Yihe yuan

Plot synopsis:
Spanning several cities and over a decade, Summer Palace tells the story of Yu Hong (played by Hao Lei), a young woman from the border-city of Tumen, who is accepted to the fictional Beiqing University, a name that evokes either Peking University ("Beida") or Tsinghua University ("Qinghua"). While in school, Yu Hong meets Li Ti, her best friend (played by Hu Lingling), and Zhou Wei, her college boyfriend and the love of her life (played by Guo Xiaodong). The film is divided into two parts. The first begins in the late 1980s (subtitles inform the audience of the place and year at various points in the film), as Yu Hong enters the university. Lonely and isolated despite the cramped living conditions, Yu Hong eventually befriends another student, Li Ti, who introduces her to her boyfriend Ruo Gu (played by Zhang Xianmin), and Ruo Gu's friend Zhou Wei. Yu Hong and Zhou Wei embark upon a passionate but volatile love affair just as political forces are moving towards Tiananmen Square.
Two events then bring the first half of the film to a close: First, Zhou Wei, incensed at the jealousy and emotional instability of his girlfriend, begins to have an affair with Li Ti; and second, the crackdown occurs on the students on Tiananmen Square and on the campus of Beida. During all of this, Yu Hong's old boyfriend Xiao Jun (played by Cui Jin) from Tumen arrives and the two of them leave, Yu Hong deciding that she will drop out from the university.
The film then fast forwards several years, as Lou Ye intersperses the travels of his three main characters with news footage of the end of the Cold War, and the 1997 Hong Kong handover. Yu Hong has left Tumen again, first for Shenzhen, and then for the central China city of Wuhan, while Li Ti and Ruo Gu have moved to Berlin. Yu Hong is unable to forget Zhou Wei, and has empty affairs with a married man and a kind but quiet mailroom worker. The film follows her disaffection with society and her use of sex as a substitute for contentment. Eventually discovering that she is pregnant, Yu Hong gets an abortion and moves to Chongqing where she marries.
Li Ti, Ruo Gu, and Zhou Wei, meanwhile, live a quiet life as expatriates in Berlin. While Li Ti and Zhou Wei still occasionally make love, the former quietly realizes that the latter does not love her. Though the three friends appear happy, when Zhou Wei plans to return home to China and settle in the city of Chongqing, Li Ti suddenly commits suicide. There he connects with former classmates who in turn point him to Yu Hong's email address.
After more than ten years, Zhou Wei and Yu Hong at last reunite in the resort city of Beidaihe. While they embrace, they ask each other, "Now what?" When Yu Hong leaves, ostensibly to buy drinks, Zhou Wei understands that they can never be together and leaves as well.

Tags: romantic

Review:
If we were to think of the backdrop of the movie, set in the late 80's, Tiananmen incident, the chant for democracy, all this would have let you understand that the China then was not a China that many could understand.The China up till the 80s was probably such a controlled and suppressed place to live in, and when these suppressed feelings and emotions were suddenly set free, it was like an explosion.
(The movie also takes place briefly in Germany, the other part of the world where significant social change was occurring in 1989)."Summer Palace" plays almost like the autopsy of a romantic obsession, attempting to get at the root of why we love in the way that we do.
The closest she can come to grasping this paradox is when she says to Zhou Wei: "I want to break upbecause I can't leave you." Love is seen almost as a form of mental illness in this film - as a debilitating, all-consuming condition that one is powerless to control or "cure" but which, if left unchecked, can become the single dominant force in a person's life (we rarely see Yu Hong studying, let alone going to class).
One can attempt to fill the void with other loves, but the heart always comes back to the same place."Summer Palace" is long and occasionally repetitious and the political aspects aren't as effectively integrated into the story as they perhaps might have been, but the movie is beautifully acted by Lei Hao and Xiaodong Guo, among others, and features incisive and sensitive direction by Ye Lou (who, along with Feng Mei and Ma Yingli, co-authored the screenplay).
The last hour of the film - so filled with longing and regret as the characters age and attempt to come to terms with the special thing they have lost - is particularly lyrical and heartbreaking and will haunt you long after the movie is over.All told, "Summer Palace" is an intelligent and moving rumination on that mysterious force we call love..
