Yi He Yuan (2006) Reviews

• Open Mind to the Movie - Summer Palace

  leech_742007-05-06

  Having watched the movie myself and reading some of the comments/reviews with regards to the movie prompted me to post something in fairness to the movie. I feel that the movie was meant to let audience have a feeling that the leads in the movies are lost. If we were to think of the backdrop of the movie, set in the late 80's, Tiananmen incident, the chant for democracy, all this would have let you understand that the China then was not a China that many could understand. The China up till the 80s was probably such a controlled and suppressed place to live in, and when these suppressed feelings and emotions were suddenly set free, it was like an explosion. The literature and external factors began influencing the way the people viewed and did things. This could explain the "mindless" love making scenes as the desires to love and to have sex were probably something that was not openly displayed or demonstrated. Freedom is what everyone wants, but the maturity to handle the consequence of the actions brought about by freedom might not be something that everyone can handle. The movie also explores on people who dare not love. All because they fear losing it. I personally felt the characterization was done quite well, and was aptly shown by the character Yu Hong. Love is not something that can be explained logically or defined in any one way. The insight to the characters views and actions in this movie shows that clearly. Summer Palace is a movie worth watching, but it might not be a movie that is for everyone. Keep an open mind and try and understand the time and country this movie is set in, you'd probably appreciate the movie much better that way.

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• an intelligent film about obsessive love

  Buddy-512008-03-22

  In the late 1980's, an inexperienced young woman named Yu Hong leaves her hometown and boyfriend in the provinces to attend Beijing University. Almost immediately, she falls into a passionate love/hate relationship with a fellow student at the school. This torrid affair plays out partly against the backdrop of the student protests and subsequent massacre that occurred in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. (The movie also takes place briefly in Germany, the other part of the world where significant social change was occurring in 1989). "Summer Palace" plays almost like the autopsy of a romantic obsession, attempting to get at the root of why we love in the way that we do. A novice at true love, Yu Hong understands neither her undying passion for Zhou Wei nor her seemingly incessant need to keep sabotaging their relationship. The closest she can come to grasping this paradox is when she says to Zhou Wei: "I want to break up…because I can't leave you." Love is seen almost as a form of mental illness in this film - as a debilitating, all-consuming condition that one is powerless to control or "cure" but which, if left unchecked, can become the single dominant force in a person's life (we rarely see Yu Hong studying, let alone going to class). One can attempt to fill the void with other loves, but the heart always comes back to the same place. "Summer Palace" is long and occasionally repetitious and the political aspects aren't as effectively integrated into the story as they perhaps might have been, but the movie is beautifully acted by Lei Hao and Xiaodong Guo, among others, and features incisive and sensitive direction by Ye Lou (who, along with Feng Mei and Ma Yingli, co-authored the screenplay). This is a largely impressionistic film, concentrating more on mood, imagery and emotions than on narrative. The last hour of the film - so filled with longing and regret as the characters age and attempt to come to terms with the special thing they have lost - is particularly lyrical and heartbreaking and will haunt you long after the movie is over. All told, "Summer Palace" is an intelligent and moving rumination on that mysterious force we call love.

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• Banned in China: What Now, Lou Ye?

  janos4512007-03-16

  Lou Ye's "Summer Palace" ("Yihe yuan") has plenty of frontal nudity and a fair number of (not very attractive) sex scenes, but that's not why the movie was banned by Beijing, and Ye forbidden to work in the film industry for five years. More likely, official displeasure was incurred by the film's powerful recreation of the Tiananmen events of 1989, from the students' point of view - and, coincidentally, equaling Tolstoy's representation of the chaos of war in the Borodino scenes of "War and Peace." And yet, all that is besides the point. Rather, after tonight's screening of "Summer Palace" in the Castro, at the 25th annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, your bewildered and overwhelmed reporter is positing this central question: whither Lou Ye? After those five years (or making movies elsewhere) will Ye become the new Zhang Yimou and China's best or just an imitator of the loathsome Tsai Ming-liang, teasing and torturing the audience... just because he can? My money - and hope - is on the better scenario. However strange and convoluted and bizarre and frustrating "Summer Palace" may be, it appears "sincere" and not reaching for effect. It's a magnificent failure or a miserable masterpiece, a stupid soap opera or a splendid insight into the human condition - the choice is up to you; for me, it was all that, and more. Seen so far only at film festivals (Cannes, Toronto, Mill Valley, Pusan and Oslo), the film is due for release in France next month and not, so far, in the U.S. Lack of commercial exposure may not be a bad thing. This is a "festival film," if there was ever one, and watching it on DVD may be the next best thing. If it came to theaters in this country, few people would go to see it, and of those, many would leave long before its conclusion 2 hours and 20 minutes later. And yet, and yet... The script - also by Ye, apparently heavily autobiographical - follows a group of young people from their Beijing University days in the 1980s through the present. The central character is Yu Hong, a teenager from the countryside. As played by Lei Hao - with little of Zhang Ziyi's physical charms and a hundred times her acting ability - here is a cinematic heroine for the ages: a complex, puzzling, neurotic young woman with touching aspirations and scary unpredictability. Lei Hao becomes the character in a naked, unselfconscious, totally believable way - she alone make "Summer Palace" a must-see film (except that you can't). Ye's way of telling the story is personal, iconoclastic, dragging here, speeding up there, taking us to Berlin (?!), unintentionally nonlinear, showing Yu Hong is similar situations time and again - and yet slowly spinning an intelligent, poetic subtext in the background. Hard as it may be to imagine, "Summer Palace" has something in common with Alain Resnais' "Last Year in Marienbad," in its wistfulness, lack of specific believability and yet presenting a feeling that makes perfect "sense." There are a hundred things "wrong" with Ye's work and yet it's one of the more memorable films in years.

