Dr eam Fact or y and Rosem Fi l ms pr esent
A LOU YE FILM
SPRING
FEVER
Wi t h
QI N Hao, CHEN Si cheng, TAN Zhuo, WU Wei
Pr oduced by NAI An and Syl vai n BURSZTEJN
Pr oduced by Dr eam Fact or y HK and Rosem Fi l ms
Fr ench Di st r i but i on - Le Pact e
I nt er nat i onal Sal es - Wi l d Bunch
DREAM FACTORY and ROSEM FI LMS pr esent
SPRING
FEVER
( CHUN FENG CHEN ZUI DE YE WAN)
A LOU YE FILM
w w w. n u i t s d i v r e s s e p r i n t a n i e r e - l e f i l m . c o m
Na n j i n g, pr e s e n t da y, s pr i n gt i me . Wa n g Pi n g' s wi f e
s u s pe c t s h i m of a du l t e r y. Sh e h i r e s L u o Ha i t a o t o s py
on h i m a n d di s c ov e r s t h a t h e r h u s ba n d' s l ov e r i s a
ma n , J i a n g Ch e n g. I t ' s wi t h t h i s ma n t h a t L u o Ha i t a o
a n d h i s gi r l f r i e n d, L i J i n g, f or m a t or r i d l ov e t r i a n gl e .
F or a l l t h r e e , i t ' s t h e be gi n n i n g of a s ph y x i a t i n g, s u l t r y
n i gh t s of ph y s i c a l a ba n don t h a t e x a l t t h e s e n s e s .
A s u l f u r ou s j ou r n e y i n t o t h e c on f i n e s of j e a l ou s y a n d
obs e s s i v e l ov e .
S Y N O P S I S
Your rst lm, WEEKEND LOVER, in 1994, was censored, your
second, SUZHOU RIVER, which you lmed clandestinely in the
streets of Shanghai, was banned in China and won the Grand Prize
at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and SUMMER PALACE, presented at
Cannes in 2006, and which dealt with events surrounding Tiananmen
Square in 1989, resulted in your being banished for ve years.
What's your relationship with the authorities in your country today?
The situation hasn't changed much. I started working on the screenplay
for SPRING FEVER as soon as I'd finished SUMMER PALACE, and was
immediately confronted with a certain hesitancy, let's say, on the part
of the producers. As they saw it, since I had been "banished", prohibited
from directing for five years, why finance my new film, which they wouldn't
even be able to show in Chinese theaters? They all said: "Let's schedule
a meeting in five years!". Thankfully, in the end, we were able to secure all
necessary funding through the French film financing system and partly from
Hong Kong.
In Cannes, in 2006, everything that happened around the production
of SUMMER PALACE, the secrets, the censors, the chases and the
media attention that ensued, were they benecial or detrimental?
At the time, I thought, neither one nor the other. But after the dust settled
we received the five-year ban. It's true, in the beginning, I was very angry
with the Film Bureau, and with Chinese decisions regarding freedom of
expression, and I made that known. Which, in turn, aggravated the situation.
Now it's ok, because I have no relationship whatsoever with the Film
Bureau. Everyone is staying his own corner!
There was signicant reaction to SUMMER PALACE and its portrayal
of the repression that took place at Tiananmen Square, which is
a taboo subject. Even though not the main subject of your lm,
is it fair to say that SPRING FEVER deals with another taboo, that of
male homosexuality?
I'm much freer today than before. When I was writing SUMMER PALACE,
I had many discussions with the producers, because we were in a very
delicate position and had to go over the material over and over again,
crossing things out, reworking things, wasting time in order to get the
film past the censors. This time I could just write and I felt completely
free because I'm no longer beholden to any kind of governmental body
whatsoever.
Is it difcult to be a homosexual in China? How do people react
to homosexuality?
Personally, I don't think I'm the best person to answer that. I think that, as
with many things, it is not easy. But the situation is much better today than it
was a century ago. For example, in the Chinese Mental Health Regulations,
dated 2001, homosexuality was still qualified as mental disorder. But, in
2005, there was a real dialogue between the Vice Minister of Health and
homosexual associations in the fight against AIDS. It's a huge step forward,
even if a number of problems remain to be resolved.
This lm is a lm about love, the love between two young men.
In the middle, there is the cheated wife. Could SPRING FEVER
be likened to a kind of inverted JULES ET JIM?
Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to do, tell a love story, full of desire, and the
reference to JULES ET JIM is appropriate, it's a film for which I have a deep
admiration.
