Strand Releasing Captures ‘Spring Fever’

Meet with a sea of boos when it won the Best Screenplay Prize at Cannes (the boos came from the adjacent theater where a live broadcast was being watched by critics), the helmer behind Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly and Summer Palace (the film that saw motherland China place a ban on the filmmaker from filmmaking, which not surprisingly didn’t really work) has found a suitor for a film that plenty, including myself, were indifferent towards. Strand Releasing have picked up a title that fills their LBGT mandate in Lou Ye‘s Spring Fever.

This is about a young threesome overcome with erotic longings. Luo Haitao has been hired by Wang Ping’s wife to spy on the passionate relationship between her husband and another man, but slowly loses control of the situation. With his beautiful girlfriend, Li Jing, he is drawn in to the affair, overcome by the fever of drunken spring nights. All are possessed by an exhilarating madness of the senses, a dangerous malady that leads the heart and head astray.

Expect Spring Fever to play at a couple of major North American film festivals before getting a late 2009 release.