DVDs: Signs of life

'Summer Palace' and 'Housewife, 49' show women coping with changing times

By Bruce Dancis - bdancis@sacbee.com

Published 3:25 pm PDT Thursday, March 20, 2008
Story appeared in TICKET section, Page TICKET28

Print | E-Mail | |

Two intriguing movies about women in extraordinary times are out on DVD this week.

Lou Ye's "Summer Palace" (Palm Pictures, $24.99, not rated) offers an unprecedented look at alienated Chinese college students during the turbulent late 1980s, a time of personal and political upheaval.

The film's main protagonist, Yu Hong (portrayed by the extraordinary Hao Lei), leaves her village near the North Korean border to attend prestigious Beijing University. There she experiments with both sexual freedom (the sex scenes are numerous and erotic) and political freedom, as Yu and her friends join the massive student demonstrations for democracy that culminated in a government crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The scenes of the students joining demonstrations and fleeing army gunfire are intercut with footage of the actual demonstrations.

But when Yu's lover, Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), is sent to a military camp after the demonstrations are crushed, they part. Yu moves around in China, working at alienating jobs, conducting listless affairs with different men, undergoing an abortion, while Zhou moves to Berlin, joining a small Chinese expatriate community and remaining disillusioned with both his life and his work.

"Summer Palace" proceeds at a leisurely, studied pace (it's 140 minutes long) as it takes the stories of Yu and Zhou and their existential angst into the 1990s and 2000s.

Considering the explosive political backdrop of its crucial scenes in Beijing, the movie is surprisingly devoid of political discussion. Yu and the other students show obvious fervor when they join the illegal demonstrations, but we're not privy to any serious political discussions or rallies among them.

This stands in sharp contrast to the explicitness of director Lou's portrayal of sexual relations and his use of narration by Yu to express her inner thoughts.

The stunningly beautiful Hao Lei gives a memorable performance as Yu, capturing her inner conflicts and outward moodiness, and her difficulty in finding herself in a rapidly changing society.

"Summer Palace's" mix of graphic sexuality and political dissent proved to be too much for China's authoritarian regime. As is explained in a short DVD documentary, "Chinese Censorship," after the film was shown at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival in France, the Chinese Film Bureau and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television barred the movie from being released in China. Furthermore, director Lou and producer Nai An were banned from all filmmaking activities for five years.

The movie, which had a limited run (to ecstatic reviews) in 2007 in a handful of U.S. cities, has still never been shown in China.

* * *

English actress Victoria Wood has had a powerful response to the lack of good roles for middle-aged actresses (she is 54): She writes good scripts for herself. It's a practice that has produced three hit TV series for Wood in Britain during the 1980s, '90s and this decade: "Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV," "Victoria Wood" and "Dinnerladies."

In "Housewife, 49," an award-winning British television drama from 2006, released on DVD for the first time this week (Acorn Media Group, $24.99, not rated), Wood stars as a Lancashire housewife named Nella Last who begins writing a diary as part of a government "Mass Observation" project to boost morale on the homefront during World War II. Wood's screenplay was actually adapted from the real, published diaries of Nella Last.

The story of "Housewife, 49" is about the transformation of a timid housewife who has been bullied and denigrated for years by her cold fish of a husband (David Threlfall), showing a more vital side only in the presence of one of her sons and his friends.

Against the wishes of her husband, Nella begins doing volunteer work for the war effort. This not only gives her a sense of purpose that had been missing in her life, it also reveals her organizational and management skills that had previously been hidden.

Nella's home life and volunteer work are set amid the difficult life faced by Britons during the war – with terror bombings by the Germans, constant news (or lack of news) about loves ones and friends killed in fighting, food shortages and other hardships becoming everyday facts of life.

It takes a strong person to withstand all of this – something Nella was not in 1939, when the movie begins, but has become by the time the war ends.

"Housewife, 49" occasionally breaks its dramatic narrative with some almost sitcom-y humor that doesn't fit the overall tone of the piece. But in Victoria Wood, the movie has a most sympathetic and compelling heroine, and the period detail of the production is excellent.

"Housewife, 49" won the BAFTA (British Emmy Awards) Award in 2007 for best drama, and Wood won for best actress.