Wow! Such a good movie.

Wonderful character development!

Truly Dreadful Film

Instant Favorite.

I have to say that I am genuinely skeptical about people who hail this movie as a "masterpiece", because I simply cannot believe that anyone could overlook the many flaws of the movie - especially concerning the aspects of story-telling and entertainment. I can already see how some people who read this cry out: "This is not supposed to be about entertainment, it's about emotions, a mirror of the time and place, it's thought-provoking, beautifully shot, if you don't like it, you should go back to watching the Fast and the Furious", etc.! Well, fact is: a good movie SHOULD be entertaining! If it fails on this level, then it fails as a whole, no matter how beautifully shot, etc. it is. It is right, of course, to say that too many movies are made solely for entertainment purposes. Many movies try to feed us basic ingredients, but fail to spice them up - and those movies fail, too. Summer Palace, on the other hand, delivers lots of spices in terms of artistic craftsmanship - but no substance. I don't think the story it tells is worth telling for the most part.The movie does depict an interesting time and place; and it is nicely shot. And it probably took some courage to make because it features the demonstrations at Tian An Men Square in June 1989, which is still kind of a taboo today in China (don't get your hopes up, though: you just see a crowd demonstrating and throwing bricks at a burning truck for a few minutes; the political background is never mentioned or even hinted at, nor does anything else happen, besides the main characters being scared and confused and running around inside the student dormitory looking for each other). The characters, however, experience a remarkably small amount of hardship (or happiness, or even anything), considering the times they live in. Yet they all seem to break in their own ways under the things they endure. I think a big problem i have with this movie is the fact that it takes itself so very seriously and the characters feel sorry for themselves all the time because of how tough they have it. And since they don't attempt to do anything about their oh-so-tough problems, it is pretty hard to feel sympathetic for them.We get to see good acting for characters that are barely worth the actors' while. They have to deliver pseudo-meaning-bearing lines like "i want to break up with you because i cannot break apart from you" followed by two people staring at each other or thinking for a veeery looong time without saying a word. Another recurring thing (at least once every fifteen minutes) is people having sex and bursting out in tears after wards because they are emotionally overwhelmed or unfulfilled. The sex scenes get really old really quick, by the way. And so does the crying.Summer Palace seems to me like a movie made for an audience that generally enjoys independent movies with high artistic value and low commercial motivation. It is made for an audience that likes to find subtle messages where there maybe really aren't any. And it is made for an audience that doesn't mind watching an unimpressive story unfold over two-and-a-half hours. It's the kind of movie you're bound to see at some point when you attend a film-festival.

This film is about several Chinese people, about how they grow up and how time changes them. It is focused on one couple, the very intense passion that they feel for each other and the paths that life shows them in relation of what they feel in each step of their lives...This movie is centered in love. More exactly, it is centered in the romantic view of life, which is destined to collide with the fact of growing up, because the characters in the film just can't manage to keep their passionate feelings while they start living other things after leaving university. It is as if life and circumstances pushes them to leave behind their memories, the anchor that seems to keep the characters living and knowing that they are someone. I think it is interesting how this is managed as the film goes by, because I recognized this feeling in myself and among my friends: about how, by leaving school, you have the feeling to be adrift in the universe of life.Also, the passion that the characters feel becomes sedated by the tedium of their lives after school. I think the director tries to communicate that feeling: after university, the characters start to get bored with their lives, compared with what they lived in school. It is sad to look how the woman character struggles to keep that feeling alive, but always feeling depressed because she can't grasp that passion that just goes away. They travel, they meet other people, they get jobs, but simply it's not the same. This is also related to the student's protests in China, all the feelings and expectations they generate, and the disillusion they found when they have to confront the real world.Finally, I think what the film communicates, is that every emotion, love, feeling or whatsoever, is seized by time. This is something that the characters just don't get and the reason of why they suffer: they can't accept that they are different from the ones that were young and passionate. Even in long marriages, couples have to reinvent themselves to keep together each other, or simply they fall in the arms of custom. This last thing is what the characters refuse to do, always trying to keep their feelings alive. But that's also the reason of why they suffer, especially the woman character: they live attached to their memories and they leave part of their identity in the past. I think that a phrase that is showed in the french movie "Irreversible" could fit perfectly on this one: TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING. But in this film, this phrase applies in a more subtle way, in something that involves people's identities.I liked the movie. It was one of those which you can't get out of your head for the rest of the day. The acting is good and the music is great. If there is something to criticize, is that the film is a little bit too long for what it express, specially at the second part of the film. I found other criticism unfounded: sex is an important part of the film, since it express passion, and it's definitely NOT a soap opera, because it doesn't have a happy ending and it has a message that you have to discover by thinking and feeling the film.I recommend this one.

