a review of 苏州河

Ported from a dead account I've seen comparisons to Wong Kar-wai, but, barring some formal similarity, there's really nothing in common. People, who claim this to be Wongian, must not be seeing beyond the superficial aspects. This movie does not exist in a manic pixie dream world or luxuriate in the escapist glamour of the first-world French New Wave-inspired pulp fiction. Despite it directly engaging with fantasy, it is grounded in the brutality and grit of real life. It understands the placement of cinema between reality and fantasy, and masterfully crafts a story that exists in both worlds simultaneously, and sees those worlds cross-pollinate and merge, exhibiting how little difference there are between them. How all life is essentially a fleeting dream, and how we make up stories to make sense of it. Very similar to Zhou Yu's Train, a later work by the same cinematographer Wang Yu.