After two years of disobedience, Lou Ye's new film "Lyceum Grand Theatre" with the theme of espionage was finally officially released.
Interestingly, this year's Asian frontline film authors: Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Zhang Yimou, and Lou Ye have all created their own spy movies in their own style.
"The Spy's Wife" has received a large number of awards and praise internationally, and is regarded as a "masterpiece" of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. "On the Cliff" is very popular, reaching the highest box office of Zhang Yimou in domestic films, among which the level of actor group drama, art and photography is well received by the public.
Only "Lyceum Theatre", which has been released since its premiere in Venice until now, has been controversial both internationally and domestically.
Some people think that this is Lou Ye's "Waterloo", and some people think that it is Lou Ye's "game-breaking masterpiece".
"Lyceum Theatre" is adapted from Hongying's novel "The Death of Shanghai" and Yokomitsu's novel "Shanghai". Gong Li plays the movie superstar Yu Yan who returns to Shanghai to participate in the new play "Saturday Novel" directed by former lover Tan Na (Zhao Youting) at the Lyceum Theatre. But in fact, she is a spy for the Allies, preparing to use hypnosis and role-playing to spy on the intelligence of japanese intelligence officer Saburo Furutani (Oda Chejō).
What is the standard of "Lyceum Theatre"? We invited 8 fans to talk about the film.
Kane Sakusuzu
9 points
"Encounter" begins with only a fold from the stage space to the "backstage" space. The faces of the actors are always obscured, becoming parts of the plane covered by black and white light. The stage-framed camera is carefully connected like a mess, and the moment when the multi-line is tightened, this is enough oppressive accident but piercingly revealed as an inevitable part.
And when the actor summons a non-existent person in the seductive play, in the conspiracy secret, the close-up gives it a "face" and a "gaze". It is this kind of gaze that looks back at the "audience" who are bound to rush to block the fourth wall. It captures every moment of light to "see", and it even harvests every inch of fluttering and dangerous light with predatory joy with sharp editing.
The final agreed "encounter" is the most accidental- in the decisive face/love generation, "doing nothing" is precisely the posture that cannot capture and freeze eternity. What used to be done in "Stormy Clouds" with a lot of lyrical ink, Lou Ye did it in silence this time.
If Lou Ye does not have a "character" this time, it may be precisely because: Lou Ye, who is similar to "Stormy Clouds", always has a hard time escaping from an earlier "reality" hypothesis, and the "character state" under his characteristic hand may be too easy to establish, but the "reality" given is stagnant or extremely thick lines from time to time.
In Blue Heart, he has to deal with the problem of fiction, so the camera is positioned in the gradual terrain to shape a character, showing the fictional process itself. I am afraid that this is contrary to the requirements of "close to the character" in the former, or even completely deviates from the portrayal of a "character" center.
Winter Silence Network
8.5 points
Lou Ye's "Era Drama" is a black-and-white group portrait of the space of the Lyceum Theatre and the Cathay Pacific Hotel. "Lyceum Theatre" is such a film noir, which is more non-historical and even non-emotional than "Color Ring". The opening scene completes a kind of "anti-meta film" in Lou Ye's symbolic sense of vertigo, and the fourth wall of the drama is blocked, becoming the identity of Qiulan/Yu Wei's psychedelic identity. At the same time, in the film, Lou Ye even creates an accidental loss of focus of hearing in a key shot, and the ghost in the film machine disables the telex.
The reconstructed old Shanghai space is a multilingual stage, and at the same time as this postcolonial phenomenon, it is also a narrative formed by multiple microscopic time, and Yu Wei's return constitutes the "dynamics" of the film, with countless telexed, deciphered/encoded teletransmitters of space-time constructed around her. She can, or may, fall into any narrative, but she is defending against correlation, meaning itself, behind her sunglasses is an empty, but containing all the subjectivity, the night of the real world.
In the film, under the intersection of several universes, streets are formed, as well as guns in the hands of the characters.
West Parker
8 points
Lou Ye went a long way this time, the texture of the black and white picture "dream", with the forced bringing of handheld photography into reality, created a strong contrast, making people confused between reality and fiction for a while. A play within a play, let reality and stage contrast with each other. Everyone is playing the role of a gun and a sharp knife of a certain force, and each speech is a position statement, and outside the position, even forget who they really are. For Lou Ye, fiction is another reality.
