Among the directors who came out of the new wave of Hong Kong cinema, Yan Hao, born in 1952, grew up and determined that he was the most mainland complex and the one who cooperated most closely with the mainland.
His father, Yan Qingshu, was a well-known leftist literati who had moved to Hong Kong from the mainland, and because there were many enemies in pen and ink lawsuits, it was normal for his family to relocate. This influenced Yan Hao's reading and thinking in his youth, allowing him to form a perceptual understanding of the mainland, and also made him first understand the turmoil of fate. His later travels in the mainland and his studies at the London Film School made him look at the mainland more rationally and have a greater understanding of the impermanence of fate.
Rolling Red Dust poster
After becoming a mature film director, the mainland, the times and the destiny have become the three core vocabulary of Yan Hao's works. Masterpieces such as "Like the Year of Water Flow (1984)", "Heavenly Bodhisattva (1987)", "Rolling Red Dust (1990)", "Chess King (1991)", "Heavenly Contrarian (1994)", "The Sun Has Ears (1996)" and other masterpieces all use the mainland as the background to explore the fate of individuals in the era.
Yan Hao himself also made a cameo appearance in "Rolling Red Dust"
Among them, "Rolling Red Dust", written by Sanmao and Yan Hao, starring Lin Qingxia, Qin Han, Maggie Cheung, etc., sangmao's story of Shanghai's change from Japan to the civil war period, was placed in the northeast of the ice and snow to perform. This transplantation not only did not produce the improper consequences of the "South Orange and North Orange", but made the film a boundary for Yan Hao's works.
Sanmao's Story of Shanghai was told by Yan Hao in the north
Earlier, he had stated providence in the landscape of the south, as if the environment depicted in Chinese poetry and painting could soothe people's depression. Since "Rolling Red Dust", the symphony of cruel fate has begun to play in the northern land where the climate and landform are more extreme, and the meaning of the invincibility of the people is very obvious. "I Love the Kitchen (1997)", "Mandarin Duck Butterfly (2004)", "Floating City Tycoon (2012)", etc., which talk about fate and dreams, etc., the geographical coordinates of the story are back to the south and even Hong Kong.
Lin Qingxia and Qin Han in "Rolling Red Dust"
Maggie Cheung and Lin Qingxia in "Rolling Red Dust"
The song ends
Before that
Hong Kong New Wave directors have many experience in television stations, and Yan Hao is no exception. When he was at TVB, thanks to the help of his sister Xu Anhua, who also graduated from the London Film School, and others, he slowly revealed his talent as a choreographer and attracted the attention of the outside world. Coupled with the fact that his drama "CID" won the Bronze Award at the New York International Television Festival, he was given the opportunity to shoot films in 1978, before other new wave stars such as Xu Anhua, Tan Jiaming, and Xu Ke entered the film circle.
Yan Hao's drama series "Young People (1977)" co-directed by TVB and Zhang Guoming and others, as well as two early films "Eggplant (1978)" and "Night Train (1980)", have explored the crushing of the era's ideals of young individuals and the influence of life. The collective death of a group of young men and women at the end of "Night Train" is even more tragic than the end of Tan Jiaming's 1982 "Burning Youth".
In the third film, "Gongzijiao (1981)", Yan Hao tried to take the farce route like many Hong Kong films in the same period, but bluntly said that he was guided by "the crowds and the specious box office value", and he did not shoot smoothly. Coupled with the death of his father at that time, his repressed emotions needed to find a channel for catharsis. According to his interview, at that time, he thought of the past when he was around 10 years old and went with his mother to visit relatives in Kaifeng, Xi'an and other places, recalled the vast wilderness he had seen on the train, thought that he would be cured by such a picture, and moved the idea of going to the mainland to shoot "Like a Year of Flowing Water".
Stills from "Like a Year of Flowing Water"
However, in 1985, "Like a Year of Water", which won six awards at the 4th Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Picture, Director and Screenwriter, was filmed in the countryside of Shantou in the early 1980s rather than in the hinterland of the north. After the death of her grandmother, Shanshan returned from Hong Kong with her father's portrait to worship after her grandmother's death, taking the opportunity to clean up her lost mood. Compared with the conservative but harmonious days lived by the villagers, Shanshan, who has become a "foreigner", is in ruins in both career and feelings, and her communication with her only living relatives and sisters has also reached an impasse. In her eyes, "the story of the flowing water and its taking away time" changed the appearance of the villagers, but did not change their inner.
