Spring Fever

Nanjing Express - Chen Sicheng and Qin Hao in Spring Fever
 
Time Investment: 107 min.
Return on Investment: 70 min.
 
Controversial Chinese director Lou Ye, whose work has often been censored or outright banned in his home country, is not afraid to show the gritty banality of urban Chinese life, as he does in Spring Fever (Strand Releasing). In this gay love triangle (quadrangle?) involving a husband cheating on his wife with another man and the private eye who ends up entangled himself, Ye infuses images of rainy Nanjing with a certain cool edge—the Chinese equivalent of French ennui. He is an apparent fan of dark, lingering visuals that, although at first atmospheric, soon devolve into just plain hard-to-see. As the characters meander from love to lust, the long, dark shots begin to feel…well, long and dark.
 
Conversely, the acting is consistently both good and believable, as the lovers and spurned exes alternate between protracted periods of subtlety and brief bursts of intensity (whether during a frank sex scene or an attention-getting office confrontation). The true eye-opener here is how the wife and girlfriend, each cast aside, react differently to the men’s love; a very stark juxtaposition. The moment when the victim of an attack lies bloodied in the street, ignored by passersby, is telling when placed in the context of this politically charged director’s oeuvre. Then there’s the weirdly amusing karaoke-saves-the-day interlude.
 
Fever, in the end, is in need of a good edit; the characters set adrift within this disjointed story combine to burden the viewer as well as themselves, and all are left trying to pick up the pieces. —Dan Heching