In photography, Lou Ye embraces the contradiction between the two styles (black and white, handheld) and creates a unique photographic style in a dialectical way. Black and white create a sense of distance and dreaminess, but handheld photography adds a sense of presence and reality. The interlacing of the two styles is the best visual representation of the battle between reality and fiction in the film. What he hopes is not the immersive aesthetic experience of the audience, but the audience can produce "separation" in the process of watching, so as to enter deeper thinking and experience the deep theme to be expressed.
Spy war films, as a genre that combines the main theme and business well, have had too many routines in recent years. From the beginning of "The Sound of the Wind" to this year's "On the Cliff", although excellent, the ultimate purpose of their creation is to sensationalize the audience to move, substitute, and finally recognize the sacrifice of these fictional characters. The reason why "Lan Xin" is difficult for the audience to empathize is because Lou Ye deliberately avoids the emotional expression of most of the characters. In fact, if Lou Ye wants to do it, he can easily arrange a large number of sensational scenes for Yu Yan.
But whether it is family affection, love or the love of home and country, it has been deliberately weakened by Lou Ye. We can only see that the characters are swayed by greater forces, and it is almost difficult to find the parts that belong to people hidden under the "chess piece" attribute. Such a great alienation of people is the true state of the chaotic world in Lou Ye's eyes.
In fact, no audience member would have believed that actors and spies in China could influence the history of the Japanese air raids on Pearl Harbor thousands of miles away. Lou Ye deliberately chose this unconvincing story, deconstructing from this moment, in fact, already exists. History is certain, spy movies only create stories on this basis. The so-called confidential information is only The MacGuffin who confuses the audience, espionage, love, and gunfights are not the most important, and what is really important is actually the sense of dislocation and intertextuality caused by fiction and history.
As the climactic scene of the movie interprets, the bullets in the theater sound, and the audience can't tell whether it is real or acting, but it is not until the bullet hits the audience and someone falls, and reality enters the theater. We realized that the audience who was shot here can also be us who are watching the movie, and no one is really safe. Any fiction of history is about the present. Lou Ye cleverly pointed out through this layer of drama-within-a-play that any fiction about history has a point of view and purpose, and only the current era is the only important reality.
Beep bear
Isn't it just another kind of "chance and imagination"? In the fear of the fallacy and the surrender of fate, is the character profile important? Does plot reversal matter? Putting aside all the blinding smoke, such as the gun that Yu Yan let go of at the end and the flesh that snuggled up, wasn't it still the distant relatives who were present or not present at a certain moment? To someone, somewhere, some ideal, even a certain era.
Lou Ye is also seeking change. In previous works, he is good at taking the lead in showing the bright side of the character, and then changing the card halfway, tying the audience's heart with the broken attachment; and in this film, the mystery surface is always indestructible, until the end of the burning and annihilation occur at the same time, the mask and the face no longer leave a gap, he deliberately opens the distance between the audience and the character, so that you can not touch, only looking.
Xu Ruofeng
7.5 points
Lou Ye's most "high-concept" film, the flaw is also in the fact that after scheduling many concepts, it seems to be a bit rigid and castle-like: the Shanghai Concession battlefield with performance, weapons and coding technology as a "perception" tool of war, the disparate "stage play-reality" narrative, the hypnosis between the star and his wife who looks like him - starting from so many concepts, and the virtual and real transformation of the scene, handheld photography under "dirty black and white", jointly "hijacked" the audio-visual, creating a "new black and white" film noir. The film as a whole is therefore in an extremely chaotic state of intoxication.
And these concepts are often pulled between each other, full of contradictions, so in the first brush, will naturally be attracted by the flaws of the film, such as: the actors between the "each acting", not unified enough, a certain two male actors can not play with Gong Li; the plot is top-heavy, scattered and empty, the dynamic line of the character relationship is very shallow, the real meaning of the entanglement is very small, are coincidences or light strokes, like hollow dolls; the third act Gong Li "sharpshooter" Bridge section is too much, changing guns to kill 10 or so Japanese troops, lack of early pavement, It seems ridiculous.
In the second brush, because of knowing the overall story in advance and the film's devastating flaws, once you convince (hypnotize) yourself that these are Lou Ye's "intentional", you can see the advantages of the film more clearly.
Just one point: Oda cut the meaning of this supporting role. The melancholy Japanese intelligence officer Furutani Saburo, who he played, may be regarded as the real male protagonist, and even has a performance that is not inferior to Gong Li in the film. Although he and Gong Li only have four antagonistic scenes, they condense the concept of "war and performance" in the whole film: the multiple identities as a performance, and the concession battlefield with stage performance.
