Summer Palace

The protests that have recently swirled around the flight path of the Olympic torch as it travels toward the summer games in Beijing have thrown yet another spotlight on the country's practices, considered abhorrent to many in the West but seemingly forgivable to world leaders. What we're mad at China for this week isn't fueled by hatred as strongly as, say, the attention its fraught relationship with Tibet got in the '90s or last year's discovery of toxic Chinese-made products from toys to toothpaste on the American market, but it still prompts the question: How much is enough? When, if ever, will these stray facts combine to form a picture policy makers can no longer ignore?

The case of filmmaker Lou Ye may not raise hackles like the sight of the Olympic rings being branded onto Chinese landmarks, but it's a violation of freedoms nonetheless. For Lou's audacity to enter his film Summer Palace in the Cannes Film Festival without screening it for Chinese authorities first, he and his producer have been banned from making movies in China for five years and has not yet been distributed in the mainland (if it ever will). Lou probably supposed, correctly, that the film's combination of incendiary timing (using the Tiananmen Square protests as a major event) and explicit if realistic sex would cause a crackdown before he could even get it out of the country.

Despite all of this political front-loading "Summer Palace" is more of a dreamy love story than a Molotov cocktail -- certainly it doesn't seem as much of a lightning rod as Ang Lee's film "Lust, Caution," which was released (albeit edited) in China. The movie follows the life of young university student Yu Hong (Hao Lei), who meets the love of her life (Guo Xiaodong) at school and continues to pine for him over a decade of cheating, lying and traveling at home and abroad. Her political activity is not a matter of ardent pageantry, but rather a contributing condition to her college experience; similarly, her passions don't titillate so much as illustrate the state of her heart.

Shot in a grainy but occasionally gorgeous pageants of washed out nature and dark rooms, "Summer Palace" is a mature and nuanced film, one that the Chinese film board ought to have trumpeted instead of trying to smother.