Suzhou River is a story about youthful love awry. An homage to Vertigo both textually and thematically, it doesn't make a meal out of the link and feels very much its own story / direction. The film is often shot how people see, in saccades, in absent mindedness, in a "this dream we call life" way. Structural interest is further enhanced by a protean narrator and riffing with the original story.
The subject matter is "male gaze", the obsessive attention that many men give to women and their appearances. A pungent moment for me was when Mei Mei applies a temporary tattoo of a flower to her inner thigh and then the camera pans up to her impassive glitter-masked face, grimly returning the viewer's gaze.
This is for those whose lives are like the eddies in Suzhou River, ephemeral, contorting, pulled into a personal orbit.
The subject matter is "male gaze", the obsessive attention that many men give to women and their appearances. A pungent moment for me was when Mei Mei applies a temporary tattoo of a flower to her inner thigh and then the camera pans up to her impassive glitter-masked face, grimly returning the viewer's gaze.
This is for those whose lives are like the eddies in Suzhou River, ephemeral, contorting, pulled into a personal orbit.