Hypnosis and shooting in the rain bring out the core of Lyceum Theatre: desire, so we are in war. The main theme of the film will often give the words of "national righteousness and national survival" at this level, and when the spy as a pawn is abandoned, it is also necessary to show the awe-inspiring and empty righteousness.
But what Lou Ye expressed was that whether it was Furutani Saburo, who was confused by the performance, or Yu Yan, who used the performance as a weapon, and finally had regret and pain, but could only decide to kill him, he was trapped in emotions and desires, and he was willing to be trapped in desire.
Yu Yan finally saw Tan Na threatened with a gun into the dockyard bar, and he could only go to the other side to die together, not to go to the situation that the two of them still had room to turn, or chose to go, this scene is more established because of the photo of his wife in hand when Furutani Saburo died. At this time, Tan Na was the photo that he would hold in his hand when he died.
From Lou Ye's "Purple Butterfly" and Ang Lee's "Color Ring", to Kurosawa Kiyoshi's "Spy's Wife" and Lou Ye's "Lyceum Theatre", it can be seen that the truly outstanding spy films have deconstructed the "political correctness" of the "political correctness" in the historical camp with the identity and perspective of women, and turned to question the "original sin". People attached to the grand history, they are also characters on the stage of history, in these films, not celebrated, but abandoned, betrayed, humiliated, damaged.
At present, we are more suitable to look at the historical view in this batch of movies from the perspective of pure fiction rather than restoration. Because these women who have embarked on the battlefield of espionage, they are both the dominant and passive at the same time, they are both the subjects of their own desires, making betrayals, and encountering betrayals, until the final tragedy.
Betrayal is the deeper meaning of these characters - it seems that they take the initiative to betray first, but in fact, these initiatives are not inevitable passivity? Before betraying the original camp, their bodies and wills had long been exploited, betrayed, and even silently damaged by the original camp.
Ice red navy
7 points
There are many subtleties in the scheduling, editing and drama structure, although the handheld mirror and jumping close-up are Lou Ye's consistent techniques, but the low-contrast gray-and-white images and zero soundtrack (highlighting the ambient sound, both realistic and estranged to avoid rendering emotions) audiovisual strategies are not without novelty, with the sense of era blurring and highlighting the "small people" rather than the "big narrative", the film has generally reached a reversal of spy films, film noir and period dramas.
However, the identities of the spies/actors are integrated/entangled, the seamless cut between the play-in-play and the reality of the story, and (relying on the bullets that are suddenly fired into the audience) to break the core design of the fourth wall of the stage is not ingenious.
The most critical problem of the film is that Yu Yan, who is undoubtedly the largest protagonist, is presented relatively thinly, lacks the portrayal of internal struggle and wandering, and the performance of many other actors is not convincing enough - this is also related to the lack of stereotyping of the role. In addition to the spy war part that cannot withstand scrutiny, Lou Ye's best emotional writing has also become empty and empty, leaving only a beautiful skin bag.
Nietzsche's quote from P.S. means "Ultimately, people love their own desires, not the object of their desires." (Theatrical version seems to have been mistranslated)
Pegasus
6 points
Actors and spies naturally have something in common, the former playing the other on stage, the latter playing the other in reality, and deception runs through their lives. However, as a human, Yu Jin is probably tired of it, and the last role is her voice to live for herself. Gong Li's acting skills are very good, and Yu Jin's intolerance and determination are all played with ease. But at the same time, Gong Li is alone in one world, and the other actors are in another world, and the two mismatched states cause the film to be divided. Now that I think about it, Yu Aoi in "The Spy's Wife" is just right.
Joyful split
The iconic hand-held walk-through the room, in line with the stormy concession atmosphere (until the rain finally falls), the subtle and tense atmosphere of the times emerges in many character fragments, and the transition has both drama and reality (is it necessary to play within a play?). There is no shortage of abrupt jumps, and the time node announced by the subtitle card is approaching the whirlpool step by step.
The group participation centered on Yu Wei is too widespread, so a large number of prehistory or emotional twists are more or less outlined, and the characters almost all have the suspicion of "tool people" and "puppets", which obviously have rich experience, such as oral lines on the stage to complete an unreal performance. Vertical subtitles are cut, modulation black and white are almost reduced to "gray white", the contrast between light and dark is not high, resulting in some paragraphs are mushy and unclear, "gray" may be the commonality of these knife tip licking blood.