A story of a teenager who likes fapping and Suzhou River. (not my review)

I was 17 during 2007, just got on my first senior year. The raddest book I've ever read was entire work collection of Gu Long. I was a retard, and of course still is a retard. Just like every other countryside self-deprecating, wretched, mess around, waiting to die teenager, friendless and nothing to be happy of, I feel as if my life will stay this way forever.

A schoolmates of mine told me there was a film called Suzhou River, and it was banned by China. Back at the days my idea of a banned film is that these films are good wanking materials, so I…

Suzhou River is a fantastical yet grim tale of two lonely souls connecting and falling out. Against the backdrop of a heavily polluted Suzhou River, which millions of people live by and live off of, this movie manages to find beauty via the most mundane existence, and elevate it with a folklore twist.

Suzhou River starts with haunting track shots of the titular river, with documentary-styled presentation as well as a somber voiceover to point out the backstory as well as a hint of the hidden connections between the protagonists and the river. Then we're introduced to a crime-riddled modern Chinese love story, where lust and money gets in the way of pure connection in a material, fast-moving Shanghai. The…

We learn in quasi-documentary fashion of what kind of filthy business takes place at the banks of Shanghai in Suzhou River, and I was instantly pulled in by its grubby candidness. Coming into more personal particulars, the narrator is an anonymous videographer whose gigs include shooting ads for a saloon with a sexy mermaid fetish. He’s in love with the mermaid performer Meimei, who teases, reciprocates, teases some more, indulges him… and disappears for days at a time.

Then the videographer ever so subtly tails off into telling us a sordid love story between a vain bike courier and a pig-tailed teen full of naiveté that gels into a kidnapping and extortion plot, one with some built-in cruelty of roping…

Su Zhou He, or Suzhou River is a love story. You can tell this as there are cute people on tiny motorcycles holding on tightly to each other while strings and keys play a soft melody in the background. This may seem like a blatantly obvious thing to state up front, but the handheld camera in the opening sequences was so vaguely focussed and jittery that I had to take a break at one point as it was starting to make me feel quite icky. I'm all for 'creative' and arty, but seriously, did nobody proof-view this before it was set loose on an unsuspecting public.

Outside of this 'defect', the story itself is really quite interesting with Zhou Xun…

Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, or as I would like to call it “Vertigo as envisioned by Wong Kar-wai”, is a gloomily romantic and boldly stylized depiction of the illusions of love. It begins with an interesting set-up: the first ten minutes or so are shot entirely in first-person view, a POV that belongs to the film’s narrator, a young videographer living in the shanty corner of Shanghai. These early moments are gorgeous, by the way. The visuals are like straight out of Fallen Angels, seeped in dreamy and noirish quality, and these come with some effective, New Wave-ish voice-overs. The aesthetics are also motif-heavy (lots of watery imagery here… oh and mermaids—perhaps a nod to Mississippi Mermaid?). Our faceless narrator…

Gauzy romantic feelings. Urban pollution. Muddled identities and criminal activities. Suzhou River melds together elements of many different influences yet still remains staunchly itself; that's because all these elements are connected to the core of our protagonist, a dual narrator-character who guides us anonymously as we never see his face nor learn his name – rather, we share his perspective literally through his eyes.

This unnamed man is a videographer and thus already throws the film's narrative into a curated one. Often we can see his hands on-screen, picking things up or lighting cigarettes, and so presumably we might see these sequences as part of his 'filming'. But then so too do other sequences that don't involve him carry his…