Category: Movies → Summer Palace [18+] 2008 DVDRip

Toward the end of Lou Ye’s “Summer Palace,” Yu Hong (Lei Hao) reflects that her college years were the “most confused” time in her life. A lot of us might feel similarly, but Yu Hong, the beautiful and passionate heroine of this beautiful and passionate film, is something of a special case.

As a young woman, freshly arrived at Beijing University from a provincial town, she shows a romantic, sometimes reckless appetite for experience, confiding in her diary a longing to live with maximum intensity. She satisfies this desire, in the movie’s heady, headlong first half, through a series of friendships and flirtations, most of all her fierce, jealous on-and-off relationship with Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo), a skinny, brooding intellectual and the love of her life.

But Yu Hong and Zhou Wei — and the various other friends, rivals and hookups who round out Mr. Lou’s portrait — are hardly ordinary university students. Or if they are, their matriculation comes at an extraordinary moment. Yu Hong arrives in Beijing in 1988, and her first year at the university, already full of emotional and sexual upheaval, ends with the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and their violent suppression by the Chinese government.