"Turbid Water Rafting" is the most watched Hong Kong art film of the year. In it, Wu Zhenyu plays a homeless homeless man who lives under the bridge.
Our impression of Wu Zhenyu is more or less dominated by the image of Liang Kun in Gu Qiaozai - exaggerated and playful expressions, open and close actions, and use his own performance imagination to fill in the details of the characters' behavior, which is the most prominent feature of his forty years of acting career.
But this time in "Turbid Drifting", he presents us with a completely different character: his face still has the signature neurotic convulsions, but the intense emotions in his heart are suppressed and never really fully released and exploded, which is also in line with the character's social identity in the film: the homeless people at the bottom, struggling to find a little dignity under the pressure of survival, but do not expect to be tolerated, understood and treated fairly. Such a complex and emotional mentality is meticulously and completely reflected in Wu Zhenyu's performance.
In the Hong Kong film and television industry, Wu Zhenyu is a typical method actor. He was a student of the eleventh session of the TVB Artists Training Course in 1982, and was at the same time as Liang Chaowei and Stephen Chow, but he was far less fortunate than the former two. When he first entered the industry, he could only run the dragon set all the time, and in just a few years, there were dozens of TV dramas on his resume, including "Thousands of Rivers and Mountains Always Love", "The Legend of the Eagle Hero", "Police Flower More", "Eagle Hero" and other famous dramas, but we as the audience can't remember who he played. It was not until the second half of the eighties that he could gain a foothold in wireless by playing the role of a villain.
The rivalry with Stephen Chow in "Gestapo" finally established his position in the minds of television audiences, making him a wireless boss in the first half of the 1990s.
The Gestapo (1989)
It was probably in the decade from 82 to 92, in the process of starring in a large number of TV drama roles, he gradually found his own good drama path: one is the anti-angle of treachery and exaggeration and violence; the other is the comedy small character with absurd and obedient emotional color; the third is the calm and reserved and deeply hidden xiaosheng.
The personalities of these three types of characters are not small (which is why in the early 1990s, Hong Kong film and television circles generally believed that Wu Zhenyu was a relatively rare potential actor with a wide range of dramas), but he cultivated an effective method of performance mode: that is, using the genre as the benchmark to shape different character frameworks according to the plot, and then "disassembling" the self into different details of emotional personality traits, exerting the genius's acting imagination and physical expression ability, and filling it into the flesh and blood of the type of character.
When he switched to the film industry with WIRELESS in 1992, his performance characteristics finally gradually played out on the screen. In 1993's "The Legend of the White-Haired Witch", his role was that of the elder brother and sister of a pair of demon cult masters, and the dramatic expression of desire and hatred was extremely rare among Hong Kong actors at that time.
The Legend of the White-Haired Witch (1993)
This stereotyped evil atmosphere is transformed into the image of the classic underworld boss Liang Kun who has no evil and no perfidy in "The Ancient Confused Boy in the Jianghu", and the arrogant arrogance under the confused eyes is unique in the image of the evil man in Hong Kong films.
The Man of the Ancient Puzzle Boy in the Jianghu (1996)
But Wu Zhenyu's performance is not limited to the repetition of monotonous images, in the opening of the same year's film "Mong Kok Roll Fit Man", we seem to see the same underworld boss as Liang Kun, but with the evolution of the plot, we have entered the youth period when he first entered the underworld, and a loyal, credulous and full of expectations for love of the underworld Image appeared in front of the audience. We have witnessed how he gradually evolved from naïve simplicity to a layered sense of demonic immorality in the deceitful underworld sauce jar. It was this excellent handling of the character compound personality that earned him the honor of Best Actor at the 3rd Hong Kong Film Critics Association.
"Mong Kok Pick Fit Man" (1996)
In the mid-1990s, the stereotyped character image of commercial films could no longer fully meet Wu Zhenyu's performance needs, and he began to appear in films of considerable artistic standards: first of all, the heavyweight production of Galaxy Image, "The Birth of a Word".
The film's unique two-stage circular structure expands the imagination of the actors' performances, and Wu Zhenyu, as the second male protagonist besides Liu Qingyun, for the first time presents a dizzy and repeatedly wronged comedy little character robber image on the screen.
The Birth of a Word (1997)
And Du Qifeng's "Gunfire" successfully quieted Wu Zhenyu, he no longer used exaggerated overheated actions to pressure the other party, but began to use eye expressions and gestures to convey to the audience the threat of the role he played.
