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29 July 2010 . eBAR.com . BAY AREA REPORTER
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FILM
Scene from Chinese director Lou Ye’s Spring Fever: passionate love in a dark room with dirty sheets.
Erotic overdrive by David Lamble n Chinese director Lou Ye’s torrid new romance Spring Fever, we are abruptly introduced to two young men driving through the rain. The guys stop to piss in a river; they push each other around on a small bridge like frisky schoolboys; and before we can get our bearings, the two are making rough, passionate love in a dark room with dirty sheets. It’s an important new work from a filmmaker who has already suffered banning and banishment from his government for the cultural crime of dealing with taboo subjects like the rights of the individual and the events surrounding the brutally repressed demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Spring Fever kicks into a very kinky gear when we notice that our couple is being tailed by an impetuous young
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runaway locomotive of a story that features three handsome men, two women scorned, and, along the way, some amusing insights into the messy behemoth of the modern Chinese economy. Lou Ye breaks his story into chapters with whimsical headings like, “Nanjing, March, just after the Day of the Insects’ Awakening.” He keeps the erotic pot boiling by filming his rutting boys close-up in seedy surroundings that don’t distract us from the business at hand. The result is one of the most boldly sensual/sexual Asian film feasts since Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. Spring Fever should definitely be caught in a theatre, but if you miss the commercial run, the DVD will hit stores on Aug. 17 from Strand Releasing (suggested retail price: $24.99). By the way, if you’re a big fan of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, be sure to grab a copy of Lou Ye’s splendid 2001 homage to the master, Suzhou River. ▼
private eye, a bisexual stud who boasts the libido of a 17-year-old, and whose brazen disregard for the line between business and pleasure will more than once put this drama into an erotic overdrive. Eventually a line will be crossed that will put everybody involved in peril, in the process producing a robust, obsessive love triangle that rivals classics like Jules and Jim. “A girl, okay, but a boy? You want to destroy us?” A fierce admirer of such Western homo-friendly lower-depths slumfests as Midnight Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, director Lou Ye means his rutting bareback boys to be a device for, as he says in a recent interview, “penetrating the interior life of a person, reversing the momentum of recent decades of Chinese history and revealing an individual’s innermost desires, secret impulses.” Spring Fever doesn’t let these intellectual musings get in the way of a
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Orlando ent sex.” To her credit, writer/director Potter dispensed with much of Woolf ’s literary conceit: the novelist insisted that the book was a biography, even including an index at the back. Contemporary critics and readers were in on the joke that Orlando was an imaginative valentine to Woolf ’s dear friend, Vita Sackville-West. As a modernist novel, Orlando falls into the fertile middle period of Woolf ’s most celebrated work, following Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and preceding A Room of One’s Own. As a film, Orlando’s pleasures are mostly front-loaded. The opening set-piece of Elizabeth’s court is visually stunning, with cameos by Crisp and Bronski Beat frontman Jimmy Somerville. It’s followed by Orlan-
Liam Longman, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
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Tilda Swinton in Orlando.
do’s ardent and ultimately unsuccessful wooing of the Russian Princess, Sasha (Charlotte Valan-
drey). While Swinton’s take on a feminized boy’s magical transformation into an aspiring female poet is believable the same way we accept the Elizabethan stage custom of boys playing the female characters, the sex change pretty much stops the plot dead in its tracks, with the rest of the film becoming a series of set changes as title-cards flip the centuries by. There’s not a whole lot to occupy the mind unless you happen to be an ardent fan of the wit and wisdom of Alexander Pope. While a must-see for Woolf devotees, gender theorists, and most especially the huge fan-club of the remarkable Tilda Swinton, Orlando represents an intriguing missing link between Swinton’s early experimental work for Derek Jarman and her more recent art-house fare, especially the sumptuous I Am Love. This revival exhibition of Orlando leaves ordinary filmgoers with more to admire than to love.▼
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