This is a response for DICK STEEL comments on the movie. You should put his comment on the end of the line. It's useless!!!!The movie is a piece of art! The director,the actors,the music,the editing,everything fit smoothly in this picture.The writer- director did a phenomenal job telling the story.I felt the soul of the director in this picture.I think it is one of the best films I've seen in the last couple of years.If you have no sensibility as a person,don't try to criticize somebody who put his mind ,time and soul in telling a story,because you confuse the soft porn movies with this one.The way that the director shows sex is in the most realistic and sincere way possible. If he wouldn't use sex in telling the story, the characters might not be so well defined . If somebody doesn't have an understanding of art ,and view the movie with a preconceived perception about sex,then don't see this movie!We don't need your opinion. Go see spider man 3,and enjoy,bla,bla ,bla!!!!

This Cannes Festival 2006 entry by the director of Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly (enjoyng very limited US theatrical release in early 2008) is more unwieldy but also bolder and more authentic than its predecessors, while still as moony and emotional and indebted to Wong Kar-wai and the French New Wave. You could compare this to Dr. Zhivago or Splendor in the Grass but despite its intense period flavor at times--the cluttered dorm rooms stay with you as do the rushing demonstrators, and the progression from bikes to nice cars and email is subtle but unmistakable--it hasn't got the structure or plot of the usual generation-spanning films; it's a hymn to love-longing posing as a contemporary historical epic. As such, it's poised for failure and doomed to be dismissed by many. But it's really great fun, a fluent, flowing, committed film with more to think about and respond to than much better-made and more tightly-edited work. And after it was shown at Cannes without official permission from home, it got Lou banned from film-making in China for five years.Full of intense realistic sex and frontal nudity that would be daring anywhere not to mention China , Summer Palace focuses on a passionate young woman who comes from the country to study at Beijing University just before the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and massacre of 1988, and though it brilliantly evokes the excitement, freedom, and experimentation of that period for what is essentially the director's own generation (Purple Butterfly dealt with the 1930's), and it gives a sense of the chaos and horror that follows--this extended, breathtaking Tiananmen-period sequence is a tour de force--the politics are peripheral to protagonist Yu Hong (Hao Lei) and the intense love addiction she shares with Zhu Wei (Guo Xiaodong). But when the repression comes, Xiao Jun (Cui Lin), Yu Hong's high school boyfriend, with whom she had intense sex at the film's outset, comes to rescue her and take her back to Tumen, in the country. The turbulent give and take of man-woman relationships is as intense at times as anything in D.H. Lawrence, but with a sexual explicitness Lawrence achieved only in Lady Chatterley.As played by the striking and talented Hao Lei, Yu Hong is a hell of a young woman, beautiful, alive, articulate, philosophical--her diary provides voice-over for many of the film's scenes--willful, and never satisfied with Zhou Wei, but never able till the end (fourteen years later) to let him go either. She doesn't want him, she says, but when she is with him she is happy. Any critique of the movie has to recognize that this is what it's about.It's quite true that (once again) rain is used excessively, but like many a filmmaker before him Lou Ye recognizes that rain, cigarettes, alcohol and intense sex by good looking people are enough to make a movie atmospheric and sexy and compulsively watchable. Jaunty Chinese pop songs and bursts of passionate classical strings are used with a broad hand, but they always work in context.Summer Palace is too long, and its wild abandon catches up with it in the diffuse, occasionally irrelevant sequences of the second half. When the political repression comes and Wei goes to Berlin along with Hong's best girlfriend Li Ti (Hu Lingling) and her boyfriend Ryi Gu (Zhang Ziannin), and there are details of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Perestroika that have far less urgency, the whole mood dissipates and the focus meanders. Hong, who's already caught Li Ti with the love of her life Zhou Wei, drifts or rather plunges greedily from one man to another. There's an abortion, a bike accident, adultery, a suicide, and other events, including a bittersweet reunion, but these are just blips in the long meditation on love-longing and life.Shown at Cinema Village in New York City January-February 2008.

Continuing my weekend of R21 movies, given that almost every screen in Singapore is showing Spider-Man 3 at the moment, and gives a clear indication on how the other blockbusters in the next 2 months will be treated as well. The Passion was a disappointment, and Summer Palace, somehow didn't live up to its hype, probably drawing curious audiences by the banning of its director Lou Ye from making films in the Mainland for the next 5 years, because he had failed to obtain official permission before screening Summer Palace overseas.In any case, the same old marketing gimmick was to hype that this as the most erotic movie from China, and naturally drew audiences in like bees to honey. I've long classified broadly that movies of the romance genre can usually be grouped into the romantic comedies which Hollywood does well enough, and the romantic tragedies which try to bring out those tears. I've forgotten one more group, so add this to the broad classification now - those that want to titillate. Summer Palace attempts to explore relationships from its leads against the historical backdrop of change in China, but falls flat and seemed to prefer to focus on humping.And even that it degenerates itself into soft porn territory, but at least soft porns are being honest about it. The story is neither a tragedy, or comedy, just plain boring drama infused with plenty of sex, which becomes meaningless, and mechanical after a while with repeated actions that drills down to lack of skills in bed. Both the action and the characters lack the emotional core that grabs the attention of the audience and engage some cerebral on why they are doing what they're doing.Yu Hong (Lei Hao) is a village girl staying near the border of China and North Korea, and qualified for Beijing University in the late 80s. Leaving behind her shopkeeper father and a postal service boyfriend who deflowered her in the middle of a road late one night, she goes to the big city, but inside is quite unhappy about it. You know, she's one of those girls with huge emotional baggage problems that nobody, including herself, understands why.Friendship comes in the form of fellow hostel mate Li Ti (Ling Hu), who introduces her to Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong) at one of those jam and hop sessions, and thereafter they become sex partners trying to heat up the screen. It becomes love found, love lost, making love, love lost, love found, you get the idea. We have confused characters who do not know what to do with each other, and to make things worse, they're promiscuous too, making everything quite frivolous in their quest to satisfy their lust for sex. Even the direction and story became schizophrenic, and with the lack of skill, breezes through events like the Tiananmen Incident, and the fall of Communism with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev's resignation, Yeltsin's ascension to power, and the likes, with just archived images, and subtitles indicating the event and the year. It's cheap, lazy film-making. Before you know it, it's down to the last hour where the characters have grown up, and apart in different countries.There's a general feeling of lost, and if that's the filmmakers' intent, they have succeeded. Perhaps the best part is the reunion, where I thought is the only time when it's realistic with the feeling of helplessness and being tongue tied when meeting up with a loved one after donkey years - things are never the same again, and could never be the same anymore, and do you wish to hold onto the past, or move on to your own future?Despite the pretentious plot and characters, the movie does feature an excellent eclectic soundtrack, and there thankfully helped keep everyone awake. Otherwise it's as hokey as the inscription on the tombstone - unless it's a mega tombstone, I don't see how those words could have been inscribed on it without running out of space.

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.