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194 Yunda Eddie FengCuriously, despite the movie’s abundance of deceptions, betrayals, anddeaths, Silbergeld feels that Suzhou River also reverses Hitchcock’s cynicism.“Mada’s quest for redemption inspires the mistaken female’s spiritualawakening” (Silbergeld 2004, p. 16). Silbergeld’s argument that Suzhou Riverhas a “more idealistic trajectory” than Vertigo relies in part on Meimei’srealization of the value of her relationship with the narrator versus Judy’sdeath (Silbergeld 2004, p. 23). Suzhou River is not quite the uplifting storythat Silbergeld believes it to be. Meimei asks the narrator if he would lookfor her the way that Mada searched for Mudan. The narrator says yes, andMeimei accuses the narrator of lying. The next morning, the narratordiscovers that Meimei has left him, but instead of looking for her, the narrator(probably drunk as indicated by the camera falling on its right-handside) takes a boat trip down the Suzhou River again, passively waitingfor the next love story to drop into his life. As the narrator drifts towardthe Oriental Pearl Tower, smoke fumes cloud his field of view. UnlikeHitchcock’s “thriller sextet,” the movie does not end with a shot of a manand a woman as a happy couple. (Even Vertigo once had a “happy” ending,with Scottie returning to Midge’s apartment in some versions.) Theimagery and the narrator’s lack of initiative negate Silbergeld’s claims.Moreover, Meimei is the least developed of the four principal characters.She is a cipher upon which Mada and the narrator project their feelingsand dreams. The viewer also does not know what happens to Meimei atthe end of the movie, so discussing her fate is pure conjecture.Viewers may at times be confused regarding whose shots are on screen– the director’s or the diegetic narrator’s. This is especially true duringSegment 3, when the movie segues from the “present” to the “distant past.”In fact, a viewer probably does not even know that the movie is in themiddle of a flashback during Segment 3. The conflation of the narrator’soptical point of view (when he is present to participate in or observe/shoot the action) and the director’s objective/non-focalized shots (whenthe narrator is not present) emphasizes how similar the story’s two principalmale characters are. “Although the videographer-narrator himself isnever quite seen by the audience . . . it is precisely this constrained viewpointthat by the end of the film becomes the chief object of scrutiny”(Silbergeld 2004, p. 37). Many of the long(er) takes can be construed asshots from the narrator’s perspective, though even this rule is tested by thefact that Mada spies on Meimei in her dressing room in almost the exactsame way that the narrator does. By extension, because the movie suggeststhat the narrator and Mada might be the same person, the viewer begins