Lou Ye's "Summer Palace" ("Yihe yuan") has plenty of frontal nudity and a fair number of (not very attractive) sex scenes, but that's not why the movie was banned by Beijing, and Ye forbidden to work in the film industry for five years.More likely, official displeasure was incurred by the film's powerful recreation of the Tiananmen events of 1989, from the students' point of view - and, coincidentally, equaling Tolstoy's representation of the chaos of war in the Borodino scenes of "War and Peace." And yet, all that is besides the point.
Lei Hao becomes the character in a naked, unselfconscious, totally believable way - she alone make "Summer Palace" a must-see film (except that you can't).Ye's way of telling the story is personal, iconoclastic, dragging here, speeding up there, taking us to Berlin (?!), unintentionally nonlinear, showing Yu Hong is similar situations time and again - and yet slowly spinning an intelligent, poetic subtext in the background.Hard as it may be to imagine, "Summer Palace" has something in common with Alain Resnais' "Last Year in Marienbad," in its wistfulness, lack of specific believability and yet presenting a feeling that makes perfect "sense." There are a hundred things "wrong" with Ye's work and yet it's one of the more memorable films in years..
It is focused on one couple, the very intense passion that they feel for each other and the paths that life shows them in relation of what they feel in each step of their lives...This movie is centered in love.
More exactly, it is centered in the romantic view of life, which is destined to collide with the fact of growing up, because the characters in the film just can't manage to keep their passionate feelings while they start living other things after leaving university.
I think it is interesting how this is managed as the film goes by, because I recognized this feeling in myself and among my friends: about how, by leaving school, you have the feeling to be adrift in the universe of life.Also, the passion that the characters feel becomes sedated by the tedium of their lives after school.
This is also related to the student's protests in China, all the feelings and expectations they generate, and the disillusion they found when they have to confront the real world.Finally, I think what the film communicates, is that every emotion, love, feeling or whatsoever, is seized by time.
But in this film, this phrase applies in a more subtle way, in something that involves people's identities.I liked the movie.
You could compare this to Dr. Zhivago or Splendor in the Grass but despite its intense period flavor at times--the cluttered dorm rooms stay with you as do the rushing demonstrators, and the progression from bikes to nice cars and email is subtle but unmistakable--it hasn't got the structure or plot of the usual generation-spanning films; it's a hymn to love-longing posing as a contemporary historical epic.
And after it was shown at Cannes without official permission from home, it got Lou banned from film-making in China for five years.Full of intense realistic sex and frontal nudity that would be daring anywhere not to mention China , Summer Palace focuses on a passionate young woman who comes from the country to study at Beijing University just before the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and massacre of 1988, and though it brilliantly evokes the excitement, freedom, and experimentation of that period for what is essentially the director's own generation (Purple Butterfly dealt with the 1930's), and it gives a sense of the chaos and horror that follows--this extended, breathtaking Tiananmen-period sequence is a tour de force--the politics are peripheral to protagonist Yu Hong (Hao Lei) and the intense love addiction she shares with Zhu Wei (Guo Xiaodong).
The turbulent give and take of man-woman relationships is as intense at times as anything in D.H. Lawrence, but with a sexual explicitness Lawrence achieved only in Lady Chatterley.As played by the striking and talented Hao Lei, Yu Hong is a hell of a young woman, beautiful, alive, articulate, philosophical--her diary provides voice-over for many of the film's scenes--willful, and never satisfied with Zhou Wei, but never able till the end (fourteen years later) to let him go either.
They go out dancing with her boyfriend and another friend, Zhou Wei. She soon knows: this is the love of her life.This is the start of a story about love, mostly from the viewpoint of Yu Hong, the girl.
I really liked how the director fit love making scenes so integral into the movie.
Also, at times the pace of events is quite high, so it may help me to capture all of it better.I rate this movie as one of the highlights of the festival: It's probably also the best movie from China that I have seen in the last two years: 9/10.Crew Trivia: Cinematographer Qing Hua was a classmate in film school of Yu Wang, the director of photography of Suzhou River (the director's breakthrough film).
