The Chinese government is trying to suppress Summer Palace. After its debut at Cannes, the regime banned its director, Lou Ye, from filmmaking for five years. Fortunately, Summer Palace has been released in the U.S. on DVD. Chances are it won’t be on sale in Beijing during the Olympic games.
What upsets the grim denizens of the Forbidden City? Well, there is sex, lot’s of it and openly depicted in this coming of age story concerning a young girl from the provinces, Yu Hong. The sex is germane to the plot as Yu explores the big world of Beijing University. For its explicitness, Summer Palace would be branded with an NC-17 rating in America.
But the setting for Summer Palace in time and place, not the seething eruptions of passion, are what has really set China’s cultural commissars on edge. Yu is a student in 1989, just as the events that would culminate in the Tianamen Square massacre were gathering momentum. She isn’t political but is caught up in circumstances that China’s rulers would rather forget. In denial over its human rights record, as it is about every facet of its misrule, the regime doesn’t want its people to see a movie depicting the Tianamen protestors sympathetically. That’s a shame, because Summer Palace is a fine film, a vivid, occasionally hand-held recreation of its milieu. The performance as Yu by Chinese actress Hao Lei is alive with innocence and experience, the recklessness and melancholy of youth.
