Summer Palace.

"With Summer Palace, Lou Ye speaks more plainly in his own voice, tired at last of affecting Wong Kar Wai's florid style of filmmaking, though he is still treading the Wongian terrain of lovelorn melodrama," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Very similar to his Purple Butterfly, another story of beautiful young things whose personal lives are pinched by the politics of their time, Summer Palace is also less fussy."

"The director's use of jump cuts and a handheld camera, combined with Yu's [Hao Lei] solemnly lyrical and literary narration, makes Summer Palace feel, at times, like a French New Wave film from 1967, with a lot more explicit sex," suggests David Denby in the New Yorker.

Updated through 1/19.

"Summer Palace uses recent events in China's history as a backdrop for an intimate story about young lovers," writes Marcy Dermansky. Its "early, vibrant scenes are aimless and appealing," but: "Ye's back-and-forth storytelling insinuates that the lives of Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are incomplete without each other, but because their young love was never convincing in the first place, the bittersweet conclusion rings hollow."

Writing in the Voice, Julia Wallace finds it "combines flashes of insight and scintillating cinematography - grainy, fumbling, light-blinded - with stretches of inscrutable mediocrity."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update, 1/16: Comparisons with Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers don't quite hold up for Nicolas Rapold, writing in the New York Sun. Summer Palace "stands on its own in its running take on regular lovers in exceptional times, without being either as sappily hackneyed or as artily oblique as that might sound."

Update, 1/18: "[I]n spite of its 2-hour-20-minute length, Summer Palace moves with the swiftness and syncopation of a pop song," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Like Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s, Mr Lou favors breathless tracking shots and snappy jump cuts, and like Mr Godard's, his camera is magnetized by female beauty.... Summer Palace can be seen as a companion piece, or even a sort of sequel, to [Jia Zhangke's] Platform which followed a group of Chinese young people through an earlier period of cultural and social transition, from the early 1970s into the 1980s."

Update, 1/19: "Summer Palace's real triumph is the performance by Hao Lei, as well as the character she plays - a passionate, sulky, headstrong girl who defines herself via her lovers," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at January 15, 2008 3:16 PM