Though made in 2006, its American release could not have been better timed.
Comment
03/21/08
Summer Palace (2008)
68 %
Reviews Counted: 25 Fresh: 17 Rotten:8 Average Rating: 6.2/10
Consensus:
Though it suffers from excessive length and inconsistent pacing, Summer Palace is held aloft by Hao Lei's riveting performance.
Runtime: 2 hrs 20 mins
Synopsis: China, 1989 Two young lovers play out their complex, erotic, love/hate relationship against a volatile backdrop of political unrest. Beautiful Yu Hong leaves her village, her family and her boyfriend to study in Beijing, where she discovers a world of intense sexual and emotional... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Lei Hao, Xiaodong Guo, Ling Hu, Xianmin Zhang
Director: Ye Lou
Screenwriter: Ye Lou, Feng Mei, Ma Yingli
Producer: Li Fang, An Nai, Sylvain Bursztejn
Composer: Peyman Yazdanian
Screenwriter: Ye Lou, Feng Mei, Ma Yingli
Producer: Li Fang, An Nai, Sylvain Bursztejn
Composer: Peyman Yazdanian
Reviews
It can overwhelm you and puzzle and repel you, sometimes within moments.
03/21/08
It benefits from a riveting performance by newcomer Hao, but the whole is sadly unsatisfying.
03/13/08
The saying goes "There's a time and a place for everything, and it's called college." Who knew that included actually caring about something?
03/10/08
Search out this vivid film in a theater. Don't let the sacrifices he [Director Lou Ye] made be in vain.
02/29/08
Top Critic
Mopey-soapy as it sometimes gets, though, this is intelligent, passionate stuff.
02/29/08
Set against the tumultuous year of 1989, this vividly colorful melodrama of Chinese youth's sex and politics links the initimate and personal with the broader social forces in intriguing, fascinating ways.
01/28/08
Despite its problems, Summer Palace is still a good film thanks to [its] sweep-away moments.
01/24/08
The film becomes less and less involving as it spins out its excessive 140-minute running time.
01/22/08
I still must recommend Summer Palace, especially for the remarkably strong performance by Hao Lei as Yu Hong, the daughter of a shopkeeper in the provinces.
01/18/08
Top Critic
Truth be told, Summer Palace feels more like an artier St. Elmo’s Fire than anything else.
01/17/08
A torrid sexual romance between two students at Beijing University set against the backdrop of changes simmering in China in 1989.
01/15/08
Combines flashes of insight and scintillating cinematography -- grainy, fumbling, light-blinded -- with stretches of inscrutable mediocrity.
01/15/08
In truth, I’ve never seen so much lovemaking in an aboveground film, but the revelation, and great triumph, of Lou’s work is that these scenes are never pornographic -- that is, never separated from emotion.
01/14/08
Ye's back-and-forth storytelling insinuates that the lives of Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are incomplete without each other, but because their young love was never convincing in the first place, the bittersweet conclusion rings hollow.
01/11/08
With Summer Palace, Lou Ye speaks more plainly in his own voice, tired at last of affecting Wong Kar Wai's florid style of filmmaking, though he is still treading the Wongian terrain of lovelorn melodrama.
01/11/08
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