Suzhou River (2000)

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Fantastic!

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Told through flickering cameras, jump cuts, fluorescent lights, visual fragments and burnt colors, this is a romance within a romance, a narrator within a narrator searching for a girl he lost. He's a cameraman, someone tasked with seeing; he watches her every day as she comes along the bridge to an apartment they share. As he waits he imagines a story she told him about a man who spent his life searching for a girl he lost. Imagines her in the girl within the story's place, until that girl disappeared in the river. His own girl emerged from water the first time he saw her, mermaid in the club aquarium.It's about his girl who never came back one day, vanished into air. The whole is narrated from the end, with the nested story about heartbreak as wondering about love, how people can truly do it. The river standing in for transient life that carries away the past. It's not quite Kar Wai, albeit in the same vein of languorous longing that stirs electrifying poetry out of streets. It's a bit loose in shape, pieces of daydream that float, and very much influenced by French notions of layered narrative.Noir Meter: not a noir

This is a wonderful movie. I am most taken with Zhou Xun (Meimei/Moudan). She played both roles impressively by giving each of them a character that is totally different from the other. Never once allowing the audience to believe that other than the looks (and the mermaid), nothing else about them is the same.Other then that... everything else about 'Vertigo' and stuff were mentioned by the others, so i shall not go into that.Great movie. One of my faves of all time.

The action of this film is so slow that I couldn't help being disturbed by the popcorn muncher behind me two rows back. But, I've been thinking about it for days. It's images are nowhere as near as beautiful, but it reminded most of Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers". The scenes are so sparse that you can't help but to focus on the simplest of details on the screen...a roll of toilet paper on a bed and each passing character all get connected to the story line by the films end. And even though there is ample reason to connect the filthy river to the source of the main characters problem it is clear that the river that the title is describing to is the vast population of disconnected people that haven't a clue what is happening to them.

Suzhou River's beginning represents an extremely compelling film. It has it all - a great narrative, great acting, great score, and it is emotionally involving. But the director/screenwriter throws it all away when he decides simply to revert back to Sir Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Vertigo is one of those films that is impossible to top, so it is just a waste of time to try. Here is my experience during Suzhou River, after having enjoyed the first 30 minutes or so immensely: I hear the score sampling Bernard Herrmann's Vertiginous theme, and see the camera quoting the film, and my mind immediately jumped back on my dreamlike memories of Vertigo. It's as if Suzhou River disappeared. Near the end, the film started to become a little more original, and my daydreams faded, but I was pretty lost at that point.Don't get me wrong. Suzhou River is still a fine film. I would actually like someone to remake most of it, taking out the Vertigo homage and inserting something more original. 7/10