Richard Green The only value in this over-hyped movie is in seeing how much China changes as a modern society, from the beginning of the story ( 1987 ), to the end ( 2001 ). The country is truly racing forward in that sense.The troubled, narcissistic heroine has moments on screen which are really rather touching: but she cannot seem to connect with anyone she meets at the university in Beijing. She is an emotional recluse. What is so galling is that we never, ever, get to have any clues about why she is so alienated from everything in her life. She has been plucked from a village near the border with North Korea and admitted to the very metropolitan Beijing University. She makes friends, so she is not all alone in that giant place.The only comparison which might resonate with western viewers is to think of a bright young thing from a small town in Montana who finds herself enrolled at the University of Chicago. It's a grand opportunity for her to learn and to excel, and all the leading lady can seem to do is feel depressed about her emotions, and then to "hook up" with an absolute Cad and Bounder. Naturally he charms her and they get into a steamy physical affair which goes absolutely no where.The leading man is a good actor but he is playing a fellow who is an out and out shark in sexual terms and not even very handsome.Near the end of this dreadful film, a woman who was friends with the leading lady -- and who has had her own fling with the "hero" -- drops herself off of a tall building in Berlin for no explainable reason at all !! Worse yet, many parts of the film are shot in dark hallways and with poor resolution, it felt like the director was having some kind of a mental black-out. This film cost five bucks to rent on DVD and that was precisely five bucks too many. Skip it, please, if you value your time and your own money.

michael_chaplan A girl leaves her home in a provincial city to attend university. She was in a sex relation; it was a good excuse to escape that. She is a poet, and her poetry seemed interesting in English translation...When she arrives in Beijing, she meets lots of people... and soon falls into a sexual relationship. She seems to be the sort of person who cannot connect to others otherwise. She gets a real boyfriend... but their relationship seems about to break up when the big demonstrations of June the second start in Beijing. While neither of the lovers has any interest in politics, the girl is obviously unhappy... her boyfriend from her home town comes to "rescue" her just as the police move in.If the film had ended there, it would have been excellent. The focus remained on the girl up to that point.Unfortunately, the film started to follow other characters and went on for the rest of the film discussing them. These people and their relationships were uninteresting. The film which had begun well with a clear focus ended up scattered and pointless. When the movie was over, I didn't even care about the woman who had been the focus at the beginning. I was just glad it was over with.As the first half was excellent, I gave the film 5 of 10 stars.

jakyou1 I just saw Summer Palace last night in San Francisco and I was blown away. I spent the entire night thinking about the film and significance of the message it sent. I don't want to spoil anything, you just have to see it and be prepared to think about it for a long time. I can't wait for my wife to see it, so we can discuss it. I didn't want to see it at first but after I read the review in the Chronicle saying that it was the greatest film to come out of China, well I guess I felt I had to see it and I am so glad that I did. Some people might find it slow, but that is life right? Sometimes it is slow and sometimes it moves so quickly is passes you by and only later to find the real message the director was trying to deliver. It is as though there are five different stories going on with just one character. I know that doesn't make sense but when you see it, you will understand. I highly recommend it.

Chris Knipp This Cannes Festival 2006 entry by the director of Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly (enjoyng very limited US theatrical release in early 2008) is more unwieldy but also bolder and more authentic than its predecessors, while still as moony and emotional and indebted to Wong Kar-wai and the French New Wave. You could compare this to Dr. Zhivago or Splendor in the Grass but despite its intense period flavor at times--the cluttered dorm rooms stay with you as do the rushing demonstrators, and the progression from bikes to nice cars and email is subtle but unmistakable--it hasn't got the structure or plot of the usual generation-spanning films; it's a hymn to love-longing posing as a contemporary historical epic. As such, it's poised for failure and doomed to be dismissed by many. But it's really great fun, a fluent, flowing, committed film with more to think about and respond to than much better-made and more tightly-edited work. And after it was shown at Cannes without official permission from home, it got Lou banned from film-making in China for five years.Full of intense realistic sex and frontal nudity that would be daring anywhere not to mention China , Summer Palace focuses on a passionate young woman who comes from the country to study at Beijing University just before the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and massacre of 1988, and though it brilliantly evokes the excitement, freedom, and experimentation of that period for what is essentially the director's own generation (Purple Butterfly dealt with the 1930's), and it gives a sense of the chaos and horror that follows--this extended, breathtaking Tiananmen-period sequence is a tour de force--the politics are peripheral to protagonist Yu Hong (Hao Lei) and the intense love addiction she shares with Zhu Wei (Guo Xiaodong). But when the repression comes, Xiao Jun (Cui Lin), Yu Hong's high school boyfriend, with whom she had intense sex at the film's outset, comes to rescue her and take her back to Tumen, in the country. The turbulent give and take of man-woman relationships is as intense at times as anything in D.H. Lawrence, but with a sexual explicitness Lawrence achieved only in Lady Chatterley.As played by the striking and talented Hao Lei, Yu Hong is a hell of a young woman, beautiful, alive, articulate, philosophical--her diary provides voice-over for many of the film's scenes--willful, and never satisfied with Zhou Wei, but never able till the end (fourteen years later) to let him go either. She doesn't want him, she says, but when she is with him she is happy. Any critique of the movie has to recognize that this is what it's about.It's quite true that (once again) rain is used excessively, but like many a filmmaker before him Lou Ye recognizes that rain, cigarettes, alcohol and intense sex by good looking people are enough to make a movie atmospheric and sexy and compulsively watchable. Jaunty Chinese pop songs and bursts of passionate classical strings are used with a broad hand, but they always work in context.Summer Palace is too long, and its wild abandon catches up with it in the diffuse, occasionally irrelevant sequences of the second half. When the political repression comes and Wei goes to Berlin along with Hong's best girlfriend Li Ti (Hu Lingling) and her boyfriend Ryi Gu (Zhang Ziannin), and there are details of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Perestroika that have far less urgency, the whole mood dissipates and the focus meanders. Hong, who's already caught Li Ti with the love of her life Zhou Wei, drifts or rather plunges greedily from one man to another. There's an abortion, a bike accident, adultery, a suicide, and other events, including a bittersweet reunion, but these are just blips in the long meditation on love-longing and life.Shown at Cinema Village in New York City January-February 2008.