The Voice Doesn’t Lie. A Revisit to Suzhou River Through Listening

The starting point of this article is the debate over cinematic realism, “truthful cinema,” and “the truth of cinema” in Chinese language cinema, providing a close reading of Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000), a film that delves into the boundaries between truth and false, past, and present, and reality and fiction. It focuses specifically on the use of voice-over and other aural components, particularly when they are nonsynchronous with the image. This article explores the interstices between the image and the sound, the storytelling, and the extradiegetic operations involving the film and investigates how these elements assist in the narrative construction. Furthermore, it argues that the recurring self-contradictions in Suzhou River are deeply rooted in a camera-consciousness that continually disrupts, deconstructs, and reveals the narrative construction, thereby fostering the characters’ becoming-real. This meta-cinematic approach unveils cinema’s potential to create “truth,” transforming the film narrative into a dynamic, open-ended state of possibility.