Summer Palace

Fourteen years of modern Chinese history from 1987 to 2001 forms the backdrop to an intimate and poetic drama centering on the philosophical and passionate young woman Yu. She goes to Beijing to study, and, as a euphoric freedom-frenzy builds up in the capital, Yu is sucked into a giddiness that threatens to rip her apart from the inside. The film is told in a fragmentary, montage-like style that serves to accentuate Yu’s state of mind as well as the fragile state of mighty China at that time. Summer Palace is the first Chinese film to touch upon the historic summer of 1989 and the student uprising in Tiananmen Square, and is ground-breaking in its inclusion of explicit sex scenes. eg