Being a big fan of director Lou Ye's previous film Summer Palace, I'm excited to hear that he's back with another film despite the ban being put on him by China's government. Summer Palace debuted in Cannes 2006 without the approval of Chinese censors, who don't take kindly to Lou Ye's film depicting the explicit sexual lives of Chinese students involved in the Tienanmen Square protest. As a result, not only was the film never released in Mainland China, but Lou Ye and his producer were censured and forbidden from making films in the 5 years following.
I'm very glad that rather than abiding to that asinine rule, they've decided to secretly shoot Spring Fever and then label it as a Hong Kong-France production. No doubt Chinese officials will be miffed. The film is also not backing down from the kind of sexuality that made Summer Palace controversial, taking on the story of a heterosexual man entering a threesome with his beautiful girlfriend and a gay man he was spying on.
Most of the reactions haven't been positive, though these are from people who note their dislike of Summer Palace and insist that Spring Fever is better. I remain cautiously optimistic. I think.
Don't forget to check out the press conference video.
"Beyond fests (especially gay ones) and the hardcore arthouse crowd, this overlong and very Euro-flavored “Spring” won’t make many B.O. wickets bloom." - Derek Elley, Variety
"A heterosexual man hired by a woman to spy on her husband's homosexual liaisons becomes seduced by his subject of reconnaissance in "Spring Fever," Lou Ye's artistically uneven, emotionally strained but at times sullenly poetic depiction of a sexually confused love pentangle." - Maggie Lee, The Hollywood Reporter
"I think there’s meant to be a tender love story buried somewhere in all this remote melodrama, but none of the five major characters makes the slightest impression; when one eventually commits suicide, you get the sense it’s mostly just a means of getting the hell out of this boring movie." - Mike D'Angelo, The A.V. Club
"Lou, helped by Zeng Jian’s striking camerawork, captures very well the mood of drift and fragmentation in modern-day urban China. Compelling and messy in equal measure, it’s a cine-letter to the future." - Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph
"While Lou Ye does valiantly attempt to showcase a subsection of mainland Chinese life that's simply not put on screen, he never raises his characters out of their flatly assigned roles, and some, like Luo Haitao's girlfriend Li Jing, are really just doleful ciphers, their dramas impossible to invest in, a lot of sound, fury and shower scenes, signifying nothing." - Alison Willmore, IFC.com
"Borrowing from stories from the 1920s from gifted Chinese author Yu Dafu, director Lou Ye, aided by Zeng Jian’s astonishing camerawork, manages to hit a poignant note with floral imagery in Spring Fever." - Howard Feinstein, Screen Daily
"Some of it hits home, raw and emotional. Other sequences (a karaoke scene, moony shots of Nanjing) thrum with a tender melancholy. Most of it, though, is boring, nonsensical and off-puttingly convinced of its own worth, with even the rough n tumble f--k scenes sure to arouse yawns. " - Jamie Graham, Total Film