I N T E R V I E W W I T H L O U Y E
Several times in the lm, one of the characters reads a portion of
a very beautiful text that marks the two parts of the lm, SPRING
FEVER and THE FLOWERING SEASON. The rst text is actually
dated July 15th, 1923. Where does it come from?
I was inspired by a book written by Yu Dafu, an author from the 1920s.
The film is not an adaptation of the book, but in the film, the two homosexual
lovers read a passage from it after making love. I wanted to pay homage
to this author and try to reflect the tone he created. He writes in a very
intimate manner. He doesn't describe his characters in terms of social
status, or politics: peasant, revolutionary, good guy, bad guy. Instead, he
goes into their inner beings, exploring their intimate selves. Yu Dafu uses
a literary approach linked to the historic May 4th revolt in 1919, which he
took part in. This movement incarnated, among other things, the rupture
with tradition and led to the first student protests in Tiananmen Square.
I guess there is a little link between my last two films! This ability, to penetrate
the interior life of a person, or, at least, the desire to do so has disappeared,
definitely since 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded.
I think it would be hard for it to come back, even today, while China remains
prisoner of its own way of seeing things, this self-imposed obligation of
self-definition, of belonging to a whole, of favouring collectivity over the
individual. And, therefore, restricting itself, concealing itself, negating its
desires, its secret impulses.
The characters in SPRING FEVER are a little older than those
in SUMMER PALACE, but they still don't seem to have settled
in their lives. A bookseller, a worker in a bootleg textile factory
In the book that inspired this story, there is also a character who is a manual
worker... And she has an affair with an intellectual. They don't have much
control over their lives either, and each one is at the threshold of something
significant... We experience this ourselves today, this kind of drifting,
the difficulty that we all have today of finding our own identities, and maybe
it's not such a bad thing.
The body of the lm... is the body. Male bodies lmed very close
up during lovemaking: naked, physical, abandoned. But you never
show the body of the woman who nds herself excluded.
In the beginning, I filmed all the bodies, the girl as much as the boys,
but then I realized that she had such a presence, such incredible power
in her expressions of jealousy, that to show her body would have been
redundant. In fact, in this film, the woman's body is represented by the body
of a man, the feminine within the man.
Do you think it's true that for a woman, it is worse for a man to
cheat on her, not with another woman, but with another man,
because there is no way that she can ever hope to penetrate that
mystery? There's that beautiful line when she asks her boyfriend's
lover: "That's how you hold his hand?"
What she says at that moment goes beyond jealousy, it's a question that
has no gender, and deals with the love that can exist between two beings.
To treat homosexuality as simply the opposite of heterosexuality would
have been a moralizing, theoretical and simple-minded approach. This girl
already gets it. She understands that it's a love between two beings, it's not
important that it happens to be between two boys. She's beyond that.
She's beyond that but at one point she cuts her hair! You start
the lm in a very direct, familiar way. Two boys are in a car, in the
rain, they stop and one of them says: "Let's take a piss." But then
one minute later we see them in bed and we hear: "I love you".
The transition is brutal.
Yes, I wanted to move right into real life, really situating the story at the level
of the most banal experiences of everyday life. I didn't want to tell an unusual
love story, but a simple true everyday love story. We begin without phrases,
without words, without knowledge of intimate manners, wrapped up in the
desire to be taken in someone's arms, in physical love. We begin in reality,
undisguised, with no makeup, without a magnifying lens.
Was it hard to nd actors, specically for the male roles?
For every project, you think its going to be difficult to find the cast, male
or female. But once again, I was very lucky to find excellent actors and
actresses with whom it was a real pleasure to work.
How did you prepare or train your actors in dealing with their
own inhibitions to act in scenes that are more erotic than usual?
Specically when they kissed: we don't often see two men kissing
on screen with such tenderness yet with such relish.
First, I gave them the script to read, then, let's say, 'technical' articles on
diverse aspects of homosexuality. Then some books, or excerpts from
books, which weren't necessarily linked to homosexuality but which evoked
love situations close to those that they would have to reproduce and live
in the film. Then I showed them films. Movies I like, naturally. In particular,
John Schlesinger's MIDNIGHT COWBOY and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO
by Gus Van Sant. The rest is a question of establishing trust which must
be reciprocal. Since I filmed with a little digital camera, the actors were
extremely free and autonomous. I tell them what the situation is, indicate
the space they can move in, and, after, I don't interrupt. The space is theirs...
They fill it as they wish, with no time limit. There is no "Action!", no "Cut!" Once,
I filmed a 40 minute shot! "Letting go" means many, many, very long takes.