When I saw Summer Palace, I assumed initially that the title referred to a building near Tiananmen Square. A quick Internet search, however, showed that this is not the case. The Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan, literally The Garden of Good Health and Harmony) is an elaborate structure and garden in the hills near Beijing that was originally the emperor's summer residence. After more web searching, I discovered from a comment by Agora on the Flixster Website (http://www.flixster.com/movie/573373022) that the grounds of the Summer Palace are the location of an "intimate bonding moment" between the two university students who are the film's main characters. They are Yu Hong, a girl who has recently come from the country, and Zhou Wei, a more experienced member of the student intelligentsia.All the same, I like the film's French title, Une Jeunesse Chinoise (A Young Chinese Girl) better. An esoteric but appropriate alternative would be La Française (The French Girl) in reference to Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 La Chinoise (The Chinese Girl). In Godard's film, a young French woman pretends to be a Chinese cultural revolutionary. In Summer Palace, a Chinese girl learns to pose as, among other things, a French intellectual.The movie is indebted to the French New Wave in other ways as well, including use of real urban settings, choppy editing, and lots of sex. The sex is different from what we're used to. It's neither pornographic nor romantic. There are nude bodies, primarily those of the attractive Yu Hong and her sexual partners, and they perform with graphic intensity. There is, however, neither stimulation nor foreplay. The partners are undifferentiated and their positions conventional (though a shift, in later episodes, from the missionary position to sex with the woman on top may have some significance).In other ways as well, I found it hard to relate to any of the movie's characters. Though they must all have worked very hard to be admitted to an elite Beijing university, there is no indication of their academic activities. A brief sequence of documentary footage shows the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and implies the subsequent massacre but there is nothing about planning or political intent. For the characters in the movie, political action seems no more than a momentary sensation as they go about their alienated lives.Maybe this indifference is an inheritance of the Cultural Revolution. Mao went to great lengths to deprive his subjects of personal identities, including, at one point, an effort to replace names with numbers as a means of identification. It's also possible that there are things in the movie that I, as an American, just don't get. Still, I can think immediately of two memoirs, Jung Chang's Wild Swans and Anchee Min's Red Azalea, that portray individual Chinese characters in depth and with great effectiveness. These are things that director Ye Lou is not able to accomplish.These comments should not be taken as excusing the Chinese government's banning Yihe Yuan from internal distribution and prohibiting Ye Lou from making films for five years. I asked the manager of the theater in which I saw the movie whether Lou had been imprisoned. "Not yet," he said. It should be kept in mind that the old men who still rule China have only been able to survive and prosper because they were once sycophants to the greatest mass murderer in human history.

What is the rationale for director Lou Ye to name the movie Summer Palace, or known as Yi He Yuan in Mandarin? Perhaps it is because, the story begins with a girl named Yu Hong (Hao Lei) who was sharing her passionate moments with her boyfriend Xiao Jun at Tumen, a rural area at the border between China and North Korea in the 80's, before leaving the hometown to study in a university in Beijing.And perhaps it is because when her new friend, Li Ti, introduces Zhou Wei (Guo Xiao Dong) to her, that makes Yu Hong and Zhou Wei falling in love with each other instantly, that they spend their summer in dormitory, having endless sex. Their relationship has been going on and off during this period, until the Tiananmen incident broke out in 1989, which causes deaths to hundreds of university students in China.For that, you have seen half of the story. And yes, that is what we get for Summer Palace, without seeing much direct relationship between the famous imperial palace and the love and sex of a young couple.As what Yu Hong said in her diary, she is excited to meet new guys, but always ends up having sex with them as she thinks of her first time meeting Zhou Wei. The message we received from her was: sex has been an outlet to release her fear and anxiety, together with the love she still holds for Zhou Wei.Lou Ye has explained the inner world of Yu Hong in the first half of the story. But the second half seems to drag the movie down. The movie continues with the government declaring an state of emergency during the Tiananmen incident, and it was fast forward to the year 1998, with footages of several incidents that took place in China and the communist country in the world. The next moment, we see how Yu Hong and Zhou Wei lead their individual life in ShenZhen and Berlin respectively, without much explanation on what has happened to them throughout the years.To make the dry spell more unbearable, the 140 minutes drama lacks a solid detail to support a good storyline. Not much details were explained, which makes the movie pretty dull and draggy. The sex scenes featured in the film also makes it seems to be a cheap pornographic production. But, to the filmmakers in China, Summer Palace is the first made in China production that openly explores sex, which is very rare. The explicitness of the scenes has made Summer Palace the first movie in China that is challenging the censors of China. (Which explains why the movie was banned in China for discussion of Tiananmen incident, tonnes of sex scenes and participating in Cannes Film Festival without approval from the authorities.) The summer could be enjoyable if more juices can be provided in the palace.