"Foreigners" in "Like a Year of Flowing Water"
The homeland that has hardly changed seems to belong to the special gift of fate, pointing to the spiritual homeland in the hearts of a generation of Hong Kong people represented by Shanshan's father (Yan Hao's father). Compared with Hou Xiaoxian's 1985 "Childhood Past" in his grandmother's dream home, although it has a real image, Shanshan or Yan Hao's father is still unable to get close, because they are no longer alive.
From the inside to the outside, the hometown that exudes a rustic atmosphere can only serve as another generation, such as the carrier of the two elderly people who returned from Australia, "falling leaves and returning to the roots", it is difficult to constitute nostalgia for the generation of Shanshan (Yan Hao). Coupled with the rapid pace of the urbanization process, the appearance of the original hometown has changed dramatically from the surface to the inside, and nostalgia has become a luxury. Zhang Wanting's 1989 "Eight Two Gold" let the male protagonist follow Shanshan's steps back to Shantou, but the changes there have quietly occurred.
A rare stretch in "Like a Year of Flowing Water"
For Shanshan, she can only use the trip back to her hometown as a holiday to adjust her mood, and when she is relaxed, she will return to Hong Kong and continue to stand on the roulette wheel of life to accept the challenge, just like many people who return to their hometown from the metropolis that only works hard during the New Year's Festival. People of different generations have different lives, and Shanshan and Yan Hao are separated from their grandparents and fathers by the distance of the times.
The fate of the individual is more or less subject to the era in which he lives, and Yan Hao has a more extreme explanation for this in the Heavenly Bodhisattva. The American pilots who supported China's anti-Japanese resistance finally settled down after suffering hardships in the Yi area of Liangshan, but the international situation in the 1950s, "Wu Zi" dragged him back to his hometown, which had long since lost its meaning to him.
Poster of "Heavenly Bodhisattva"
At that time
"Rolling Red Dust" is Yan Hao's continuation of the theme of "turning clouds and raining hands" that individuals cannot escape the times. It's just that "Like a Year of Flowing Water" is a gentle and gentle way to cut through a specific period, while "Rolling Red Dust" tells about different eras with fierce and turbulent brushstrokes.
The screenplay of the film was written by Yan Hao on his own initiative to find the writer Sanmao. Yan Hao was touched by the female perspective in Sanmao's text, asked a friend to find her, and expressed his desire to find her to write a script. Sanmao at first thought that Yan Hao was pursuing her under the guise of an appointment draft, but did not take it seriously, and the two met three times to finalize cooperation.
Perhaps because he had never done script writing, the manuscript handed over by Sanmao, with a lot of personal emotions and explanations, was not consistent with the usual format of the script, but it was very ironed for the female angle that Yan Hao wanted, and also left Yan Hao with room for modification (in fact, Sanmao left a lot of gaps between the lines for Yan Hao to adjust and delete, and often came to say things like "No, this is too dragging, please director scissors"). From shen shaohua, a writer who is a party, to her girlfriend Yuefeng, editor Gu Yin, to the downstairs little woman who has intersected with her, Rong Sheng's sister-in-law, and her character Yulan in her novels, these women jointly witness Shen Shaohua's fate and examine the love between her and Zhang Nengcai's era.
Shen Shaohua and girlfriend Yue Feng
Shen Shaohua and boyfriend Zhang Nengcai
In the emotional ups and downs of Shen Shaohua and Zhang Nengcai, whether there is a shadow of Zhang Ailing and Hu Lancheng, Sanmao and Jose, Yan Hao does not care - but when the film is released, the identities of Shen Shaohua, Zhang Nengcai and other characters still make associations between the relevant departments, causing Yan Hao a lot of trouble. He just wanted to borrow the hand of Sanmao and express his views on fate.
The film is in the memories of the elderly Zhang Nengcai, slowly presenting the story written by Sanmao. After the vast picture in the north and his vicissitudes of voiceover, the first scene under Sanmao's pen, Shen Shaohua's ex-boyfriend Xiao Jian tries to save her from the family cage, only to appear in ink. As the plot progresses, Shanghai's alleys and rainwater are gradually replaced by the streets and ice and snow in the northeast, and the women at the end of the three-brush have a more decisive taste.
This determination, on the one hand, is given by the cold natural conditions created by Yan Hao (just like xiao Hong's "Life and Death Field" in which the old and old, sick and dead seem to be closely tied to the countryside in the northeast), and on the other hand, it is related to the temperament of the actors. Lin Qingxia, who played Shen Shaohua, although she had not yet starred in the "Smiling Proud of the Jianghu" series of movies at that time, she had already shown a tough and soft side in Xu Ke's 1986 "Dao Ma Dan". Maggie Cheung, who played Yue Feng, once played a strong woman in Guan Jinpeng's 1989 "People in New York", has her own open-mindedness and ability.
