Review of Summer Palace

History Is Boring, Let's F*ck

It's too bad the first film to directly portray the Tiananmen Square Massacre treats the event as an inconvenience that interrupts the protagonists' ceaseless humping and histrionic breakdowns. Perhaps it was government censors that forced director Lou Ye to portray the soldiers firing into the air, conforming to the communist party line that few if any students were killed on June 4th, 1989, but the film isn't really about history anyway. Sure, there is some archival news footage of the fall of communism and the handover of Hong Kong back to the Mainland, but the characters seem utterly untouched by global events, instead flopping languidly from bed to bed, city to city, and country to country, expressionlessly going through the motions of life, only occasionally showing emotion when faking an orgasm. In one emblematic scene, two of the main characters meander into a crowd of demonstrators in Berlin who are somehow protesting the Iraq War in 1998. Characters are introduced as quickly and inexplicably as they disappear, and the plot progresses like a stoned teenager recounting an entire season of The Hills. Lou resorts to a mock vérité that feels more like NYPD Blue than Cassavetes, and for fuck's sake, why do all Chinese movies have to have voice overs? If the censors' aim was to portray the youth of China as soulless douche-bags that deserve to get run over by tanks, they totally succeeded. If I wanted to watch 140 minutes of loathsome people awkwardly copulating, I'd hang out in a Midtown club on a Saturday night.

Posted on 01/11/08 by: Lord Grimmak 02:04 AM