Time Out's Film Screenings: Suzhou River

Time Out's Film Screenings: Suzhou River

Sunday 13 November, 4.15pm, Glam, Free
Every month, Time Out Shanghai shows one of the greatest Chinese films of all time for free at Glam, M on the Bund, with free popcorn and specially tailored drinks. This month, we're showing number 17 on our list, Lou Ye's Suzhou River.

Dir Lou Ye, 2000; Drama/Romance

A lunatic love story and existential film noir in one, Suzhou River jitters with yearning and virility with its roaming handheld camera, impetuous jump-cuts and quixotic twists on petty mobsters and elusive broads.

Chronicling two separate love affairs, each involving a take on the hardboiled hero, and a woman who may or may not be the same person in both, its aesthetic debt to Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express is unavoidable.

The long-winded voice-over storytelling, movie poster close-ups and self-conscious glee in deploying a number of unreliable narrators to prevent the audience from being able to pin down a single version of events are certainly reminiscent of Wong’s film. Its device of doubling has precedents from Shakespeare to Dostoyevsky, but the film’s many derivations do nothing to detract from the fact that it pulses with an ecstatic romantic derring-do that has been missing from Chinese cinema for years.

'A terrific romantic-dramatic landscape, great exploratory urban filmmaking, and my favorite of Zhou Xun’s performances' - Maya Rudolph, post-production supervisor and writer, dGenerate Film

To reserve your free spot, send the word 'film' to our WeChat account.