Summer Palace

Yu Hong leaves her village and the life she knew there to study at a university in Beijing. Away from her family and her boyfriend, she enters a world of unfamiliar freedoms and begins an intense, volatile affair with a fellow student, Zhou Wei. Their relationship is marked by passion, jealousy and mutual provocation, and it plays out against a city where students are increasingly taking to the streets to demand democratic reforms. The political turmoil of 1989 eventually forces the couple apart, sending Zhou Wei abroad while Yu Hong remains in Beijing. Spanning roughly a decade and a half in the lives of a group of university students, the film follows the love affair and its aftermath.

Summer Palace was released in 2006 and runs 135 minutes. It is a Chinese-French co-production. Lou Ye directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Mei Feng and Ma Yingli, and he also produced it with Nai An and Fang Li. Hao Lei plays Yu Hong and Guo Xiaodong plays Zhou Wei, with Hu Ling, Zhang Xianmin, Cui Lin and Zeng Meihuizi in supporting roles. The film came after Lou Ye's Suzhou River (2000) and before Love and Bruises (2011).

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.2 out of 10 from around 5,000 votes, and on TMDB it holds 7.3 out of 10 from about 115 votes. A critics' rating of 6.8 out of 10 is based on 32 reviews, placing it below the audience scores on both platforms.