“Spring Fever” won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival this year, where it competed for the Palme D’Or. We missed it in Cannes because it played early and we arrived late, but being a fan of its director, Lou Ye, we finally caught up with it at TIFF last month.
Lou Ye began his career on a bum note – the gorgeously shot but emotionally hollow Wong Kar-Wai riff “Purple Butterfly” – but his second feature, last year’s “Summer Palace,” was seen by most as a vast improvement; it’s a bold and explicit work that was banned by the Chinese government, and led to Lou himself being barred from making further films for a duration of five years.
Its decades-long story of a young girl coming of age and eventually navigating the travails of adulthood, parallels a sexual and political revolution in modern China, evoking the latter during a memorable, appropriately frenetic scene set during the 1988 Tiananmen Square riots. At two hours and 20 minutes, it can seem a bit unwieldy and even long winded, but its potent subject matter and the harrowing, fearless performance of Lei Hao in the lead – not to mention Lou’s newfound individualist aesthetic, a swooning mixture of gritty imagery and roving, fluid camerawork that served to divorce Lou from those earlier Wong comparisons – make just about all of “Summer Palace’s” largely minor shortcomings (it’s over-extending final third, the level of focus given to secondary characters) easy to overlook. As such, Lou’s film can be put in a class with Jia Zhang-ke’s phenomenal, similarly themed 2002 epic “Platform” as a work of politically-charged, socially-conscious and deeply human filmmaking, depicting the complex adjustment period young people faced in a heavily western-influenced era of China, as the country turned toward consumer capitalism.
So, on the heels of “Summer Palace,” Lou’s uneven and oddly aloof season-centric follow-up, “Spring Fever,” should be seen as a disappointment. It’s about 20 minutes shorter than Lou’s previous film and yet feels 20 minutes longer. It’s scope is decidedly less ambitious and the minor issues Lou had in the development of characters in ‘Palace’ are increased ten-fold here. First and foremost, the circumstances of its production are worth mention, as Lou disobeyed his state mandate and shot ‘Fever’ on the sly during a very short filming period. His defiance is emblematic of his latest film’s content, as he once again throws a middle finger to the Chinese government, depicting explicit sex as an act of rebellion against an oppressive and unsympathetic social and political climate. The problem is that the film is far more interesting for its extenuating circumstances, and when you consider its aims and ambitions, than it is as a compelling piece of narrative fiction. And this wasn’t the case with “Summer Palace.” For ‘Fever,’ Lou once again sets out to capture the restless spirit of China’s marginalized youth, this time in present day, but like the director’s debut, this film never catches fire emotionally, and with mostly nondescript, unengaging performances, it can be difficult to follow exactly what’s going on.
“Spring Fever” revolves around two gay men (one closeted, one not), seen at the start of the film sneaking off to a secluded retreat for a romantic rendezvous, and engaging in the kind of passionate, uninhibited sex that lent such vigor and emotional complexity to “Summer Palace.” (Here, there’s that same feeling of Lou’s enthusiastic want for provocation, but, and perhaps just do to desensitization, it’s not as effective.) Of the two men, the “out” one is essentially our central character, seen in long, handheld takes, cruising gay bars and drifting aimlessly from one dive to the next, often concealing his eyes behind a pair of dark glasses and striding through crowds with the kind of contagious confidence of one of Quentin Tarantino’s macho tough guys. His closeted lover is softer spoken, living with his wife and doing his best to maintain an ordinary public appearance, compartmentalizing his two lives. Eventually, the man’s wife begins to suspect him of cheating, and when she discovers it’s with another man, her tireless disapproval and her own personal devastation fills the weak-spirited man with guilt and confusion. Things become more complex when a third gay man, with a girlfriend of his own, enters the picture, his arrival completing a loose love quadrangle.
What should vibrate with the same intensity and verve of “Summer Palace’s” every scene, feels both awkwardly staid and on occasion melodramatic and contrived. The plot here is way too complex for being so uninteresting, and the relationships feel fractured in a way that makes it difficult to invest in these characters.
Still, the aesthetic pleasures are just as rich and rewarding as those of ‘Palace,’ with the cinematography this time around being even more gritty and abrasive, helping the film escape inevitable comparisons to – again – Wong Kar-Wai, specifically his seminal 1997 contentious gay romance “Happy Together.” Whereas Wong chose a more opulent, woozy visual pallet, Lou gravitates further toward the unaffected, bare-bones realism of early Jia Zhang-ke, but differentiates in his preference toward handheld over the static formalism Jia and many other mainland Chinese filmmakers tend to favor. This makes Lou one of the more exciting names in a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, and also makes “Spring Fever” look better in retrospect.
However, the major difference between Wong and Lou’s two films is not aesthetic, but stems from Wong’s ability to find a powerful emotional center beneath the surface sheen, and “Happy Together” is most memorable for the affecting relationship at its core, as portrayed by Leslie Cheung in a legendary performance as the brash loner, and Tony Leung as his more grounded and emotional foil. Both archetypes are seen again in “Spring Fever,” but the characters which embody them are also defined by them, and we never get a great sense as to who they are, as evidenced in this writer’s decision to not designate any of them by name.
This is perhaps a byproduct of Lou’s purposefully subdued approach, which avoids the lyrical romanticism of “Happy Together’s” most transcendent passages (such as a long, breathtaking pan of a waterfall) in favor of stark observation. And that can work, as Lou proved in “Summer Palace” and as Jia proved with “Platform,” two films which are less about characters and more about the times they live in; but “Spring Fever” doesn’t carry the same sociopolitical heft as those films, and thus the same treatment proves bland rather than serving to place focus on the broader themes at work. Still, “Spring Fever” is essentially only a minor misstep in the career of one of mainland China’s most talented new filmmakers, so Lou Ye will hopefully disobey his state mandate again very soon. [B-] –Sam C. Mac