Suzhou River

A fitfully employed videographer in Shanghai, who never appears on-screen, gets involved with a go-go dancer and then meets a motorcycle courier who’s convinced that the dancer is actually his girlfriend, who’s vanished mysteriously after jumping off a bridge. This moody Chinese independent (2000, 83 min.), the debut feature by Lou Ye, at first seems like a Wong Kar-wai remake of Vertigo, but in fact it’s something much stranger, drawing on not only Hitchcock and Chungking Express but also Hollywood noir and Hans Christian Andersen to create something relatively fresh from the confluencea postmodern fairy tale about romantic obsession. This is well worth checking out. (JR)

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