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• Not a Great Film but One that Says Something about China Today

  johnpetersca2008-03-28

  When I saw Summer Palace, I assumed initially that the title referred to a building near Tiananmen Square. A quick Internet search, however, showed that this is not the case. The Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan, literally The Garden of Good Health and Harmony) is an elaborate structure and garden in the hills near Beijing that was originally the emperor's summer residence. After more web searching, I discovered from a comment by Agora on the Flixster Website (http://www.flixster.com/movie/573373022) that the grounds of the Summer Palace are the location of an "intimate bonding moment" between the two university students who are the film's main characters. They are Yu Hong, a girl who has recently come from the country, and Zhou Wei, a more experienced member of the student intelligentsia. All the same, I like the film's French title, Une Jeunesse Chinoise (A Young Chinese Girl) better. An esoteric but appropriate alternative would be La Française (The French Girl) in reference to Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 La Chinoise (The Chinese Girl). In Godard's film, a young French woman pretends to be a Chinese cultural revolutionary. In Summer Palace, a Chinese girl learns to pose as, among other things, a French intellectual. The movie is indebted to the French New Wave in other ways as well, including use of real urban settings, choppy editing, and lots of sex. The sex is different from what we're used to. It's neither pornographic nor romantic. There are nude bodies, primarily those of the attractive Yu Hong and her sexual partners, and they perform with graphic intensity. There is, however, neither stimulation nor foreplay. The partners are undifferentiated and their positions conventional (though a shift, in later episodes, from the missionary position to sex with the woman on top may have some significance). In other ways as well, I found it hard to relate to any of the movie's characters. Though they must all have worked very hard to be admitted to an elite Beijing university, there is no indication of their academic activities. A brief sequence of documentary footage shows the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and implies the subsequent massacre but there is nothing about planning or political intent. For the characters in the movie, political action seems no more than a momentary sensation as they go about their alienated lives. Maybe this indifference is an inheritance of the Cultural Revolution. Mao went to great lengths to deprive his subjects of personal identities, including, at one point, an effort to replace names with numbers as a means of identification. It's also possible that there are things in the movie that I, as an American, just don't get. Still, I can think immediately of two memoirs, Jung Chang's Wild Swans and Anchee Min's Red Azalea, that portray individual Chinese characters in depth and with great effectiveness. These are things that director Ye Lou is not able to accomplish. These comments should not be taken as excusing the Chinese government's banning Yihe Yuan from internal distribution and prohibiting Ye Lou from making films for five years. I asked the manager of the theater in which I saw the movie whether Lou had been imprisoned. "Not yet," he said. It should be kept in mind that the old men who still rule China have only been able to survive and prosper because they were once sycophants to the greatest mass murderer in human history.

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• A movie about love (and time?)

  tavira2008-11-30

  This film is about several Chinese people, about how they grow up and how time changes them. It is focused on one couple, the very intense passion that they feel for each other and the paths that life shows them in relation of what they feel in each step of their lives... This movie is centered in love. More exactly, it is centered in the romantic view of life, which is destined to collide with the fact of growing up, because the characters in the film just can't manage to keep their passionate feelings while they start living other things after leaving university. It is as if life and circumstances pushes them to leave behind their memories, the anchor that seems to keep the characters living and knowing that they are someone. I think it is interesting how this is managed as the film goes by, because I recognized this feeling in myself and among my friends: about how, by leaving school, you have the feeling to be adrift in the universe of life. Also, the passion that the characters feel becomes sedated by the tedium of their lives after school. I think the director tries to communicate that feeling: after university, the characters start to get bored with their lives, compared with what they lived in school. It is sad to look how the woman character struggles to keep that feeling alive, but always feeling depressed because she can't grasp that passion that just goes away. They travel, they meet other people, they get jobs, but simply it's not the same. This is also related to the student's protests in China, all the feelings and expectations they generate, and the disillusion they found when they have to confront the real world. Finally, I think what the film communicates, is that every emotion, love, feeling or whatsoever, is seized by time. This is something that the characters just don't get and the reason of why they suffer: they can't accept that they are different from the ones that were young and passionate. Even in long marriages, couples have to reinvent themselves to keep together each other, or simply they fall in the arms of custom. This last thing is what the characters refuse to do, always trying to keep their feelings alive. But that's also the reason of why they suffer, especially the woman character: they live attached to their memories and they leave part of their identity in the past. I think that a phrase that is showed in the french movie "Irreversible" could fit perfectly on this one: TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING. But in this film, this phrase applies in a more subtle way, in something that involves people's identities. I liked the movie. It was one of those which you can't get out of your head for the rest of the day. The acting is good and the music is great. If there is something to criticize, is that the film is a little bit too long for what it express, specially at the second part of the film. I found other criticism unfounded: sex is an important part of the film, since it express passion, and it's definitely NOT a soap opera, because it doesn't have a happy ending and it has a message that you have to discover by thinking and feeling the film. I recommend this one.

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