The message of Lou Ye's film "Summer Palace" seems to be this: depressed people have sex. A lot. There are three major characters in Ye's film that have some obvious issues, and all of them waste no time hopping into bed with each other in an attempt to escape their apparent (and unexplained) pain. The director manages to make this situation somewhat interesting during the first half of the movie, but the last half drags miserably to a conclusion that doesn't seem like a neat wrap-up of the events we've witnessed, but a confession that Ye is just as bored with the movie as the audience is, and he wanted it to be over as much as I did. It's pretty seldom that I come across a film that has me counting down the minutes until the end, but "Summer Palace" managed to do just that.
The story starts with Yu Hong, a girl from a small town in China who gets accepted to Beijing University just before the Tiananmen Square massacre. She makes friends with a girl, Li Ti, and through her meets Zhou Wei, a young man with whom Yu Hong begins a turbulent relationship. This is the interesting half of the film. Despite the fact that Yu Hong doesn't seem to feel much unless she's sleeping with someone, the culture surrounding her, Li Ti and Zhou Wei provides an interesting backdrop.
After the night of the Tiananmen Square incident (an event which I thought was sadly underplayed in the movie), Yu Hong decides to drop out of college and goes back home with an old boyfriend of hers. Li Ti and Zhou Wei, who have been sleeping together (imagine that) go to Berlin with the help of Li Ti's boyfriend who's studying there. We follow all the characters, through Li Ti and Zhou Wei's weird, seemingly one-sided affair (Li Ti is obsessed with Zhou Wei, Zhou Wei appears to be in it only for the sex) and Yu Hong's series of meaningless affairs and relationships. This part of the movie quickly descends into the doldrums. The "full boil" described by Manohla Dargis of the New York Times in a blurb on the DVD's cover quickly cools down to a state of near-stagnancy.
I think perhaps what would have saved "Summer Palace" from its dull and unfortunate fate is a bigger sense of politics. China in the late 80s was full of political unrest among the young, and the movie barely illustrates this point. In fact, the Tiananmen Square massacre is shown as little more than a bunch of excited kids getting beaten down by soldiers, and is an event that seems to have little to nothing to do with the film's main characters. The conflict that stems between them all seems to come from Yu Hong's need to be around Zhou Wei, and Zhou Wei's increasing confusion about what the hell is wrong with Yu Hong.
"Summer Palace" had the potential to be an interesting little movie, maybe some engaging cross between "To Live" and "The Dreamers" (if one can imagine such a thing) but unfortunately the movie takes the mind-numbingly mediocre middle ground and does nothing. It doesn't make any political statements, neither does it try to revolutionize through its love scenes."Summer Palace" has a promising start, but that's all. It is, essentially, a movie that goes nowhere, does nothing and really has nothing to say.