Village voice returns very voicey movie#
Village voice returns very voicey tv#

Shocked by his betrayal (as well as the apparently paltry sum that her captors are demanding), the girl seizes an opportunity to run away and hurl herself into the Suzhou, clutching-yes-a blond mermaid doll. Mardar, who is not particularly bright, allows himself to be recruited by some underworld pals in a plot to kidnap Moudan and hold her for ransom. The alert viewer will quickly note that Moudan is also played by Zhou Xun, albeit as an annoyingly pert gamine. Tapes documenting Meimei, already a vanished object, at work and play segue into the legend of Mardar-the handsome motorcycle messenger who has experienced a far more dramatic tale of love and loss.Ĭharged with the care of the schoolgirl Moudan, daughter of a wealthy lowlife, Mardar made the mistake of becoming emotionally involved with her. Voyeur that he is, the movie’s nameless camera-I naturally falls in love with the exhibitionist Meimei (Zhou Xun), a young woman who performs in a long blond wig and a floodlit tank, impersonating a mermaid in the dank recesses of the Happy Tavern. Less intractable than the season’s other first-rate Chinese movie, Jia Zhangke’s cool and detached Platform, Suzhou River revels in déjà vu.

Village voice returns very voicey tv#

Lou, a 35-year-old Shanghai native who has worked mainly in Chinese TV (and made his share of music videos), locates a plot lifted largely from Vertigo and a noirish first-person narration supplied by an unseen, itinerant videographer in a moody urban landscape whose sumptuous industrial dereliction would be the envy of film aesthetes from Williamsburg to Edinburgh or even Azerbaijan.

Village voice returns very voicey movie#

In the absence of anything by Wong Kar-wai, this may be the most stylish movie currently playing lower Manhattan. Awash with new-wave flotsam and jetsam, Suzhou River (which had its premiere in last spring’s “New Directors/New Films”) is a movie of seductive surfaces-mainly as reflected in the queasy glamour of the polluted canal that winds through the heart of Shanghai. The latest in East-West fusion, Lou Ye’s wildly atmospheric, cleverly low-budget Suzhou River is no Blade Runner or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-but this adroit, concise, and poetic city-symphony is almost too fashionable for its own good.

Syncretic by nature, Hong Kong movies expanded the imagination of Asian filmmakers, no less than that of the American audiences for whom the East Asian metropolis (from Seoul to Singapore) has come to be the image of globalization, if not the economic frontier of the future. Home to the last great popular cinema of the 20th century, Hong Kong has proved a great source of inspiration. Tank girl: Zhou Xun in Suzhou River photo: Strand Releasing