'Summer Palace': Sex and Politics in a Turbulent China

Two billion Chinese can be wrong.

It was in their name, after all, that Chinese authorities banned Lou Ye's film "Summer Palace" from commercial exhibition there even after it had been selected as China's entry in the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. And what does it take to get banned from the largest market in the world?

Well, one answer is sex. In the movie, a tormented young college student named Yu Hong (Lei Hao) has sex over time with three or four boys, and Lou doesn't look away. He doesn't look at it either, at least not in a romantic or clinical way. He just sort of lets the camera run and the young lovers, usually in darkened circumstances, heave and sweat and lurch, looking objectively pretty funny, and I doubt if anyone's prurient interest would be aroused (while admitting that among an audience of 2 billion there's always an oddball).

Or is it the politics? The movie takes Yu Hong through the uprising at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and it's clear that, as a student, she's a willing participant in her generation's stand against the armored divisions that represented the government's will. It's also clear that as a director, Lou is a master of chaos. Like Paul Greengrass in 2002's "Bloody Sunday," he's able to stage re-creations of famous events that feel completely spontaneous in their capture of the fear, the drama, the adrenal surge of such an event. But it also seems doubtful that the film will inspire further agitation for change -- though again, there's always someone among the 2 billion -- as, if anything, it points out not how important politics are, but how unimportant they are.

Yu Hong is a participant, but only because it's the thing to do. She never articulates the issues nor shows much interest in them. She is not that New Man of communist yore, pledged to equality, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the triumph of the working class. She probably hasn't even noticed those things. Her interior life is far more interesting to her (and to us) than any speeches or pamphlets.

Yu Hong, the bright country girl on scholarship at Beijing University, smokes, tries to dress cool, loves and hates and supports and betrays her friends, including the innocent Dongdong and more sophisticated Li Ti. She lives, she suffers, she drinks, she lives, she suffers. And she suffers.

She is in fact one of the great female characters of recent years. I am stunned at the performance of Lei, who while conventionally but not overwhelmingly attractive (she's no Gong Li or Ziyi Zhang) nevertheless creates a vivid, knowable, yet mysterious human being. One antecedent may be the unfortunately named Pookie Adams, played with heartbreaking simplicity by Liza Minnelli in "The Sterile Cuckoo" all those years ago.

Yu Hong is of her time, but she's also got a self-awareness that belies that time. The movie takes the shape of her diary, and it cuts away time and again to her ruminations of the subject of that long malady, her life, spanning to the present day. Her problem is men, mainly one Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo), whom she loves and, at the same time, hates. She's way too complex, we see immediately, for the good-looking Zhou, who's a kind of a chick magnet, and in his sloppy, eager-to-please way, unable to stay true to her. As we men say: It means nothing, it's just sex. As you women say: I'm going to kill you.

She doesn't kill him, of course, but the dynamic of the relationship, against a backdrop of burgeoning chaos (it felt very '60s to this survivor of the '60s) is that he cheats innocently so she cheats knowingly, then taunts him, making him cheat more, making her cheat more, while at the same time developing between each other a staggering and unbreakable dependence.

What keeps the movie from being a chick-lit weeper is its sense of reality; now and then the director gives us a lover's reverie, but that's to sell us on the intensity of the emotion that Yu Hong is feeling. More often, the movie has the crackle of everyday life, particularly college life, where hundreds are crammed into dorms suitable for dozens, there's no privacy, and everyone is shabby, poor, and smokes and drinks too much, trying to live as intensely as possible.

It's a swim in a human sea, unforgettable.

Summer Palace (140 minutes, at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center) is not rated and contains sexually explicit scenes.