Love is a story you tell yourself— about yourself, about the one you love, and about your lives together. But we want love never to end, while a story, a narrative, must come to an end, or else it is not a story. Does that make love a special kind of story, or is love the arena where we can see storytelling working against itself, undercutting its own narratives?
Suzhou River, the second film 35-year-old Chinese director Lou Ye, sinks deep into these questions, not only addressing them but taking them in, taking them on. As one might expect from a movie about narrative working against itself, the plot of Suzhou River is slippery. There are, it seems, two pairs of lovers. The first pair, whose story begins years before the main action of the movie, is Moudan (ZhouXun), indeterminate in age but girlish in her pigtails, and Mardar (Jia Hong-sheng), a silent, withdrawn motorcyclecourier. He is hired to take Moudan to a relative’s house whenever her father has an assignation. Mardar lives for the mobility,the endless motion, of the motorcycle—off-duty, he sits immobile on his sofa and watches videos — and he is valuable to his shady employers because he tells no tales (we will see this thematic pairing of mobility and story elsewhere too). Eventually, he notices Moudan’s love, and returns it, but when his employers tell him to kidnap her and hold her until they collect a ransom from her father, he obeys; when he releases her, she runs off and jumps into the Suzhou River. He dives in after her, but cannot find her. read more