Our fifth dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, our third, our fourth) tackles some of the fall’s bigger ticket items: Rian Johnson’s buzzed-about whodunit, Knives Out; Noah Baumbach’s latest portrait of domestic and individual discord, Marriage Story;…
Set amidst the spy games of Allied and Axis intelligence agencies in Shanghai’s neutral French Concession, Saturday Fiction tracks famed actress and Allied agent Jean Yu (Gong Li) as she — having returned to the city with the cover of assuming the lead role…
Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play is a vicious work that descends into the depths of corruption in both a private enterprise (the events of the film are based on those of the real company named here) and in State government (the implications…
Lou Ye’s 2014 film Blind Massage marked a transition for director, one that took him into broadly more commercial territory for the first time. Based on the popular novel of the same name, the film unsurprisingly concerns the lives of a Nanjing-based community of…
Despite Lou Ye’s reputation for pushing the boundaries of Chinese censorship guidelines – due to his often frank and incisive takes on politics, gender, and sexuality – Mystery proves a confoundingly tame affair. It opens with the antics of privileged, hedonistic youths racing cars…
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…
A film built upon gay male hypersexualization overlaid with some hamfisted prose, Spring Fever turns the sadness of being gay and Chinese into a dry drama that does not say anything new about the LGBTQ experience. The film opens with a jangly driving sequence…
Lou Ye’s Summer Palace is an exasperating experience, full of interesting ideas and an incendiary political backdrop but falling victim to clichés of poeticized romantic longing. Though not a new idea, conflating the political and the personal can be an interesting way to explore how…
The year 2000 was a watershed year for Chinese-language cinema. Milestones like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and In the Mood for Love and Yi Yi saw release alongside lesser-known, but equally important, films like Jia Zhangke’s Platform and Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep (in…
The most striking aspect of Weekend Lover, the directorial debut of Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye, is its palpable sense of existence as a kind of ceaseless struggle. Indeed, the film itself feels practically willed into existence, exhibiting a preponderance of brash style…
