by Isabella Tianzi Cai
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.
The Chinese state banned Lou Ye from making films for a period of five years in 2006 for the production of Summer Palace, whose story alluded to the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing. In order to shoot Spring Fever, Lou moved underground and had to work constantly under the fear that his equipment might be confiscated and the production halted.
Lim’s article highlights Lou’s determination to make the sex-loaded Spring Fever “in defiance of that ban, with a subject guaranteed to vex the Chinese censors.” In Lou’s words:
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.