But if I was able to recreate moments of real intimacy, it was thanks to this
method, this almost documentary-style technique. The first few minutes of
the shot, the actors are acting, and then, little by little, they enter a more
personal dimension, they are more natural, and are able to forget that
people are watching them.
Where are we in the lm? We nd ourselves in a lot of rooms, in
beds, the exterior decor is nocturnal and succint.
I wanted to pick visually insignificant, anonymous locations, with nothing
too beautiful or too ugly, so that the audience wouldn't be distracted by the
beauty or singularity of the exterior. I also didnt want any lighting set ups or
other technical elements to interfere with my characters and the actors
performances. Everything in this story happens in the interior.
Why did you choose the city of Nanjing as the setting for your story?
Is it a city that is known for being home to a certain level of freedom
of expression?
I think Nanjing is a city that finds itself in the middle, in a "grey zone".
It's not as political as Beijing, not as commercial as Shanghai, nor is it as
open as Shenzen or Hong Kong, but it's not as tough as Chongqing and
more developed than several cities in Western China. Nanjing was the
capital of China for six dynasties and it was the capital of China when
Yu Dafu was alive. It is a city that is linked to very dark periods of the country's
history, but, situated south of the Yangtze river, it is also full of poetry.
I really like this city.
At the end of the lm - a little time has passed - and the hero
has a large ower tattooed on his chest. What is the signicance
of this "owering"? Does it mean that things have nally found
their place?
The symbol of the flower being inscribed on the body is important because
the film begins with another flower, the lotus, which floats in a pool,
and which we encounter again at key moments in the film. The tattooed
flower is part of the path of the character, and, perhaps, as writer and
director of this film, part of my own journey as well. A flower engraved in the
skin cannot be forgotten. In Chinese, we have a saying: The whole world
is a single flower.
C R E W
Di rect ed by LOU YE
Screenpl ay MEI FENG
Producers NAI AN / SYLVAI N BURSZTEJN
Co- producer LOU YE
DP ZENG JI AN
Sound FU KANG
Edi t ors ROBI N WENG
ZENG JI AN
FLORENCE BRESSON
Product i on desi gner PENG SHAOYI NG
Composer PEYMAN YAZDANI AN
Product i on DREAM FACTORY HK
ROSEM FI LMS
Wi t h t he part i ci pat i on of FONDS SUD CI NEMA
MI NI STRY OF CULTURE
AND COMMUNI CATI ON - CNC
MI NI STRY OF FOREI GN AFFAI RS
Wi t h t he support of RGI ON LE- DE- FRANCE
C A S T
QI N Hao JI ANG CHENG
CHEN Si cheng LUO HAI TAO
TAN Zhuo LI JI NG
WU Wei WANG PI NG
JI ANG Ji aqi LI N XUE
1 1 5 mi n / 35mm / DCP / 1 : 85 / Col or / Dol by SRD
D R E A M F A C T O R Y H K
Dr eam Fact or y HK i s a f i l m pr oduct i on company est abl i shed i n 2008.
R O S E M F I L MS
Syl vai n Bur szt ej n, pr esi dent of Rosem Fi l ms, has pr oduced mor e
t han t went y cr i t i cal l y accl ai med f i l ms i ncl udi ng HALFAOUI NE by Fer i d
Boughedi r, THE OAK by Luci an Pi nt i l i e, LE CRI DE LA SOI E by Yvon
Mar ci ano and THE PERFECT CI RCLE by Ademi r Kenovi c.
For ei ght year s, Syl vai n Bur szt ej n has been devel opi ng hi s act i vi t i es
i n Chi na wher e he col l abor at es wi t h bot h est abl i shed and upcomi ng
t al ent . Ana s Mar t ane, Rosem Fi l ms r epr esent at i ve i n Chi na, act i vel y
par t i ci pat es i n t he Chi nese pr oj ect s. Rosem Fi l ms ef f or t s have r esul t ed
i n t he pr oduct i on of ei ght f i l ms i ncl udi ng: LUXURY CAR, by Wang Chao,
Pr i x Un Cer t ai n Regar d, Cannes 2006 and SUMMER PALACE by Lou Ye,
sel ect ed i n Of f i ci al Compet i t i on i n Cannes t he same year.
I n 2008, Rosem Fi l ms pr oduced LA FI VRE DE L OR ( CURSED FOR
GOLD) by Ol i vi er Weber, and MEMORY OF LOVE by Wang Chao t he
f ol l owi ng year.
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