Just before Suzhou River unspooled at the Toronto International Film Festival, a programmer described the film as Vertigo if it were directed by Wong Kar-Wai.  It seemed like a silly statement to make and I chuckled at the comparison as the lights went down.  An hour and a half later, I walked out of the theatre in a delightful daze, wondering both where Ye Lou came from and how he happened to make one of the year’s best films.

The film is set in Shanghai and takes place around the city’s filthy Suzhou River (hence the title).  The main character in Suzhou is a hapless videographer whose identity is never revealed to the viewer.  We never learn his name, and every scene he’s in is filmed from his point of view.  He spends his days spray-painting advertisements for his struggling business around the city, and his nights are consumed by watching videos.

The main character’s lethargic nature seems to be due to a breakup with Meimei (Xun Zhou, the blind girl from The Emperor and the Assassin), a beautiful woman he met while he was filming the mermaid show at a bar for one of his clients.  The film is full of flashbacks and replayed conversations, like one haunting exchange where Meimei asks him if he’ll spend his whole life looking for her.  He says he will, but she doesn’t believe him.

A chance encounter seems to bring the main character back to life.  He meets Mardar (Hongshen Jia), a bike messenger who has just been released from prison.  Mardar served three years in the pokey for botching a kidnapping attempt that he and his former girlfriend concocted to extort money from her wealthy father.  Not only did he end up in the clink, but his ex took a header off a bridge into the murky Suzhou after telling him that she’d come back one day … as a mermaid.

If you’ve seen Vertigo, you can probably figure out that Mardar thinks Meimei is his girlfriend (she’s also played by Zhou).  Although writer/director Ye Lou swears his film wasn’t meant to be like Hitchcock’s classic, the parallels are unmistakable.  Mardar assumes the Jimmy Stewart role, while Meimei plays the double role originally handled by Kim Novak.

Ye Lou does an amazing job of establishing the dirty, claustrophobic feel of both Shanghai and the gloomy, polluted Suzhou, which becomes just as important as any of the film’s characters.  You may have to go out of your way to find it, but Suzhou is a film that should definitely not be missed.

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