After the initial release of “Suzhou River” in 2000, the People’s Republic of China saw fit to ban its director, Lou Ye, from making movies for two years. The reason? Mr. Lou had the audacity to screen his film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam without governmental permission.

Mr. Lou has continued to make films and to get in trouble with Chinese authorities, but the banning of “Suzhou River,” which Film Forum will be showing in a new 4K restoration beginning February 17, only goes to prove that autocrats often miss the boat when it comes to censorship. 

Mr. Lou flexed more independence than the CCP would like from its citizens, but there’s a better reason the picture should’ve received censure: Mr. Lou’s film makes contemporary Shanghai look like hell on earth. 

Surely, the Chinese National Tourism Office would have had a choice word or two on just how grotty the environs of the country’s largest city are depicted. Disabused, tattered, abandoned, and dank — the Shanghai seen in “Suzhou River” is nobody’s idea of good p.r.

The exigencies of art are another matter. Given a story involving gangsters, dancers, and desperate lives led on the fly, the industrial outposts of Shanghai offer an appropriately seamy setting. Some 20 years after “Suzhou River” initially impressed critics with its whiz-bang editing, scuttling camera work, and postmodernist caprice, the picture now comes across primarily as a sociological treatise on the downsides of urbanization. Shanghai, strung-out and over-extended, is the film’s true star.

“Suzhou River” was Mr. Lou’s third feature film and the first to gain international prominence. It is, very much, a young man’s movie, what with its blase attitude toward the niceties of narrative logic, cinematic flow, and character development. You can see Mr. Lou working his way through Hitchcock and Wong Kar-Wai without having fully absorbed their influence. Pastiche, this kind of thing is typically called. 

Stylistic déjà vu persists throughout the run of “Suzhou River,” especially given how blatantly Mr. Lou cribbed from “Vertigo.” A drastic change of context adds flavor, as does the director’s fondness for juxtaposing gritty environs and soft-focus sensuality. Yet when Jörg Lemberg’s sweeping soundtrack comes to the fore, we’re back in Hollywood circa 1950 with all the romance, melodrama, and grandeur that portends. Where’s Kim Novak when you need her?

Actually, Mr. Lou doesn’t need Ms. Novak when he has Zhou Xun on hand. She plays two roles here: Moudon, the pixie-like daughter of a wealthy businessman, and Meimei, a nightclub performer whose act consists of donning a platinum blonde wig and mermaid costume. The Happy Tavern, you see, has an aquarium at its center. From the looks of it, the giant fish tank hasn’t undergone a cleaning in some time. Meimei doesn’t give the surface scum a second thought. 

“Suzhou River” is a first-person narrative related by a person that’s never seen. We watch events from a videographer’s vantage point, largely through a jittery hand-held camera. (Viewers who don’t have sea legs for this kind of thing are hereby warned.) 

Mr. Lou doesn’t altogether stay true to the all-knowing, all-seeing eye. The camera eventually alights on places and people to which the story-teller wouldn’t necessarily be privy. This shift in priorities does much to clarify plot points that are sometimes hinky in execution.

“Suzhou River” barrels on by in a taut 83-minutes. Ms. Zhou is sexy, slinky, and sly in all the right measures: There’s a reason this was her breakout movie. 

Mention should be made of her leading man, the late Hongsheng Jia. His rough hewn looks and stoic cool bring to mind Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and John Garfield, and he helps center a movie that often threatens to fritter away at the edges.

Correction: Lou Ye is the name of the director. The name was misspelled in some references in an earlier version of this article.