Suzhou River Is A Mesmerizing Thriller

The mesmerizing thriller Suzhou River doesn't just toss you smack dab into the middle of the story, it actually makes you the narrator. The action begins on the Suzhou River, which cuts through Shanghai; we see images of the river, the banks, the bridges, the people visiting the river, all seen from a small boat, first person, like home video footage, except it's shot on film. Strange figures on bridges stare down at the camera as the boat glides under them. Is that insinuation in their eyes? Mockery? A threat? We can't be sure.

The voiceover narrator confounds things further: unseen (even in mirrors), unnamed throughout and the actor who provides his voice was not credited. (The distributor suggests, with some uncertainty, that the narrator's voice is dubbed by the director himself.) The narrator explains that he's a freelance videographer who spends quite a bit of time floating along the river, checking the bridges and banks for fleeting glimpses of a woman another man loved and lost?a beautiful creature named Moudan (Zhaou Xun), the daughter of a bootlegger and crime boss who vanished under circumstances that will become only slightly more clear as the film unspools. In a patently unbelievable but powerfully seductive Hitchcock flourish, it turns out that Moudan is a dead ringer for the narrator's lovely girlfriend, Memei (also played by Zhaou Xun). Are the two women actually the same woman? Is one an alter ego of the other? The reincarnation of the other? An extension of the other?

Just when you're warming up to the movie's dark mood of romantic yearning, it shockingly shifts perspectives. Suddenly you're not in first person anymore, you're in third person, moving through life with the movie's romantic hero, Mardar (Jia Hongsheng), the lover of the doomed Moudan. Mardar is a handsome, rough-edged, motorbike-riding courier who does small, dirty jobs on the side for Shanghai's assorted underworld figures.

It takes a second to untangle the movie's pretzel-like narrative strategy, but you soon figure out that what you're seeing is Mardar's story as imagined by the narrator, who heard the tale of Mardar's doomed affair from Mardar himself. At least, that's what I got out of it. Complex enough for you? Don't be spooked; the technical ins and outs of Suzhou River's narrative don't matter quite as much as the intense mood of sex, dread, longing and emembrance. Like Vertigo, the narrative and even the stylistic tropes ultimately matter less than the end product: the feeling of vertigo produced by watching Vertigo, and the sweet discomfort created when its images collide with your own memories, beliefs and wishes. In an age where thrillers from all countries are under increasing pressure to explain themselves to death so the dummies in the audience don't get miffed, Suzhou River doesn't just permit ambiguity, it insists on it. Ostensibly an homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, this haunting and inventive film also owes a large debt to Joseph Conrad, whose fiction (including, most famously, Heart of Darkness) was often wrapped inside onion-skin layers of framing devices?for instance, a first-person narrator listening to someone else tell a story about events that happened a long time ago, and not always to the storyteller. The point of such devices is not merely to be clever, but to call into question the relationship between storytellers and their stories, and to underline the somewhat queasy identification we feel with the heroes and heroines of fiction, and with people we've never met whose stories we heard secondhand. On paper, the story is poetically tangled: two men are in love with two women who might be one woman. The mood of dreamy obsession and youthful aimlessness suggests Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and his disciples. But the technique is less pure, more tantalizing. It suggests the two women might be aspects of the same woman, or that the two men might be experiencing variations on the same love affair. It's tough to get your groundings because writer-director Lou Ye keeps pulling the rug out from under you. As Suzhou River unfolds, you're often not completely sure what you're looking at, or whether the characters are acting out of love or duplicity, even what position a scene might occupy in the narrative if the whole thing were laid out chronologically, through the eyes of one character rather than two. The first-person camerawork is deliberately, suggestively confusing?handheld, subject to sudden shifts in focus and angle, with zooms galore and ellipses that suggest either a damaged reel or holes in the hero's memory. (The music, which alludes liberally to Bernard Herrmann's legendary music for Vertigo, unifies the fragmented images and lends heft to the tragedy.)

Though the narrator says he's a videographer, and we see him spray-painting his beeper number on building walls, the entire movie is shot on film, not tape. Which raises the question: what are we looking at when we look through the eyes of this unnamed storyteller? Are we seeing an assortment of his video footage, which just happens to be represented on film? Or are we seeing his own jumbled, elliptical memories of what happened to him and his friend Mardar?memories that quite naturally have the rhythms of home video footage because we're inside the head of a guy who makes videos for a living? There's a precedent for this kind of spectator-confounding playfulness, which falls somewhere between unreliable first-person storytelling and highly abstract metafiction. Fight Club and The Sixth Sense, to name two recent mainstream movies, immersed themselves in unreliability, juxtaposing subjective and objective reality and forcing you to ask, What am I looking at? Can it be trusted? Is film anything other than a lie that repays trust with passion?

A number of old movies have played with first-person, camera-as-narrator structures, notably Robert Montgomery's 1946 movie Lady in the Lake, which was told almost entirely through a first-person camera that revealed the narrator's face only when he looked in a mirror. (This technique was dusted off, to humorous effect, in Being John Malkovich.) Orson Welles' unpublished 1940 script for a film version of Heart of Darkness takes the notion even further; in a witty prologue explaining the uses of point-of-view (narrated by Welles), the camera is used to represent a variety of characters, ending with that of a caged parakeet menaced by a hungry cat. Welles' point was that film technique need not be shackled to variations on third-person; it could be used to comment on storytelling, just as literary technique could be used to comment on storytelling.

But Suzhou River is the most heady example I can think of. Its relaxed, confident, fluid technique suggests, a la Malkovich, that experience is transferable, that identity is in flux, that we actually feel the stories that are told to us, and that true love is forever.

Framed Paramount is doing the right thing in rereleasing director Curtis Hanson's marvelous adaptation of Wonder Boys, a droll account of academia, failure and lost youth that ranks among the finest comedies released by a major studio in recent years. It's very subtle, very low-key, almost like an excellent 1970s French romantic comedy that just happens to be set in Pittsburgh and star such heavy-hitting actors as Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr., Tobey Maguire and Frances McDormand. See it on the big screen, where Hanson's mournful, snow-swept landscapes?and Douglas' bravely rumpled and sad performance?can be properly appreciated.