Suzhou River: ‘On the [Haunted] Waterfront’

By examining the film Suzhou River (2000), Dr. Lopez traces the narrative and aesthetic legacy of a Chinese film that was banned from screenings in China. Often compared to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the film crosses genre boundaries to unsettle the viewer’s sense of certainty. The narrative is complicated by doubles, drownings, mythical creatures and point-of-view shifts; it uses these tropes to both question the reliability of storytelling in general and specifically in China. Through the disjunction between visual evidence and fictional constructs, the film weaves the viewer into its spectral world of ghosts. It uses the eerie, polluted landscape of millennial Shanghai, and the decaying surrounds of Suzhou River to evoke a social and aesthetic malaise stemming from rapid economic and environmental changes in a newly globalized China. The director, Lou Ye, builds his hybrid narrative from flotsam and jetsam of cinematic and literary influences in a wider aesthetic negotiation of the Gothic. Ultimately, he creates a new type of Urban Gothic tale, one that addresses the particular difficulty of telling stories in China, a world haunted by the ghostly proliferation of stories, both untold true stories and discarded fictions.