According to the director, the events at the square mark a change in the lives of the main characters.Connection Trivia: Asked about being influenced or inspired by "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", director Lou Ye says that he is a big admirer of Kundera's novel, not so much the film adaptation.Screenplay Trivia: Asked about the possible difficulty of having a young woman being the center of the story, director / screenwriter Lou Ye says that it made it actually easier.
Lou ye's film summer palace is really a good exercise of great cinema, that kind of movie makes you think about it even after have watched it..Is one of those films that I call hard to watch, there are too much pain in it, but that is what in art I always call, find the beauty of the sadness, when a film can make you feel different kind of emotions means that the movie have succeed and summer palace is a great success...for me is hard to understand the girl's mind in that film,because the whole movie she seems lost, looks like she is unable to be happy and when she can be, she avoid it...same happen with some of the other characters of the film..this film can be classified like a tragedy without hope.
This is an ambitious film about the stalled maturation of an idealistic but troubled young woman flanked by the Tiananmen Square protests, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China.
Politics aside, and they are on the side, this is a remarkable film in its honest portrayal of failure, not of personal character necessarily, but of circumstance.This is another film that got its director and producer banned for five years from making films in China.
we see a young girl encountering her first experiences with love and sex.set at the decor of the huge changes China is undergoing in the mid-eighties.She is excepted at university and meets a handsome guy she's so overpowering in love with , it's scary...wow , the acting , directing ,editing, photography...is breathtaking..the story sometimes heartbreaking..trough sidesteps we are witnessing the student uproar at tianamen square etc.the 2 main characters loose sight of each other and we follow moments of their separate lives..
This is the worst Chinese movie ever made and I am so shameful of Lou Ye. I personal experienced the Tian'an'men Square incidence and pretty much understood what that student generation looked like.
If you like this movie, before making your own comment, try to contact your Chinese friends who had been through the transformations in late 80s and early 90s, they will tell you what the real life is.
I can already see how some people who read this cry out: "This is not supposed to be about entertainment, it's about emotions, a mirror of the time and place, it's thought-provoking, beautifully shot, if you don't like it, you should go back to watching the Fast and the Furious", etc.!
And it probably took some courage to make because it features the demonstrations at Tian An Men Square in June 1989, which is still kind of a taboo today in China (don't get your hopes up, though: you just see a crowd demonstrating and throwing bricks at a burning truck for a few minutes; the political background is never mentioned or even hinted at, nor does anything else happen, besides the main characters being scared and confused and running around inside the student dormitory looking for each other).
I think a big problem i have with this movie is the fact that it takes itself so very seriously and the characters feel sorry for themselves all the time because of how tough they have it.
They have to deliver pseudo-meaning-bearing lines like "i want to break up with you because i cannot break apart from you" followed by two people staring at each other or thinking for a veeery looong time without saying a word.
At last I think the best character in the drama is Li Ti played by Ling Hu .The flaw of the film is at the end when Yu Hong and Zhou Wei met, I think, the process is not very good..
The director,the actors,the music,the editing,everything fit smoothly in this picture.The writer- director did a phenomenal job telling the story.I felt the soul of the director in this picture.I think it is one of the best films I've seen in the last couple of years.If you have no sensibility as a person,don't try to criticize somebody who put his mind ,time and soul in telling a story,because you confuse the soft porn movies with this one.The way that the director shows sex is in the most realistic and sincere way possible.
After more web searching, I discovered from a comment by Agora on the Flixster Website (http://www.flixster.com/movie/573373022) that the grounds of the Summer Palace are the location of an "intimate bonding moment" between the two university students who are the film's main characters.
They are Yu Hong, a girl who has recently come from the country, and Zhou Wei, a more experienced member of the student intelligentsia.All the same, I like the film's French title, Une Jeunesse Chinoise (A Young Chinese Girl) better.
In Summer Palace, a Chinese girl learns to pose as, among other things, a French intellectual.The movie is indebted to the French New Wave in other ways as well, including use of real urban settings, choppy editing, and lots of sex.
These are things that director Ye Lou is not able to accomplish.These comments should not be taken as excusing the Chinese government's banning Yihe Yuan from internal distribution and prohibiting Ye Lou from making films for five years.
