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SFIAAFF: Looking For Love at Summer Palace and Mistress of Spices
SFist Wendy makes it a weekend of romance at the SF Asian-Am Film Fest!
This was a good weekend, thanks in large part to the Asian-American film festival. We spent part of the past two days at the Castro checking out a couple of remarkably different films: Lou Ye’s Summer Palace, and former SFIAAFF director Paul Mayeda Berges’ Mistress of Spices, a Bollywoodesque adaptation of Chitra Divakaruni’s novel, featuring the ever-stunning Aishwarya Rai, aka “the world’s most beautiful woman.” Both films packed the theater.
We imagine that a meeting of Summer Palace's tormented heroine Yu Hong and magical matchmaker Tilo from Mistress of Spices might have worked wonders. Perhaps some sesame seed, a little fenugreek, maybe a bit of cardamom would have helped Yu Hong... although we’re pretty sure Tilo would advise against the red chili pepper.
Tianammen Square, the most beautiful woman in the world in Oakland, and -- get SFist Wendy some black gold, stat!: after the jump.
Friday’s film, Summer Palace, the name of one of the buildings in Tiananmen Square, is banned in China, although likely not the for erotic and sexually explicit scenes but for its representation of the Tiananmen events of July 4, 1989. Summer Palace has been compared to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The movie follows heroine Yu Hong from Tumen to Beijing and beyond. It’s at university in Beijing in the 80’s, though, that Yu Hong meets the quirky, unpredictable, and ultimately deeply troubled, Li Ti, and through Li Ti, Zhou Wei, with whom Yu Hong connects on both a physical and metaphysical for better or for worse. Thoughts of Zhou Wei torment Yu Hong for what becomes the rest of the movie and what we can only presume, the rest of her life.
Mistress was hands-down the more light-hearted of the two films, and the audience really seemed to enjoy it. Tilo has been gifted (and seemingly cursed, at times) with the ability to speak to the spices. Her “gift” requires both integrity and compromise; she must be true to her gift without using it for personal gain -which is no small sacrifice after Dylan McDermott walks into Tilo’s spice bazaar one day. It didn’t hurt that the film is set in the Bay Area, and that we got to accompany Rai and McDermott as McDermott ever so graciously (ha) introduces Tilo to some SF landmarks.
We will never look at our spice rack the same after this movie. And beware to the lust interests in our life; we know that we couldn’t be trusted with black gold should we have the opportunity to experiment with it. Watch out!
Mistress of Spices screens again at Camera 12 Cinemas in San Jose on Saturday, March 24, 2007 at 4:45 p.m. If you want to catch another film with Aishwarya Rai [like SFist Wendy is doing! --ed.], Bollywood musical Umrao Jaan shows tonight at the Castro at 8:30 p.m.