Review of Suzhou River / 苏州河, directed by Lou Ye

There are some movies you spend a hot minute waiting for the opportunity to see. I’d known about Suzhou River for years, ever since I took a Contemporary Chinese cinema course in the midst of my undergraduate degree. However, because I’m a master at procrastinating, I spent years putting off finally watching this.

So you might be thinking how I ended up here, writing this blog post and evidently having watched the movie at this point. At the time of writing this, the film is not available to watch on an American streaming platform—that I know of.

Well, I went to Malaysia for a three week trip and found the opportunity to watch it when I logged into my MUBI account and saw a bunch of different kinds of movies from my standard USA fare on the platform.

One night when I was jet lagged, at around 5 AM in the morning, I decided to just go ahead and watch this movie. And I watched it all the way straight through as the sun rose, which made the most sense considering the topic of the film. I only paused once to listen to the daily prayer that came out of the local mosques at 6 AM.

Here’s my review!

A doomed love story set on the fringes of contemporary Shanghai.

At the beginning of the movie, we meet the videographer, who has a new gig. He’s been brought on to record the performances of a woman named Meimei, who dresses up as a mermaid. Throughout the course of working together, though, the two end up falling in love, but he becomes more heartbroken when she disappears randomly.

This is when he begins telling a concurrent story: a man named Mardar works odd jobs stealing and as a courier, and Mardar falls in love with a girl named Moudan. She’s the daughter of an influential importer in the region, and they meet after Mardar is hired to drive her home.

That’s how they end up meeting and falling in love, although this would become very complicated quickly. Mardar finds himself with a bad crowd looking to kidnap someone, but their victim is actually Moudan.

They take her away to a warehouse, where one guy kills the other after getting the money, but when Moudan finds how much she was ransomed for, she throws herself into the river. She thought that she was worth more than what she was ransomed off for.

Her body isn’t found, but Mardar is thrown in jail for it. He gets out eventually, coming back to Shanghai and resuming his work as a courier. When Mardar comes across Meimei, he thinks she’s Moudan, and he finds the Videographer and tries to get him to document his story.

Meimei ends up falling in love with Mardar in the process, and they have their own affair. Mardar goes out to the outskirts of town one day after getting beat up, then finds Moudan working at a convenience store. They reunite and sparks fly, but one day they are found dead at the side of the Suzhou River.

When Meimei finds out, this freaks her out and she doesn’t handle it well. She meets up with the Videographer, and they spend the night together. He wakes up with her gone, only a note explaining that she wants him to go find her if he loves her, just like Mardar and Moudan.

The Videographer makes the decision to not pursue her, getting drunk on Mardar’s vodka.

Overall Thoughts

For those who love Wong Kar-wai movies, you’re going to really enjoy Suzhou River. There’s a lot of similar imagery Lou Ye utilizes throughout the movie, and I thought that they lined up pretty well.

That said, I wasn’t finding myself super impressed with this movie outside of the visuals. I can see how someone else might enjoy this film a lot, but the narrative notes weren’t doing it for me.

Perhaps I wasn’t invested in the romance aspect of it enough—I wasn’t sold on it properly from the beginning, that’s for sure. I am glad I watched it, though!

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