"Sex and politics are on full boil!" NY Times
"Its sex scenes are mini revolutions!" Guardian
"I got a boner--from all the sex!" TVs Fred Savage, DGA nominee
That is the first impression that the viewer of Summer Palace is supposed to receive. A hot-seat, glorified porno, and that's mostly what the film is. However, it's a bit more high-class than that: Lou Ye has a better eye for photography than your average porno auteur, and he manages to meld the debauchery with political events, whether or not his characters (that happen to be having sex at the time) know what the hell is going on.
I actually liked the film. While the running time was a bit on the long-side, and certain scenes were way too brooding and self-important, there were frequent shines of brilliance in Lou Ye's direction.
The story involves a girl named Yu Hong from a small Chinese town, who is introduced as being strange and strong-willed and in a passionate romance with her boyfriend. Just as soon as she sleeps with him in a "lyrical love scene" in the middle of a field, she says that she's leaving him and going to school in Beijing.
Cut to: Beijing, where disaffected youth smoke like chimneys and have intellectual discussions in their dorm rooms, all the while having an interest in the opposite sex that can only be described as juvenile. There are long, LONG shots of the heroine's face as she stares down her love interest, Zhou Wei, and establishes an obviously otherworldly mind-connection with him, because those scenes and their wonderfully photographed sex-scenes are really the only connection that they seem to have. This is the one issue I had with the film--while everything looks beautiful, passionate, and melancholy, there doesn't seem to be much substance behind Yu's and Zhou's relationship. We're meant to think there is, and there quite possibly may be, but there is not much evidence of it.
Eventually, the students become wise to this whole "communist government" thing and begin to stage huge protests, to which Yu and her female friends seem to know nothing about. The depiction of Tiananmen Square is incredibly effective: Yu seems to drift through the endless throngs of people, in a haze, an outsider trapped in something that she cannot escape from. While at many points the movie seems to be masquerading as something much more important than it really is, this scene is perfect.
Soon after these protests, and in the format of any sweeping love story, Yu and Zhou are inevitably separated by the forces that brought them together and eventually reunited and need to decide whether their love has lasted. In general story arch, the film is undeniably conventional.
It's Lou Ye's outstanding direction that makes the film good. His eye for gorgeous, continuous shots is unprecedented--I could have fallen for the film after the club scene very early in the film, in which corny pop music is playing and Ye deftly maneuvers his camera to view all parts of the club, while still focusing mostly on Yu's and Zhou's connection. There is a very French, new-wave feel to it, while still capturing the lyricism of truly Asian art. The ending is a perfect illustration of this: it is beautiful, it is ambiguous, and it is heartbreaking. (Minus the cheesy, indulgent mini-bios of the character's lives after the film's events--do yourself a favor and press STOP right after the film starts to fade out.)
I stated earlier in my review that Summer Palace is a glorified porno, and that is an exaggeration. While there are about 10 sex scenes, including scenes in a field, in a hallway of a public establishment, and in three or four different bedrooms with all manner of partner pairings, it really is not as bad as you'd think from reading the DVD case. The film would most likely merit an NC-17 rating, but I'm not one to judge. (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is PG-13, and there are full nudity shots in it.) However, the sex scenes really do serve a purpose. Most of the dialogue between lovers consists of very generic, simple sentences, including "What now?", "What's wrong?", "Do you love me?", etc. The real passion is established through the imagery, through the feelings evoked by the director's style, and most noticeably through the outstanding music. The score really is a marvel, though I've heard it criticized as being "atrocious and cliched," two of the last words that came to my mind. The sex scenes only add to the poetic fervor of the character's and of the film itself.
Unless the Chinese government is exceptionally stupid (which is more than possible), I would venture to guess that the banning was on account of the sexual liberty shown in the film. The subplot of political activism and unrest really felt forced, with no real connection to the character's other than their newfound "free-love" feelings, which are revolutionary at this time in China. I couldn't help but comparing the backdrop to Forrest Gump's backdrop of several generations of political and social turmoil--but while in Forrest Gump, the political commentary added to hilarity (I don't care what people say about that movie), in Summer Palace it only slows down the plot, especially in a God-awful transition montage around the film's halfway point. As I previously mentioned, the only scene of relevance is the Tiananmen Square sequence. Another film that is pretty connected in subject matter is Germany's The Lives of Others, a far superior film, demonstrating East Germany's secret police's invasion of privacy and censorship while trying to catch a pair of stage actors who infuse their plays with political satire. However, that is more of a morality tale than a romance, and Summer Palace is almost strictly romance with attempted undertones of political importance.
Once again, I have found myself picking apart and bringing down a film that I actually enjoyed. I didn't love it, since it has its obvious flaws, but it is a good movie, and an excellently photographed one. If you're easily offended by full-frontal nudity and gratuitous sex, you might do best to steer away from this one. But it is a decent, lyrical love story from a very talented director. Its hot-seat political significance should really only be remembered for the reaction of the Chinese government.