But if you would like to get a bit more out of a film, be prepared to endure painfully long minutes (hours) of wordless, earnest look scenes for a few brief gems of poetic insight and genuinely interesting philosophical questions.It starts off in an interesting way with a young girl living in a small town who has just learned she has is accepted to the prestigious Beijing University.
Perhaps it is because, the story begins with a girl named Yu Hong (Hao Lei) who was sharing her passionate moments with her boyfriend Xiao Jun at Tumen, a rural area at the border between China and North Korea in the 80's, before leaving the hometown to study in a university in Beijing.And perhaps it is because when her new friend, Li Ti, introduces Zhou Wei (Guo Xiao Dong) to her, that makes Yu Hong and Zhou Wei falling in love with each other instantly, that they spend their summer in dormitory, having endless sex.
And yes, that is what we get for Summer Palace, without seeing much direct relationship between the famous imperial palace and the love and sex of a young couple.As what Yu Hong said in her diary, she is excited to meet new guys, but always ends up having sex with them as she thinks of her first time meeting Zhou Wei. The message we received from her was: sex has been an outlet to release her fear and anxiety, together with the love she still holds for Zhou Wei.Lou Ye has explained the inner world of Yu Hong in the first half of the story.
(Which explains why the movie was banned in China for discussion of Tiananmen incident, tonnes of sex scenes and participating in Cannes Film Festival without approval from the authorities.) The summer could be enjoyable if more juices can be provided in the palace..
The Passion was a disappointment, and Summer Palace, somehow didn't live up to its hype, probably drawing curious audiences by the banning of its director Lou Ye from making films in the Mainland for the next 5 years, because he had failed to obtain official permission before screening Summer Palace overseas.In any case, the same old marketing gimmick was to hype that this as the most erotic movie from China, and naturally drew audiences in like bees to honey.
Both the action and the characters lack the emotional core that grabs the attention of the audience and engage some cerebral on why they are doing what they're doing.Yu Hong (Lei Hao) is a village girl staying near the border of China and North Korea, and qualified for Beijing University in the late 80s.
Perhaps the best part is the reunion, where I thought is the only time when it's realistic with the feeling of helplessness and being tongue tied when meeting up with a loved one after donkey years - things are never the same again, and could never be the same anymore, and do you wish to hold onto the past, or move on to your own future?Despite the pretentious plot and characters, the movie does feature an excellent eclectic soundtrack, and there thankfully helped keep everyone awake.
This movie doesn't felt like a summer palace.
I don't think, a highly repetitive movie with no character development about the passionate but volatile love affairs of an unstable young woman, Yu Hong (Hao Yei) was needed.
Overall: I get that this coming to age movie was going for a French New Wave feel to it, with Hong, narrating her life in somewhat a poetic way, but I had to say, it kinda failed.
While, I do understand, why the Chinese government banned this movie, due to the sex scenes and political undertones.
Summer Palace is a politically charged drama from director Lou Ye.The movie features Hao Lei and Guo Xiaodong.The screenplay by Lou Ye, Feng Mei and Ma Yingli tells the story of Chinese political upheaval through the eyes of protagonist Yu Hong, who moves from her rural community to embrace life in Beijing.
Spanning nearly 20 years, the film elucidates the mindset of the Chinese revolutionary youth during the 1980's and into the new millennium through its narration by Hong, who reads diary excerpts to set scenes.Yu Hong is a beautiful 17-year-old girl who is soon to leave the small border town where she was born and raised to attend college at Beijing University.
At Beijing University, Yu Hong makes friends with Li Ti,another girl dealing with a long-distance relationship, and meets Zhou Wei, a handsome student who soon steals her heart.
Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are separated and the heavy hand of the state is brought to bear on the rebellious students.The movie suffers from excessive length and inconsistent pacing.Also,one who does not speak the movie's language needs full concentration to follow what's happening in the plot and to get the message that it is trying to impart.But nevertheless,it manages to be a brilliant and excellent film encapsulates an important moment in Chinese history and will especially enlighten viewers to the nuances of people struggling for freedom.Aside from that,we get to see the coming-of-age and maturation of Hong as she gets exposed to the her world and the changes she undergoes in response to it..