Suzhou River

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Movie
German title Suzhou River
Original title Suzhou He
Country of production People's Republic of China , Germany
original language Chinese
Publishing year 2000
length 83 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Lou Ye
script Lou Ye
production Philippe Bober , Nai An
music Jörg Lemberg
camera Wang Yu
cut Karl Riedl
occupation

Suzhou River is a film by Lou Ye from the year 2000 about a tragic love story in Shanghai plays.

The second film by the scriptwriter and director Lou Ye takes place in the desolate industrial and social landscapes on the outskirts of Shanghai. The polluted Suzhou River is one of the film's central themes.

action

The film is told from the perspective of a man who almost always has his video camera with him and is filming. But he himself never appears. He remembers the story that happened to him and the film is sometimes shown with its recordings.

The story tells of Mardar who struggled through life as a motorcycle courier and member of a gang of petty criminals. One of his customers as a courier is Moudan's father, a businessman who pays Mardar to chauffeur his daughter. Mardar and Moudan become friends and a love looms, but when Mardar kidnaps Moudan on behalf of his gang to extort a ransom, she then tries, disappointed, to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Suzhou. But her body is not found and therefore Mardar thinks later in Meimei, the friend of the narrator, that he recognizes his Moudan. Meimei, however, denies being Moudan, which doesn't stop Mardar from visiting her regularly and telling her the story of Mardar and Moudan, which Meimei is also fascinated by. The film closes with the narrator and Meimei being called to the scene of the accident, since their address has been found, where Mardar and the real Moudan had an accident shortly after the two have reunited.

style

By basing his story on chance encounters and intertwined life paths, Lou takes visible borrowings from Wong Kai-Wai's Chungking Express . The jumping cuts and the agile handheld camera guidance by Wang Yu are also striking . The mixture of observational realism and lush romanticism illustrates the scene in which the narrator describes the local people's explanation for the disappearance of Moudan, you see her as a mermaid, bathed in golden light, her tail fin sunk into the murky river water. The figure of the mermaid, which is not part of Chinese tradition, is typical of the globalized mind of many of his modern Chinese contemporaries.

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