Word: suzhou
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...true scent of romantic obsession, one would have to go east: to the Chinese Peony Pavilion, Hong Kong director Yonfan's love story of two women (played by Japan's Rie Miyazawa and Taiwan's Joey Wong) in a Suzhou noble house. The film is so saturated in the sad glamour of their love that style becomes substance. The women don't make their sexual affinity explicit; but one can always feel the breath of the other's erotic interest, and the air goes humid with promise. Seeing Peony Pavilion is like getting high on the opium smoke a beautiful...
...movies. Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan) and Jacob Cheung (Hong Kong) went to France; Cheung also touched down in Africa, as did Iran's Abbas Kiarostami. And although Hong Kong is now officially part of the People's Republic, a trip to Beijing (for Mabel Cheung and Stanley Kwan) or Suzhou (for Yonfan) can still be a journey into the exotic or forbidden unknown...
...romantic obsession: Yonfan's Peony Pavilion. Again we meet two women who forge a deep friendship, and a man who tests that bond. This film, though, is so saturated in the sad glamour of their love that style becomes substance. The moving camera, the gorgeous homes and gardens of Suzhou, the handsome people with complex urges?they all seem to swoon in the telling of a story about Jade (radiant Japanese star Rie Miyazawa), a Kunqu Opera singer who marries into a noble house and falls into a near-lesbian relationship with her new master's mannish cousin Rong (Joey...
...leave you someday," a slim beguiler (Zhou Xun) asks her beau, "would you look for me forever?" This being a film noir, Shanghai-style, she has to drown in the dirty Suzhou River, then re-emerge as someone else. She could be Kim Novak in Vertigo, hijacked into a James M. Cain plot and photographed in the grainy, high-contrast glamour of a Wong Kar-wai romance. Lou Ye lays out a ravishing wasteland of femmes fatales and lovelorn tough guys--all in 79 minutes. So it's in Mandarin? After Crouching Tiger that's no longer an excuse...