During Spring Fever‘s stunning opening, the filmmaker cuts from a flower serenely drifting across water to two men exiting a car on a ferociously windy day to take a piss by the side of the road. Dissonant and jarring, the film’s sounds and images oscillate between lust and frustration, and as the past and present are hauntingly blurred, so too are the identities of the story’s characters. It’s a fetching audio-visual brew invigorated by fiercely spontaneous performances, but Spring Fever, like Purple Butterfly before it, reveals Lou’s propensity for losing himself to the soap-operatic.