Lin Qingxia in "Dao Ma Dan"
Therefore, Shen Shaohua and Yue Feng tried to regain their respective love or life from the tiger's mouth of the times, but the end of the fiasco was even more magnificent.
Yue Feng and her boyfriend Xiao Yong
Qin Han and Yan Hao played the two boyfriends Zhang Nengcai and Xiao Yong, at the time of national disaster, one did a traitor and one rushed to the front line, the former avoided love and only hoped that he could live, and the latter died for the future of the nation, taking into account small love and big love, but also the epitome of the group portrait of the times. The audience can criticize or praise this, but the two, like the sentient beings in the chaotic world, can only make passive choices - if the world is too peaceful, they are probably thinking about "wife and children hot kangtou".
The plot of the fall of a city in Zhang Ailing's "Love in the Fallen City" to complete the marriage of a man and a woman has not reappeared in Shen Shaohua and Zhang Nengcai. Shen Shaohua, who did not board the historical wheel to the far away with Zhang Nengcai, had to stay in the same place, and under the care of The Yu Boss, who loved her from beginning to end, her life was extended and she completed the writing of the novel "Magnolia". However, in the end, because of the words she wrote during the chaotic world, like countless compatriots, she could not escape the disaster created by another era.
However, the heroine of the novel, Yulan, learned that her husband Chunwang died in the battlefield and committed suicide by jumping into the river, and was saved by the boys in the neighboring village and had a new life. "In the bottom of her heart, Magnolia resented this life-saving benefactor for a lifetime, and despite this, they still had a child."
thenceforth
At the 27th Golden Horse Awards in 1990, "Rolling Red Dust" won eight awards such as Best Picture and Director, and the limelight was unparalleled. Lin Qingxia and Maggie Cheung, who won the best actress and supporting actress respectively, have raised their careers to a higher level since then, but Yan Hao's filming of "The King of Chess" the following year fell into chaos. "The King of Chess" was originally written and directed by Yan Hao, and Xu Ke served as the supervising producer, but during the filming, Xu Ke played a "power grab" as a director, and half of the filming and returned the power to Yan Hao's role.
Stills from "The Chess King"
Fortunately, the film is doing well. The parallel montage technique shows the era of the two generations of chess kings on both sides of the strait and their fates, allowing the audience to see the similar but different faces of the beasts of the times. At the end of the film, the picture of two chess kings holding hands with each other, one big and one small, each holding hands in the air, makes a preview for the theme of Yan Hao's later films: people may be able to get out of the arrangement of fate, "my life is up to me", but it cannot violate human morality.
Based on true events, "Heavenly Contrarian" (won the best film, best director and other awards at the 7th Tokyo International Film Festival in 1994), has always suspected that the mother who had remarried for many years poisoned her father's eldest son, and in order to open her heart, she returned from the army to the countryside of Tohoku and took her to court. The forensic doctor opened the coffin and the result was that the mother was innocent, but the eldest son's speculation really happened many years ago. In order to be able to live with her considerate lover, the mother slowly poisoned her husband who was not mean to her with rat poison. Yan Hao was of course opposed to this way of changing his fate, and his mother finally went to prison.
Stills from "Contrarian Son of Heaven"
"The Sun Has Ears" (which won the Best Director at the 46th Berlin International Film Festival in 1996, the Best Film in the Competition Unit of the Fabisi Prize, etc.), the north during the warlord division period, was briefly "lent" by her husband to the warlord leader Pan Hao's peasant woman oil oil, and she was moved by Pan Hao' true feelings for Pan Hao, and she cut off her marriage with him despite her husband's roar and revenge. But seeing that Pan Hao killed innocent people indiscriminately, she killed her lover with her own hands and won an open future for herself and the children in her belly.
Stills from "The Sun Has Ears"
Talking about "The Sun Has Ears", Yan Hao said that this film allowed him to gain real liberation, and fate had a way out in his lens. Perhaps because of this, his later creations not only put the story back into the warm south, but also let the characters embrace their dreams and dance. "I Love the Kitchen", which came from Yoshimoto Banana's novel "Kitchen", girls and boys who have lost their only relatives have come out of the haze with each other's encouragement, have an open-minded understanding of life and death, and eventually become a couple of lovers. "Floating City Tycoon", which has connected Hong Kong for half a century, the male protagonist from a humble background is relying on the belief of chasing dreams, step by step to success, and find his identity.
I Love the Kitchen poster
If Yan Hao remade "Rolling Red Dust" now, he should follow sanmao's script and honestly put the story in Shanghai to tell, so that the old style of Shencheng will dilute some "mistakes in the world".
Source: The Paper