Spring Fever

TIFF: With the freedom lent him by a non-intrusive digital camera, controversial filmmaker Lou Ye casts a clandestine look on the yearning beauty of forbidden love in Spring Fever, his latest and most lyrical work to date.

In making this film, Lou defies the five-year ban on his work imposed by Chinese authorities in response to his 2006 feature, Summer Palace. He also breaks the taboo of showing explicit scenes of same-sex lovemaking, rendering the ambiguity and fragility of modern relationships with curiosity and humility.

The distant sound of a camera shutter underscores the silvery laughs of a couple on their way to a secret refuge. There, sheltered from a hostile world, they will touch and kiss, caress and make love. The camera belongs to private detective Luo Haitao (Chen Sicheng), hired on the suspicions of a jealous wife, Lin Xue (Jiang Jiaqi). As it turns out, reality surpasses Lin's imagination; she would never have suspected her husband to be in love with Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), a handsome man whose mere presence seems capable of stirring the most recondite thoughts and needs.

Through its close proximity, Lou's camera seems to stalk the film's protagonists in their intimacy, displaying their bodies and desire, their outbursts of love and rage in a powerful and innocently disturbing portrait.

Grim in its setting yet intoxicatingly sexy, Spring Fever was inspired by the intense charm of Yu Dafu's prohibited novels of the twenties. In bringing the tension of these taboos into the present, Lou has created a remarkable portrait of passion and its consequences.

--Giovanna Fulvi

Lou Ye was born in Shanghai. He studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and produced the groundbreaking television series Super City in the mid-nineties. He has also directed several short films. His feature films are Weekend Lover (93), Suzhou River (00), which won several prizes, including the VPRO Tiger Award at the 2000 International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Purple Butterfly (03), Summer Palace (06) and Spring Fever (09).
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Larry Richman: I'm back from my last film on this Day Eight of the festival, the North American Premiere of Spring Fever. There was a short line at the AMC, which did not bode well for this screening. The theater turned out to be relatively empty.

A co-production of Hong Kong and France in the Vanguard section, director Ye Lou's Spring Fever is quite a unique film about a gay love triangle. There's very little dialogue, which is a device I normally relish, but here it just drags out the already minimal action. The film is shot with all handheld and shaky camera style, using lots of extreme closeups. It might not have been that hard to handle except that the picture itself was very dark at times so it was often difficult to even see what was taking place. I don't know if it was the source print, digital transfer, or projection, but it made for a very disappointing experience. There was no Q&A and the small audience filed out quietly.