Love and Bruises, which Lou Ye made during his five-year, government-imposed ban from filmmaking in China, is a tale of l’amour fou set, appropriately enough, in Paris. However, the grand romanticism that usually marks such stories is replaced here by a grimly repetitive pattern of lust and violence which, while often unpleasant to witness, strikes one as a more realistic depiction of desperate and obsessive love affairs. The opening scene plunges us immediately into the high-pitched dramatic register that characterizes…
