About.com Rating

The girl (Lei Hao) in Ye Lou's Summer Palace is ordinary and lovely. An image of her, hair in pigtails, looking away from the camera, made me want to see this film without any prior knowledge. However, the disjointed story never quite lives up to the cinematic longing expressed by her face.

Summer Palace uses recent events in China's history as a backdrop for an intimate story about young lovers. Yu Hong, a local village girl, gets accepted to Beijing university during the tumultuous late 1980's, the time of the Tiananmen Square protests.

Yu Hong falls passionately in love with another student, Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). In the early stages of romantic bliss, they have passionate sex in various dorm rooms. The full frontal nudity (both male and female) and the off camera reference to the Chinese massacre of students prompted Chinese censors to slap Ye with a five year ban from filmmaking.

Summer Palace's early, vibrant scenes are aimless and appealing: Yu Hong making her first friends at college, falling in love, drinking in bars, dancing spirited, conga lines. The students experience a heady time of liberation and sexual freedom. Alas, Yu Hong and Zhou Wei cannot remain happy. They have meaningless affairs, break up, get back together, and break apart again. Despite Hao's enormous appeal, the melodramatic nature of their relationship borders on histrionic.

The story stretches on into the future, covering a period of fifteen years. Yu Hong travels from town to smaller town, never recapturing the glory of her youth. A slightly more successful Zhou Wei becomes an expat in Germany, where he witnesses more history: the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Ye's back-and-forth storytelling insinuates that the lives of Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are incomplete without each other, but because their young love was never convincing in the first place, the bittersweet conclusion rings hollow.