After Blind Massage and Summer Palace, here’s a third film by Lou Ye and it’s one of his earliest yet. Another reason for adding this to our list is because it stars Jia Hongsheng who life story was featured in Quitting as well as Zhou Xun who was his real life girlfriend for a while. It also felt appropriate to watch this after visiting Shanghai recently and we even recognized a bridge from our visit in the film.

An unnamed photographer who lives in a flat that overlooks the Suzhou River in Shanghai recounts a story of him and his girlfriend, Meimei. She works in a nightclub where she wears a mermaid costume to swim around inside a water tank and they met when he was hired to shoot a promotional video featuring her. The story then segues to another character, a motorcycle courier named Mardar who roams across the city searching for a girl named Moudan. Most of the events occurred many years ago but the result is that Moudan who was in love with Mardar fled from him, jumped into the Suzhou River and disappeared. Mardar spent some time in jail due to his actions and after his release became obsessed with finding her. One day he sees Meimei in a bar and as she looks exactly like Moudan, is convinced that she is her. Meimei at first treats him as an annoying stalker but eventually seems to be won over by his devotion and his tirelessness in searching for his one true love.

This film leaves me in some confusion as to what the director was going for as he drops hints and threads that lead one way only to abandon everything and go another way. There are some hints at first that Meimei and Moudan really are the same person or else that Mardar is delusional. Another possibility is that the unnamed narrator, being a creative type, is imagining a story as he watches people pass by from his balcony that overlooks the river. Some ambiguity would have added a poetic sensibility to the film and made it more interesting. Yet the film plays out in a completely transparent and concrete manner that leaves absolutely no room for doubt. The removal of any sense of mystery suddenly renders this into a very plain and ordinary romantic story. It’s an incomprehensible decision on the director’s part. Another disappointment is that its opener suggests that it’s about the many different people who live along the river in Shanghai but it turns out to be a very small story about just a few people and the setting doesn’t matter at all.

As a conventional romantic film, I suppose that Suzhou River works well enough. Jia Hongsheng is mostly stoic and impassive yet manages to convey an almost insane level of obsession in his search. Zhou Xun impresses by playing two women who turn out to be very different even if they look the same. The film is shot with all of the trappings of an artistic work, complete with camerawork that has a bit of a cinéma vérité feeling. Unfortunately the core of the film is thoroughly mainstream and really quite traditional. It’s completely at odds with the film’s visual style.

While this is not at all a bad film, it is still very disappointing that it isn’t better. There are so many ways that it could have been better and I’m especially bitter that ultimately it isn’t about the river that runs through Shanghai at all. Chalk it up to a director who has yet to grow into the fullness of his talent I guess.