Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

Lou Ye’s Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly 193Jerome Silbergeld’s Hitchcock With a Chinese Face (2004) includes oneof the first in-depth scholarly critiques of a movie directed by Lou Ye.Silbergeld is primarily interested in how contemporary Chinese movies incorporateelements of Chinese paintings, architecture, statues, literature, andother art forms from the past. Of course, given Suzhou River’s similaritiesto Vertigo and Rear Window, Silbergeld discusses Lou Ye’s “replies” toHitchcock’s imagery, themes, and story/plot construction. For example,he compares Mudan’s leap from a bridge into the Suzhou River to Judy’sfall from the top of a bell tower in Vertigo. Silbergeld also compares theShanghai Oriental Pearl Tower to the bell tower in Vertigo, though the PearlTower is more than simply a visual allusion.The Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower plays an important part in SuzhouRiver’s mise-en-scène. The “Tower encompasses a dream world, a mightytransformation from the mundane and the ordinary” (Silbergeld 2004,p. 29). The camera often drifts toward the Tower on Shanghai’s waterways,or the Tower appears in the background while the characters interact inthe foreground. However, the camera and the characters never reach theTower, which is located in the Pudong district. Pudong is Shanghai’srecently developed financial district and is separated from the rest of thecity by Huangpu River. Thus, the characters are permanently ghettoizedin Shanghai’s squalid districts. The Oriental Pearl Tower (and all that itrepresents) seems like a distant phantom, an illusion of the free-marketsuccess that dominates news headlines but is out of reach for the vast majorityof Chinese citizens.Lou Ye complicates Vertigo’s structure when he reveals that the “realwoman” did not actually die when everyone else thought she did. Silbergeldargues that the “double-disappearance in Vertigo . . . becomes a tripledisappearancein Suzhou River,” which reverses Hitchcock’s formula(Silbergeld 2004, pp. 30–1). The first disappearance is Mudan’s leap intothe Suzhou River. The second disappearance is Mudan’s real death. Thethird disappearance is Meimei’s abandonment of the narrator. While thethree disappearances are indeed an extension of what occurs in Vertigo, Loudoes not really reverse Hitchcock. In Vertigo, Scottie interacts only with thedoppelganger, never with the “real woman.” In Suzhou River, Mada interactswith both the “real woman” and the doppelganger. In both Vertigo andSuzhou River, the women whom Scottie and Mada love die. One could arguethat Judy is the “real woman” for Scottie anyway since he never meets hisfriend’s wife; thus, the real “real woman” dies in both Hitchcock’s andLou’s movies.