en’s underground homo-erotica.

Compared with his half-baked attempt at fusing personal sexuality with political history (Tiananmen Square) in Summer Palace, this film is a considerable improvement as it generates intensity through the extreme intimacy among its minimalist cast (accentuated by restless closeups and deliberately asymmetrical compositions) while offsetting them against an authentic social backdrop.

- Maggie Lee, The Hollywood Reporter

Borrowing from stories from the 1920s from gifted Chinese author Yu Dafu, director Lou Ye, aided by Zeng Jian’s astonishing camerawork, manages to hit a poignant note with floral imagery in Spring Fever.

Lou Ye does delve successfully into more universal subjects such as loyalty, betrayal, and obsession, but an overall triteness undermines their impact.

Like the 19th^th-century German philosopher Schopenhauer, Yu Dafu saw weeds in any field of flowers. In spite of the beauty of the movie’s lotuses, Lou Ye conveys the writer’s cynicism.

- Howard Feinstein, Screen Daily

There are moments of beauty and happiness along the way, but for the most part this is a not-so-merry-go-round of love and lust, the participants howling at one another and flailing weak fists against hitching chests.

Some of it hits home, raw and emotional. Other sequences (a karaoke scene, moony shots of Nanjing) thrum with a tender melancholy. Most of it, though, is boring, nonsensical and off-puttingly convinced of its own worth, with even the rough n tumble f–k scenes sure to arouse yawns.

Spring Fever is nowhere near as bad as Lou Ye’s inscrutable 2003 competition entry Purple Butterfly, perhaps, but it’s also nowhere near as good as his acclaimed Suzhou River (2000), a far more engaging film concerned with the same themes – identity, desire, loneliness.

- Jamie Graham, Total Film

I think there’s meant to be a tender love story buried somewhere in all this remote melodrama, but none of the five major characters makes the slightest impression; when one eventually commits suicide, you get the sense it’s mostly just a means of getting the hell out of this boring movie.

- Mike D’Angelo, The A.V. Club

Lou, helped by Zeng Jian’s striking camerawork, captures very well the mood of drift and fragmentation in modern-day urban China. Compelling and messy in equal measure, it’s a cine-letter to the future.

- Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph

While Lou Ye does valiantly attempt to showcase a subsection of mainland Chinese life that’s simply not put on screen, he never raises his characters out of their flatly assigned roles, and some, like Luo Haitao’s girlfriend Li Jing, are really just doleful ciphers, their dramas impossible to invest in, a lot of sound, fury and shower scenes, signifying nothing.

- Alison Willmore, IFC.com

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