14/05 - CANNES DAILY ON SPRING FEVER

ENTERTAINMENT / CANNES FILM FESTIVAL / CANNES DAILY / 14/05 - CANNES DAILY ON SPRING FEVER

14 May 2009 — Judging from the commotion surrounding tonight's Cannes premiere of Lou Ye's Spring Fever, you'd suppose this is a film about homosexuality or about censorship or about China since the Cultural Revolution. Commotion, of course, is something that comes with Lou Ye territory. China's censors came down on him for his first film, Weekend Lover, back in 1994. They didn't like Suzhou River, his second film, any better. When he dared talk about the Tiananmen Square movement in his third film, Summer Palace (2006), Lou was officially banned from any further moviemaking for the next five years. So what did he do? He went and shot Spring Fever with financing from France and from Hong Kong and didn't ask for official approval in China, and now here he is back in Cannes.Commotion aside, Spring Fever is simply (although simple is the wrong word) about people trapped in the undertow of their own emotions, people who aren't sure whether to run toward happiness or run from it and who wind up running in both directions at once or not running anywhere at all. The film's first love scene involves two men, one of whom turns out to be married to a woman. This love triangle gradually expands to become a love pentagon, but the ensuing emotional complexities have little to do with geometry and everything to do with the unreasonable demands of human passion.Spring Fever opens with a shot of lotus blossoms in a pond and the movie meanders through Nanjing and the surrounding countryside, mimicking the aimless trajectories of characters who can't decide which way to turn. This is a road movie about people who have fallen off the path. Dialogue is sparse. In place of words Lou gives us wind rushing through leaves, wind whipping off the ocean, wind blowing curtains and rattling windows. Instead of plot there's poetry, on-screen kōans evoking the passing of seasons and the inexorable certainty of change. And instead of polemics we get poignancy. Spring Fever will touch different people in different ways. It might even open a few minds. — Randall KoralThis year NESPRESSO has Cannes covered, inside and out. Vincent Maraval gives us his take on the films his company, Wild Bunch, is screening during the festival ("Un Autre Regard," exclusively on NESPRESSO's website, daily at 6 p.m.). And Randall Koral, NESPRESSO's Cannes correspondent, serves up his impressions of the films and festivities as they happen ("Cannes Daily", 11 a.m. CET).