Lou Ye

b. 1965, Shanghai

Film director

Lou Ye graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989 and represents the first generation of modern Chinese filmmakers educated equally in Western and Chinese film traditions. He also studied film at New York University and lists Casavettes, Antonioni and Fellini as major influences. After his prize-winning first film, Weekend Lovers (Zhoumo qingren, 1995), Lou produced a television series, Super City (1995), the first digital film project in China, in which members of his Beijing Film Academy class were invited to direct ten episodes. His own contribution to the series developed into his digitally produced film, Suzhou River (1999), which epitomized the globalization of Chinese filmmaking in its European financing and German post-production.

Lou’s third feature—coming after Girl in Danger (Weiqing shaonü, 1995)—was awarded Best Film at the Paris and Rotterdam film festivals, along with directorial and acting awards. Narrated and purportedly filmed by a fictional videographer like Lou himself and taking Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as its point of departure, Suzhou River’s complex plot used mistaken identity, betrayal and voyeuristic surveillance as themes by which to critique the money-orientation and disaffection of China’s post-Mao youth culture and—contra Hitchcock—to urge a romantic leap of faith.

Lou Ye’s most recent film is Purple Butterfly (Zi hudie, 1993), starring Zhang Ziyi, and takes up the subject of love, collaboration, and resistance in the years before the outbreak of war between China and Japan in 1937.

Further reading

Berry, Chris (2000). ‘Suzhou River’ [review]. Cineyama 49:20–1.

Silbergeld, Jerome (2002). ‘Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River’. Persimmon 3.2 (Summer): 70–3.

JEROME SILBERGELD