Cannes. "Spring Fever"

By David Hudson on 05/14/2009

[Updated through 5/26]

Mike D'Angelo "sort of liked [Lou Ye's] 'Suzhou River' (2000), which was a knowing and sensual 'Vertigo' riff, but everything he's done since has been as gorgeously inert as the giant redwoods Scotty and Madeleine admire. Both 'Purple Butterfly' (a passionless simulacrum of a spy thriller) and 'Summer Palace' (80s college student experiences political + sexual awakening, audience falls asleep) have a handful of defenders, but it's hard for me to imagine anyone getting behind this deadly soap opera, which involves endless anguished humping and plate-smashing recriminations among a young factory worker, her aloof husband, the arrogant drag queen her husband is fucking behind her back, the amateur private dick hired by the wife to follow the errant husband, who turns out (the amateur dick does) to be bisexual, and the dick's petulant girlfriend."

"Shot clandestinely in Nanjing, central China, on digital equipment - cleanly transferred to 35mm, though murky in interiors - 'Spring Fever' aims to evoke an atmosphere in which characters are swept up in a metaphysical fever, which blurs some sexual inclinations while reinforcing others," writes Derek Elley in Variety. "The screenplay is much better constructed than the untidy 'Summer Palace,' but the pic is still a long, long way from Lou's inventive and involving 'Suzhou River' and flawed but impressively ambitious period drama, 'Purple Butterfly.' As Lou has seemingly catered more and more to Euro tastes (and Western sensibilities), his vision and imagination have become progressively more restricted."

"Impressionism in the cinema is a volatile, tricky technique, as it strives to give a sense of something rather than the thing itself," writes Daniel Kasman in The Auteurs' Notebook. "To pull off something like Mann's 'Miami Vice,' Malick's 'The New World' and Denis's '35 rhums' - where the object escapes the grasp of the camera - one needs a sure hand and an even surer sensibility. Lou Ye's 'Spring Fever' has neither, and confirms, after Summer Palace, that we should be looking elsewhere for interesting Chinese cinema."

Howard Feinstein, writing for Screen, finds that the screenplay is "so convoluted and contains so many loose ends that the intense style (fragmented editing, jerky, handheld camera) only highlights the movie's occasional lapses into incoherence.... Lou Ye references François Truffaut's classic ménage-a-trois 'Jules and Jim' as an inspiration, but the film owes much more to Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai's 'Happy Together.'"

"It's not as if the increasingly complicated and contrived plotting is helped by the poetic and philosophical theme: namely, that we all come to fruition, emotionally, at different times, and move in different directions." Geoff Andrew for Time Out London: "There's an awful lot of bad timing going on in this rather humourless movie. There's a suggestion, towards the end, that we're supposed to feel some kind of infinite sadness about our existential loneliness and vulnerability; but what I felt, despite a scattering of strong scenes, was a growing impatience both with the characters and the trite message."

Cannes has a statement from Lou Ye.

Update: "'Spring Fever' is like a series of emotional firecrackers going off, not sex bombs," writes the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "But Lou does solidify his reputation as one of the most arresting directors of normal, life-size intercourse. In other words: the kind of love you or I might make - sloppy, intense, seemingly real. These are jacked up with the prurience that a shallow stylist would try. There's a charge to the way bodies touch in this. The film is the work of a pop dramatist, traversing Shanghai's streets, nightclubs, and karaoke parlors breaking away the banalities of love poems and songs until the vividness of their underlying ache is undeniable. The bounds of gender and sexual orientation are movable constructs. Imagine that Blur chestnut 'Girls and Boys' with violent outbursts, unexplained roadkill, and busted hearts, and you're halfway there."

Cannes has audio of the press conference, where indieWIRE's Brian Brooks took extensive notes.

Updates, 5/15: "There were a few walkouts," notes Melissa Anderson at Artforum, "but the response at the end of the film was notably indifferent: just the sound of a few hands clapping puncturing the stony silence - a rarity at a festival infamous for lusty booing."

"[W]hile Lou Ye does valiantly attempt to showcase a subsection of mainland Chinese life that's simply not put on screen, he never raises his characters out of their flatly assigned roles, and some, like Luo Haitao's girlfriend Li Jing, are really just doleful ciphers, their dramas impossible to invest in, a lot of sound, fury and shower scenes, signifying nothing," writes Alison Willmore.

Update, 5/18: "For all its graphic sex - gay and straight - and blunt depiction of youthful anomie (as well as suicide and attempted murder), Lou Ye's disorganized 'Spring Fever' proved a major disappointment," blogs J Hoberman for the Voice. "Had the film been made in 1980s Germany, it would have seemed the work of a confused Fassbinder wannabe."

Update, 5/26: "It doesn't work on so many levels it might be astonishing if it weren't just embarassing," writes Christoph Huber at La lectora provisoria.

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Spring Fever," Dream Factory, 2009]

Tags: Cannes 2009, Lou Ye, Spring Fever