Reviews
Spring Fever | Review
Taboos That are Tattooed: Ye loses sense of his message in poetic essay
Spring is the season when flowers bloom and where solitude is worse than terminal cancer. Perhaps having more to do with the guerilla style and clandestine limitations of the production than the filmmaker’s true intentions, Lou Ye’s embraces a more naturalistic, behind closed doors approach with his fourth embargoed offering. A heavily flawed film that does a disservice to its quintet of characters by abruptly ending each character’s final chapter before it even begins making Spring Fever a film that never manages to find itself. Audiences who’ve followed his past efforts such as Purple Butterfly and Summer Palace will be puzzled by erotica without reason, by the undefined terms in which the characters are set in and the lack of dramatic focus.
Said to be inspired by Jules et Jim, at first, Ye proposes a difficult love triangle featuring a wife who hires a private eye (who looks more like a delivery boy) to track down her hubby who she suspects of cheating on her, only to find out that the hubby has a lover and that lover is a man. The story-line one ups itself when the hired help also wants in on the action, well sort of.
Quoting from 1930’s writer Yu Dafu’s poetic renderings on the restlessness that comes with the arrival of spring, the characters come across like a basket of unripe fruit, where each piece is individually ready rather than ripe at the same peak time. For the film’s entire length, this sentiment is repeatedly applied to each new relationship that develops – which is so categorically different from the film’s opening sequence where two men, hand on hand, drive up to a secluded home far away from public view and engage in full thrust activity, the film’s only assured act.
This might be remembered for the courageous actors that embody this restless spirits, a filmmaker in defiance mode and in defence of his artistic freedom but Spring Fever is most likely going to be thought of for the muted coloration, claustrophobic-styled, Zeng Jian’s grainy-like and the hand-held jerking around of the frame. Visually the film suffers from the discomfort of a faulty screenplay where characters are left hanging rather than explored. This might indeed be worse than a bad poetry reading.
Reviewed at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Main Competition Section.
115 Mins. May, 13th, 2009
Rating 1.5 stars
