Before he made “Summer Palace,” the talented Chinese director Ye Lou made two dazzling films that stopped viewers frustratingly short of falling head over heels in love with them. The intoxicating “Suzhou River” (2000) and its femmes fatales refracted Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” through Hong Kong-caliber handheld cameras, but wanted for an emotional core. His spy melodrama “Purple Butterfly” (2003), set in 1930s Shanghai during the Japanese occupation, swooned with its gamine heroine (played by Zhang Zi-yi) but suffocated in a rich but humid aesthetic, like a Wong Kar Wai misfire.

“Summer Palace,” which opens Friday at Cinema Village, fearlessly pitches us into the rapture and tumult of a lovelorn Beijing student and her friends against the backdrop of ’80s Beijing and on through the 1989 Tiananmen protest for democratic reform. If the “Sixth Generation” echelon of filmmakers that includes Mr. Lou can often seem like little more than a Western classification for convenience’s sake, the autobiographically informed “Summer Palace” reminds one of the emotional force of the “generation” part of the moniker. (Chinese authorities certainly had strong feelings on the subject, slapping Mr. Lou with a five-year ban from filmmaking for screening his movie at Cannes in 2006 without permission.)

“Summer Palace” circles around the moody young romantic Yu Hong (the justly lauded Lei Hao) for most of its sprawling 140 minutes. From her border village in the far north reaches of the country, she journeys to Beijing to study, but not before a final, alfresco tryst with her hometown boyfriend under a deepening dusk. Candidly shot, it’s the first of the film’s sex scenes that attracted Chinese attention to the movie, but here and elsewhere the moment is true.

At the university, Mr. Lou’s giddy camera takes us through Yu’s chatty bunk-bed dormitory, and into giddy bar and dancing scenes. A cruise through and up a university stairway set to jaunty pop tunes could come from an American high school TV show (albeit with the musical eclecticism of scattershot imports), but the swing feels genuinely free in this context. Instead of showing a student tease a stone-faced guard or pore over leaflets in a basement, Mr. Lou captures a youthful buzz and co-ed frisson that partakes of and fuels the political testing in the air.

After initially nursing the adjustment pains that stem from her uprooting, Yu falls hard for another student, the maturely handsome Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). From that point, everything else could be mere backdrop as far as she’s concerned. Even her voice-over reports from articulate diary entries yield to the delirious devotion, resentment, and folly — all of the recognizably headlong sort that you wouldn’t ever trade away. Yu and Zhou are entwined, then pushed apart and embattled; at one low point, Yu simply topples over, no longer the dorm’s sullenly aloof smoker in the hallway.

The gossipy tumult of dorm social life is another thing “Summer Palace” has down, and proof of its youthful priorities is the standoff at Tiananmen Square that one anticipates as a climax. In fact, little is shown beyond the dorm-set confusion and the scary missed connections that result; the historic moment proves to be the movie’s pivot before it speeds away into the future. The dispersal after the chaos is followed by the separation of friends and lovers in bewildering datelined montages and with inevitable casualties along the way.

Which is a good moment to qualify the praise for “Summer Palace,” lest cinephiles drool at the prospect of another “Regular Lovers,” Philippe Garrel’s intense cinematic ode to student-led Paris in the upheaval and aftermath of May 1968. “Summer Palace” sometimes seems to hold interest in spite of its top-heavy sprawl and general lack of concern with dramatically lighting the way. It also flags in its final quarter, perhaps more than can be attributed to the dispersal of its two leads or the burning off of the unrepeatable headiness of their university days.

Not that “Regular Lovers” doesn’t suffer similarly, and the comparison between two different projects really doesn’t hold up (nor does one critic’s offensive dismissal of “Summer Palace” as a “French art movie in oriental dress”). “Summer Palace,” which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, stands on its own in its running take on regular lovers in exceptional times, without being either as sappily hackneyed or as artily oblique as that might sound.