Fatal Betrayal and Persistent Memory in Lou Ye’s Summer Palace

Abstract

Lou Ye’s Summer Palace was officially banned in mainland China and its Chinese filmmakers subjected to five years’ censorship, due to its audacious rendering of the 1989 Tiananmen incident and its daring portrayal of sexuality. Spanning the time period from 1987 to 2001, with the 1989 student pro-democratic movement and its crackdown as a crucial historical backdrop, the film seems to be a college love story: Yu Hong and Zhou Wei’s love relationship changes as their intense love and sex life comes to an abrupt halt due to her betrayal by Zhou Wei. Summer Palace is a film about lost love and memory, both personal and generational. The film conveys a strong sense of mourning over these losses and an acute sense of nostalgia for the past preceding them. The narrative follows Yu Hong’s diary chronologically, often read in voiceover. The fatal betrayal of love, analogous to the fatal betrayal of the students by the Chinese government, psychologically cripples Yu Hong in her subsequent life.  Lou Ye artistically intertwines love and politics with extended metaphors, images, music and songs. The protagonists suffer the aftermath of their personal and communal crises, which persist in memory in the form of images, desires, and even music and songs associated with their traumatic experiences. They are unable to resurrect their lost love, or to regain their lost paradise; however, nostalgia for the idealized past of short-lived love and freedom connects the students of Yu Hong’s generation even as loss has separated them and deprived them of their dreams.