The ProjectorLou Ye’s film Saturday Fiction gets lukewarm reception – has Chinese filmmaker been crushed by burden of expectation?
- Critical consensus is that the new movie fails to live up to the last, which looked at contemporary China through the lens of social realism
- But is there more the evocative story of love and betrayal at the heart of Saturday Fiction than meets the eye?
He, too, had doubts about the film. It’s a gripping affair, and a visually striking one, but it all seemed “meaningless”, he said, pointing to the lack of reference to China’s current social and political climate.
Indeed, Saturday Fiction is an outlier in Lou’s body of work, with the director having dedicated most of his 25-year career to gritty filmmaking revolving around contemporary stories. This is only his second period film, the other being the 1930s-set spy thriller Purple Butterfly (2003).
A multilingual whirlwind of shifting alliances, smouldering relationships and scintillating jump cuts, the film is daunting – and not helped by the constant, confusing switching between the story and the play within the story, which is based on Jean’s past romance with its director (played by Taiwanese actor Mark Chao Yu-ting).
Among the critics in Toronto, there was a shared disappointment that the film was “not as good as the last one”. They were referring to Lou’s The Shadow Play (2018), which was also a whirling sprawl, but with a difference: beneath its noir-like facade of a young detective’s investigation into the death of a corrupt apparatchik, the film provides an insight into the illicit deals and unrest born out of China’s urbanisation.