Critics reviews

A film built upon gay male hypersexualization overlaid with some hamfisted prose, Spring Fever turns the sadness of being gay and Chinese into a dry drama that does not say anything new about the LGBTQ experience.

Who knows why Mei Feng’s script for a movie that can’t come up with the words to define its characters or give psychological continuity to their action won best screenplay at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival?

As lived-in as the film’s images, that melancholia in the end feels nothing but canned and trite.

Wallowing in unmitigated bleakness, Mei Feng’s Cannes-feted screenplay misses the chance to explore thematic angles that might have distinguished it from being a dreary Happy Together wannabe.

Somewhere in the course of its nearly two-hour run time, Lou Ye's "Spring Fever" loses its way, and its examination of identity and loneliness begins to feel like a soap opera season boiled down into one very long episode with too much happening.

Lou Ye references Francois Truffaut’s classic ménage-a-trois Jules and Jim as an inspiration, but the film owes much more to Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together.

The film’s often candid sexual comings-and-goings made the group of Chinese people sitting next to me squirm. Other audiences will struggle to find an emotional way into the story: psychological motivation and narrative continuity are thin on the ground. But Lou, helped by Zeng Jian’s striking camerawork, captures very well the mood of drift and fragmentation in modern-day urban China. Compelling and messy in equal measure, it’s a cine-letter to the future.

It’s not as if the increasingly complicated and contrived plotting is helped by the poetic and philosophical theme: namely, that we all come to fruition, emotionally, at different times, and move in different directions. There’s an awful lot of bad timing going on in this rather humourless movie.

It is an opaque, grainy account of homosexual liaisons in modern-day China; a tale of illicit love that is itself illicit (Lou was forced to shoot it in secret, contravening a five-year ban by the Chinese authorities). But it is still an alluring, intriguing film that packs a considerable emotional wallop.

I think there’s meant to be a tender love story buried somewhere in all this remote melodrama, but none of the five major characters makes the slightest impression; when one eventually commits suicide, you get the sense it’s mostly just a means of getting the hell out of this boring movie.