Presented by The Garden Cinema’s Chinese Cinema Project.

The third feature from Lou Ye, a leading figure of China’s Sixth Generation directors. This is the first time the restored version will be shown in a cinema in the UK.

On the banks of the Suzhou River, which winds precariously through Shanghai, Marda falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Moudan. When he tries to kidnap her in order to demand ransom money from her rich father, she escapes, jumping in to the river and disappearing forever. Marda serves a three-year jail sentence for his attempted crime. Upon his release, he meets a woman that looks exactly like Moudan, named MeiMei.

'…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 confluence—a postmodern fairy tale about romantic obsession.' – Jonathan Rosenbaum

Cast:
Zhou Xun, Jia Hongsheng, Nai An