Lou Ye's "Spring Fever" Shows that Being Banned by the PRC is No Guarantee that a Movie is Good

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters have no monopoly on inexplicable choices. Cannes juries also puzzle me with some regularity. One of their most astounding choices was the 2009 best screenplay to Mei Feng for the not just unoriginal and uninspired but outright murky "Chun feng chen zui de ye wan" "(Spring Fever" is the Enlish abbreviation of "A Night Deeply Drunk on the Spring Breeze") directed (in defiance of a five-year PRC ban on his making movies after the peripheral portrayal of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in "Summer Palace") by Lou Ye.

The plot begins in pretty standard soap opera country, supposedly Nanjing, though at least some of it looks to have been shot in Shanghai with Lin Xue (Jiang Jiaqi) suspecting her husband Wang Ping (Wu Wei), who works in a bookstore, is having an affair and hiring Luo Haitao (Chen Sicheng) to trail him. Actually, the viewer sees Wang Ping with his male lover, travel agent Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao).

Lin Xue invades Jiang Cheng's office, ordering him to cease any contact with her husband. Jiang Chen's willingness to obey is aided by the private detective, Luo Haitao, coming on to him. From one married man right on to another. History repeats itself in that the husband wants to introduce his male lover to the wife. Luo Haitao's wife, Li Jing (Tan Zhuo), is more willing to share and the new threesome goes off on vacation together.

I'm leaving out many melodramatic excesses. The interior scenes are so underlit that I wasn't always sure which married man Jiang Chen was with (flashbacks to Wang Ping or present-tense naked couplings with Luo Haitao). Though the anguish seems influenced by Wong Kar-War, Lou Ye has acknowledged being influenced by "Jules and Jim." I have to say that Chen Sicheng lacks Jeanne Moreau's willfulness and joie de vivre, though Qin Hao seems to have sufficient masochism, especially in drag as he sometimes is in a nightclub.

There are portentous passages from Yu Dafu (1896-1945) - not voiceovers, but read by one character to another. Lines like "Drunken nights without hope, like this one: I spend them wandering outside until the sky grows pale" seem gratuitous telling of what is quite visible! Similarly, the karaoke lyrics are at least as pretentious as they are portentous,

Lou Ye's best film "Suzhou River," as well as "Spring Fever (which prompted a ban from film-making), and this illicit (not just in content but in having been made) film is, of course, also banned in the PRC, so I can forgive the dark and very grainy look, but still think that a banned film-maker should have something to say, or at least something that is not humdrum to show?

Jiang Cheng smokes a lot and the city is remarkably unpopulated. Some of the characters speak Cantonese, others Mandarin.

Though "Spring Fever" is far superior to "Shanghai Panic" (the faintest of faint praise!), but not to "Happy Together" or "East Palace, West Palace." Marginally less annoying than "Lan Yu" was...