Guns and Fire (1999)
Subsequently, in Ye Weixin's two quite literary and artistic films "Burst Police" and "Juliet and Liang Shanbo", he played a lonely middle-aged man with a violent personality but a pure heart.
Burst Cop (1999)
Interestingly, we will find that in the last two films, his physical action expression is almost indistinguishable from that in "Ancient Puzzle Boy" or "Mong Kok Carrying Fit Man", and the same is the neurotic impulse and the rhythm suddenly slows down and seems to be a whisper that may erupt at any time, but he uses micro-expressions and gesture actions to secretly correct the delicate skills of the character attributes outside the character type, so that the two characters have a delicate effect of violence and gentleness under the background of the plot, and feed the delicate role of tension and madness. Magically, a set of physical language that originally belonged to the anti-angle of the evil person is subtly grafted with the emotions gushing from the heart, forming the contagious inner and outward contrast of the positive characters, thus completing the personality shaping of the composite character with a distinct sense of hierarchy.
Juliet and Liang Shanbo (2000)
Judging from the outstanding performances in these films, Wu Zhenyu has completely departed from the idea of relying on personal temperament to dominate the performance, and has evolved into the performance stage of using skillful techniques to cover the actor's external self, but trying to connect the inner self with the set role. The exemplary role of such a method is Ni Yongxiao, the heir of the underworld leader played by him in "Infernal Affairs 2".
Infernal Affairs 2 (2003)
When watching the film for the first time, most people will be surprised by Wu Zhenyu's quiet eyes and minimalist gestures: in the 1990s, the restless neurotic exaggeration was once his signature, but when he entered the twenty-first century, he suddenly calmed down and put himself in a static braking position.
Apparently, his approach to shaping the type of character has played a key role, and he has designed a unique action expression system for Ni Yongxiao: the walking through the streets in a hand-held briefcase late at night, the action of reaching out to push the gold-rimmed glasses when lighting a cigar cigarette, or the silent anger of opening his eyes and clenching his teeth when executing a traitor, all greatly increase the psychological thickness of the characters.
He consciously distinguishes the character's external action performance from the real thoughts in the heart, so that we can hardly find out the true intention of the character through external behavior for most of the time, which is just right with the film's constantly reversing plot, so that the dramatic tension of the character's fate change will burst out at the most critical moment and form an unexpected emotional impact.
Interestingly, another lead actor in the film, Huang Qiusheng, is also a methodist actor who is good at shaping the character type, and he is also known for his unscrupulous wildness in previous performances (see Da fei in the "Ancient Puzzle Boy" series). But in "Infernal Affairs II", Huang Qiusheng also gave up the external popular way of expression and sank into the heart of the character.
So the opponent scene between these two actors who are quite overlapping on the road is extremely challenging: both sides are using new body language to shape the characters, and in order to ensure that the overall stylistic characteristics of the film are simultaneously adopted in a way that suppresses and then rises, and allows the inner emotions to surge in the external restraint.
It has to be said that in this round of confrontation (in the late 1990s, marked by "Gunfire", the two began the history of playing each other on the set), Wu Zhenyu won because of the contrasting character characteristics (polite appearance but cruel and ruthless inside) and was nominated for best actor at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards.
After 2010, Hong Kong commercial films began to continue to decline, and acting stars like Wu Zhenyu also went north to pan for gold. While appearing in a large number of mainland film and television dramas, he cannot guarantee a truly high-quality performance all the time.
However, in the Hong Kong films of this period, he still occasionally played well, creating some unforgettable comedy character images, such as the father who spanned several different ages in "Peeling Daddy", the grumbling but soft bottom uncle in "Uncle Against the Current", or the real estate agent who was anxious in order to tear down the billboard blocking the window sea view in "Home and Everything", and it seems that playing the bottom of society has gradually become the real interest point of his honing his acting skills.
Uncle Against the Current (2018)
Probably because of this, we have the opportunity to see such a wonderful performance in "Turbid Water Drifting": under the pressure of the difficult life on the daily street, the characters have become accustomed to being surrounded by painful emotions, but still do not give up the pursuit of the last trace of dignity. In Wu Zhenyu's new character type, the character's face twitches and trembles while smiling, and the wandering confused eyes seem to not know how to deal with the dilemma in front of him, but the slightly hunched back with slow movements reveals his gradually firm will.
These meticulously polished details once again construct a composite character image that is rare in Hong Kong cinema in the past decade. Compared with Wu Zhenyu's past roles that audiences have talked about, Hui Ge in "Muddy Water Drifting" may even be the best performance of his acting career so far.