The Banquet
by Grégory Valens
The maturity of Lou Ye stands out in his third feature film, two years after the brilliant Suzhou River that revealed him to international audiences, and will undoubtedly be mistaken for academism by those who think (luckily enough, they’re not many) that Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny represents modern cinema. In his attempt to portray a dark period of his country’s recent history (the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the thirties), Lou Ye chose the form of an epic drama involving many characters, all carried away by the storm of political changes.
After Suzhou River, which was truly representative of what one expects of young Chinese cinema, the danger for Lou Ye was to repeat. He cleverly escaped it by choosing a type of story and a style that nobody expected. First director of the sixth generation to dare exploring a historical subject, he can for this very reason not be classified as academic. Of course the visual aspect is apparently less audacious than that of his previous film. If you call the most impressive photographical research seen in some years – creating sepia postcard impressions for the Shanghai prologue, enhancing the warm colors to reveal not only the cruelty of the bombings, but also the inner fire consuming characters forced to choose between love and political action – an academic form, then yes, Purple Butterfly is academic. And how many academic films like this one would we like to see each year!
Purple Butterfly actually reminds us of previous epic movies such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. Films that need time for their spectators to truly know the effect they will have on them. And films that necessitate a high degree of attention, as the many characters involved are not always easy to recognize and it may be tricky to follow all the story developments, especially when one is not aware of the political background. Still, the maestria shown by Lou Ye in the intimate sequences as well as in the demonstrations and bombing scenes is nothing but obvious to anyone who sees the film – denying the pleasure that Purple Butterfly gives is simply absurd.
The poignant conclusion of the film, which shows archive stock shots of the China-Japan wars, gives an historical perspective to the individual trajectories the film portrayed. A subtle way for the director to link the film to contemporary situations and contemporary wars, and an indispensable reminder of what the craziness of men can do to humanity.
Synopsis
1927. Manchuria. Itami, a young Japanese man, in love with Cynthia, a beautiful Chinese girl. Their happiness ends when he is called home for his military service and they are forced to part. Returning from the train station where she has bid her lover farewell, Cynthia witnesses her brother's bloody murder at the hands of Japanese right-wing extremists. Three years later, Shanghai has been unofficially occupied by Japan. The city is rife with violence. Cynthia - now known as Ding Hui - is working for Purple Butterfly, a resistance group planning to assassinate Yamamoto, head of the Japanese secret service...
Director
Lou Ye, known as one of the 6th generation filmmakers in Chinese mainland, was born in 1965 in Shanghai where two of his successful pieces were made. Being the son of theatre performers, Lou Ye's childhood was spent backstage and in dressing rooms. Once an adult, he devoted himself to studying painting at the well-known Beijing Film Academy. During his days at BFA, Lou Ye along with his fellows students were deeply influenced by European films as well as courses in film schools such as those of N.Y.U and U.C.L.A, while the seniors were more fond of those of the Soviets.
Lou Ye's graduation film, Weekend Lover (1994), helped to define the 6th generation filmmaking. The film follows the lives of a group of dissatisfied young people in Shanghai during the 80's and early 90's. It is a significant shift from the 5th generation filmmakers (of which the representative directors are Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige) with its emphasis on tradition and official Chinese culture. The film is also notable as the production team was the youngest in Chinese filmmaking history. Weekend Lover was the Winner of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Prize for Best Director at the Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival in 1996.
In 1995, faced with the near impossibility of raising money for independent feature films in China, Lou Ye turned to television, producing the ground-breaking "Super City," a series for which he gave ten of his 6th generation colleagues the unprecedented opportunity to leave their inhibitions at the door and make whatever kind of film they wanted. His own TV production "Don't Be Young" (1995),a psycho-mystery, broke similar ground for Chinese television films with its non-narrative expressionism.
In 1998, Lou Ye founded Dream Factory, one of China's first independent film production companies. Dream Factory's first production, in association with Philippe Bober and the Coproduction Office, was Suzhou River, Winner of the VRPO Tiger Award at the 29th Rotterdam Film Festival 2000. The film is turning out to be a big hit with both general audiences and the critics in the western world, notably Suzhou River was a hot selling film at the Berlin European Film Market.