Suzhou River

Told through flickering cameras, jump cuts, fluorescent lights, visual fragments and burnt colors, this is a romance within a romance, a narrator within a narrator searching for a girl he lost. He's a cameraman, someone tasked with seeing; he watches her every day as she comes along the bridge to an apartment they share. As he waits he imagines a story she told him about a man who spent his life searching for a girl he lost. Imagines her in the girl within the story's place, until that girl disappeared in the river. His own girl emerged from water the first time he saw her, mermaid in the club aquarium.

It's about his girl who never came back one day, vanished into air. The whole is narrated from the end, with the nested story about heartbreak as wondering about love, how people can truly do it. The river standing in for transient life that carries away the past.

It's not quite Kar Wai, albeit in the same vein of languorous longing that stirs electrifying poetry out of streets. It's a bit loose in shape, pieces of daydream that float, and very much influenced by French notions of layered narrative.

Noir Meter: not a noir