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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
SPRING FEVER No doubt director Lou Yee employs a hand-held, little digital camera for budget considerations, but it’s to his drama’s advantage, and not simply a monetary necessity. The grainy, off-the-cuff look automatically lends an appropriately voyeuristic point of view to the Chinese indie, whether when two gay lovers are being spied on or in the numerous frank sex scenes. (Note to any director of photography: a shower scene blindingly backlit with a window works wonders.) In 2006, Lou had a run-in with Chinese authorities over his Summer Palace. He was banned from filmmaking for five years for submitting the film to the Cannes Film Festival without the censors’ approval, but really it was because of its overt references to the Tiananmen Square crackdown. This time around, he has found funding in France and Hong Kong. Without it, this film would again raise the ire of authorities. It’s one thing to show two men kissing, it’s another to see them going at it again and again. Spring Fever should serve as a warning to all those engaging in some extra-relationship activity—you never know who’s watching. After two men meet for a rendezvous in the countryside, neither one notices the young man nonchalantly smoking a cigarette, following them back into Nanjing (where the film was shot on the sly). The photos that Luo Haitao takes that afternoon and during his surveillance of the younger half of the couple, Jiang Chiang, are sent to Luo Haitao’s client, the wife of the older man in the affair. Meanwhile, the photographer-for-hire keeps his sideline business a secret from his girlfriend, Li Jing, who labors in a sweatshop churning out designer knockoffs. (Maybe this subplot, more than the gay sex, presents an image of industrial China that the authorities would rather be left unseen.) After Luo Haitao and Li Jing’s rather tame (for this film) bedroom scene, the baby faced Luo Haitao brags that though he’s 27, below the waist he’s 17, setting up his character’s up-for-anything nature. How Luo Haitao’s feelings evolve toward the good-looking Jiang Cheng, whom he’s tailing (no pun intend), might be predictable, but Lou takes the viewer step by step through a certain awakening during the course of one drunken, party-hopping night. (The only alarming note during this nocturnal sojourn: Jiang Chang drives after drinking, a lot.) The director even makes believable the clichéd moment when Lou Haitao watches Jiang Chang, dressed in drag, singing a love song in a gay bar. The poppy soundtrack in the clubs scenes and a karaoke bar scene proves Noël Coward’s observation, "Strange how potent cheap music is." Not all of the characters live up to progressive expectations of gay acceptance (gentle hint: one man has his share of self-loathing), but the swaggering Jiang Chang and the wide-eyed Luo Haitao don’t neatly fit a label. Not indentified by sexuality alone, they sidestep definition without denying or feeling guilty about it. A detailed synopsis would wrongly make this film sound
melodramatic, but Lou sparingly varies the more mundane scenes of his
characters’ lives with high drama. In comparison to his Suzhou River
and Summer Palace, the director allows his characters to rip,
especially the betrayed wife, with well-timed flare-ups of full-on
drama. However, the love triangles (there are two in the film) unfold in
a haphazard, tentative fashion. The energy of the desultory second
half drags compared to the charged set-up. Kent Turner
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