Yu Hong(Hao Lei) is no different than the average American youth. Although the first-year college student may take a passing interest in her country's political climate, the super-charged ambiance of the bustling Beijing University campus never makes a strong enough impression to usurp the personal fireworks she started with a boy named Zhao Wei(Guo Ziading). While her classmates talk about politics in smoke-filled cafes and bars, she and Zhao Wei are having hot sex in his dorm room. Yu Hong is apolitical. Dancing to bad American music gave Yu Hong and other young people like her the impression that they didn't have to fight for the right to bop along to Toni Basil. The girl from the small provincial town can open her legs all she wants, but it still doesn't make China an open country.
Campus life is a sheltered life of consciousness raising and extra-curricular activities. In "Yihe yuan", the leeway that the Chinese government allows their young people to speak their minds is mistaken for freedom. Because the students smoke, drink, f***, and dance like Americans, they forget that this intellectual and spatial enclave was the site of a purge that resulted in a lot of over-qualified laborers who dotted the countryside. In one pointed scene, to illustrate how young people like Yu Hong and Zhao Wei took their deliverance from collectivism for granted, the two lovers pedal for the lead in a playful bicycle race, and as they alternate being in the front position, a passing poster of Mao Tse Tsung reminds the viewer that life in Red China was a utilitarian one. Yu Hong and Zhao Wei don't live in a vacuum. The image of this dictator is a foreshadowing of things to come. To go racing in the streets that once flowed with blood, and will soon flow again, is an innocent but flagrant act of defiance. There can't be a battle of the sexes until the battle is won against the government.
After their love breaks down, Yu Hong writes in her diary that she taught Dong Dong, a roommate, how to masturbate. As an afterthought, she reports on the first rumblings of the students' protest at Tianamen Square that infamously ended in police gunfire. Yu Hong makes love, not war, and the same goes for Zhao Wei, as well. When the first shots are fired into the student congregation, Zhao Wei hardly notices the pandemonium that surrounds him. All he cares about is locating Yu Hong before she returns home to Yumen.
Yu Hong and Zhao Wei aren't heroic. Their participation in history was pure happenstance. It's not fair to paint them as anti-heroes, but they are, despite their tender age. "Yihe yuan" is not a film about revolutionaries, but still the lovers make a political statement with their bodies. "Yihe yuan" ends with a post-script that informs us on the current whereabouts of Yu Hong and Zhao Wei as if they were real people. This simulacrum of reality gives us the impression that we've just witnessed a documentary about their otherwise fictive lives. By doing this, their f***** seems real enough to be thought of as a weapon to fight back against the government, with love, instead of bullets.
Campus life is a sheltered life of consciousness raising and extra-curricular activities. In "Yihe yuan", the leeway that the Chinese government allows their young people to speak their minds is mistaken for freedom. Because the students smoke, drink, f***, and dance like Americans, they forget that this intellectual and spatial enclave was the site of a purge that resulted in a lot of over-qualified laborers who dotted the countryside. In one pointed scene, to illustrate how young people like Yu Hong and Zhao Wei took their deliverance from collectivism for granted, the two lovers pedal for the lead in a playful bicycle race, and as they alternate being in the front position, a passing poster of Mao Tse Tsung reminds the viewer that life in Red China was a utilitarian one. Yu Hong and Zhao Wei don't live in a vacuum. The image of this dictator is a foreshadowing of things to come. To go racing in the streets that once flowed with blood, and will soon flow again, is an innocent but flagrant act of defiance. There can't be a battle of the sexes until the battle is won against the government.
After their love breaks down, Yu Hong writes in her diary that she taught Dong Dong, a roommate, how to masturbate. As an afterthought, she reports on the first rumblings of the students' protest at Tianamen Square that infamously ended in police gunfire. Yu Hong makes love, not war, and the same goes for Zhao Wei, as well. When the first shots are fired into the student congregation, Zhao Wei hardly notices the pandemonium that surrounds him. All he cares about is locating Yu Hong before she returns home to Yumen.
Yu Hong and Zhao Wei aren't heroic. Their participation in history was pure happenstance. It's not fair to paint them as anti-heroes, but they are, despite their tender age. "Yihe yuan" is not a film about revolutionaries, but still the lovers make a political statement with their bodies. "Yihe yuan" ends with a post-script that informs us on the current whereabouts of Yu Hong and Zhao Wei as if they were real people. This simulacrum of reality gives us the impression that we've just witnessed a documentary about their otherwise fictive lives. By doing this, their f***** seems real enough to be thought of as a weapon to fight back against the government, with love, instead of bullets.