Summer Palace (2006) is based on a true story that centers on a young woman named Yu Hong (played by Hao Lei) as she goes on a 20-year journey from the late 1980s to present day China. We first see her as a young girl falling in love with the boy next door named Xiao Jun (Lin Cui) only to move on after being accepted into Beijing University. While attending university, we see her study, make friends, and become involved with the political activity that sweeps the campus. All the while Yu Hong records every thought and feeling she experiences in her diary which becomes the narration of the film.
We see the conditions that she and other college students had to endure and restrictions placed on them by the Chinese government. Through it all she meets and falls in love with a man named Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). It is their tumultuous relationship becomes the main focal point of the film. Yu Hong constantly says in the film that she wants to live and experience things more intensely. Though she is admired by her friends as being very passionate with living there are drawbacks. The intensity of her love for Zhou Wei is so great that they cannot be together. From their breakup she goes through relationships with several different men over the course of the next several years to make up for her loss of Zhou Wei. Her narration of the film, shows how is unable to handle all the conflict and pain that she experiences in these relationships and her inner self.
Time passes, but we can see the internal conflict building within her and Zhou Wei. But both manage to go on. Zhou Wei eventually moves to Germany with a couple of friends, while Yu Hong remains in China. But their minds remain on each other. There are several sequences that you see major events that have occurred over the last twenty years, i.e. Berlin Wall Falling, Britain turning over Hong Kong back to China, etc., intersect with Yu Hong and Zhou Wei’s lives. In a way these events are an analogy with them. One example is when the last British colony turns Hong Kong back over to China, Zhou Wei returns to China and eventually back to Yu Hong.
Directed by Lou Ye, the film has won acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival upon its premiere in 2006. Because of its political subject matter, the film was banned in China. It is a film that is powerful not because of the political satire, but to see how a woman who lives under a suppressed government has liberated herself by her own internal conflict. Hao Lei does an excellent job playing Yu Hong. She embraces all the emotional aspects that make the character a strong, vulnerable character. Xiaodong Guo does a great job playing Zhou Wei. In the beginning you do not like him because of what he does, by the end you sympathize and realize how much he is like Yu Hong.
Ye’s use of actual footage of the historical events depicted in the film makes the viewer a part of the film. Though from time to time you see subtext of years and what happens to the characters you really don’t realize that this film is based on true events until the very end. Summer Palace is a great historical romantic film that almost be compared to Love Story. It can even be considered existential due to philosophical narration of the film’s main character. I recommend this film to those who like historic romantic films.