Nuits d'ivresse printanière ***

Nuits d'ivresse printanière ***, director: LOU Ye

Documentary style handheld camera, low lighting, grainy, dark, clandestine shot fiction
Romantic Love, homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual love life in contemporary China in Spring

The film has little narration, succint and the story is intricate, sensitive.
Due to the rough texture of the film making itself, crude love making scenes; it looks very realistic/documentary like. It shows bluntly the melodramatic sad muffled suppression of homosexual love and the difficulties of finding outlets for transexuals and all non mainstream love. The China we see here is rather dirty, even when people are taking showers, washing incessantly, there seem to be a forever coating of unclear smog on mirrors, in the air, on the street, everywhere. The outdoor scene next to a lake, along water edge has the softness of ancient cities. All the trees, the clouds, mists are gentle and accomodating, it just seems the people are running themselves into dead ends there is no way out. Man who works in a bookshop and his teacher wife lives together, we see him on an outing with another man. They are lovers. The bookish Man wants his wife to meet his salary man as ordinary friend - because he wants to have a friendly relationship (this is very Asian). The Woman finds this unacceptable and stops salary man from hanging around her husband, but he commits suicide. The salary man has missed his great love. He tries to replace with another guy - the man who was the detective who followed him. The young man wants to entertain this relation with the salary man, but he also wants to bring his girlfriend. The three goes on a road trip and the girlfriend was shocked to find out. She plays along a little but only for a short time and left them. She also does not accept this threesome idea. The salaryman change profession, he runs a clothing shop and lives with another transexual person from the club and all this, narrated from a book; two man reading together a book of Yu Da Fu 1927 a very poetic text on the occasions of passing love by.

We get the idea that this is a story shared in a book by two intimate friends.

The film has a lot of realistic scenarios, karaoke, small restaurants, illegal labourers, reality of setting up business, restaurants, salons, factories, sex life of man/woman, man/man, man/man/woman. The suffocating social norms and desire all suppressed in a conservative society thats on its way to become open and modernised. Quick paced, dislocated people with no way out for Spring time desires. People dont know what is acceptable and what is not nor how to negotiate new situations thats happening everywhere.

While I was watching this movie, it reminded me of the book Dream of the Red Chamber - in the classic novel there are descriptions of homosexuality, threesomes, transgression, cross dressing people but in that scenario, and surrounding - ultra affluent private household - everything is negotiated gently, so you could have very non-conformist situations and it could be absorbed with ease due to the limited "arena"; if people wanted it, it could be arranged. It wouldnt be like in the movie, where you could run and drive for miles and hours and days maybe, and you would always to still have no way out. The same everywhere.

Very subtle layers of relationships, delicate, successful and powerful story w flesh and breath, a contemporary movie.