"Spring Fever" by Chinese director Lou Ye

Cannes loves controversy. Which is as old as the 62-year-old Festival. Once the starlets out to grab newspaper headlines stripped and slipped into the arms of hunk heroes. But with the world past its obsession for sex and nudity, politics crept in to fulfil Cannes’ love for all that was controversial. What could be better than China with its Great Wall still impeding free cinema. The country’s newest enfant-terrible is Lou Ye, whose “Summer Palace” in 2006, set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square protests and screened at Cannes, angered Beijing so much that it banned the director from making movies for five years. But Lou was unstoppable.

He made another, called it “Spring Fever,” and wove it around gay sex. There is plenty of sex and nudity, as there was in “Summer Palace,” though of the male variety here. But this apart, “Spring Fever,” screened the other day in the Festival’s top Competition slot, had little to offer. Cannes selectors must have been swayed by Lou’s contentious existence than, strictly speaking, any real merit in his work.

“Spring Fever’ made me angry that some far better Indian films made by sensitive auteur-directors, such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan (“A Tale of Crime”) or Girish Kasaravalli (“Gulabi Talkies”) or Buddhadeb Dasgupta (whose latest, “The Window” was reportedly rejected by Cannes!), have not found a slot in this Festival.

Back to Lou, his movie is set in present day Nanjing’s spring time, and traces the bitter jealousy provoked by homosexual love. Wang Ping’s wife suspects him of adultery and hires a detective, Lou Haitao, to catch her husband with his pants down. But Luo and his girlfriend, Li Jing, find themselves in a triangular affair with Wang’s male lover, and realise that homosexual obsessiveness is far more difficult to fathom and control than a heterosexual affair.

However, Lou says that his work “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 moralising, 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”.

Sadly, “Spring Fever” is a far inferior work to “Summer Palace,” and to any of the Indian films I mentioned earlier. Often Lou’s movie seems dull and listless with its handheld camera visuals and a positively depressing imagery that seemed to mock springtime spirit and beauty. Grainy features do not add anything significant to the script that is at best confusing. Lack of visual consistency does not help the tone and tenor, and the feeling that is evoked is more of autumn gloom than spring hope. Somehow, Lou seems to be on a free wall with his earlier “Sozhou River” and “Purple Butterfly” appearing far more inventive and ambitious.