After two years, "Lyceum Theatre" was finally released on October 15, and the fresh partner of "Lou Ye + Gong Li" made the film expect a lot, and the current film Douban score was 7.4, and the box office exceeded 16 million. This box office is actually not unexpected, for literary and art film fans, Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, Bi Gan and other literary and art film directors only need to calm down to make a good movie, the box office market and film quality want to be beautiful, it is still a big problem for them.
Interestingly, the box office failure of "Lyceum Theatre" once again proves that for literary and art films, although "literary youth" is conducive to word of mouth, but it is released in the theater line, and if you want to have a high box office, you still have to rely on the general public. The aesthetic and appreciation tastes of the general public and the so-called "literary and artistic youth" are really very different in the experience and cognition of literary and art films, and "Lyceum Theatre" is an interesting example.
Ordinary audience: the camera is shaking dizzy "literary youth": Lou Ye style is to make you dizzy
The film "Lyceum Theatre" is adapted from The Death of Shanghai by Hongying and The Novel by Heng Guangli, directed by Lou Ye, written by Ma Yingli, and starring Gong Li and Zhao Youting. The film tells the story of the famous actress Yu Yan (Gong Li) who returned to Shanghai in 1941 to star in the drama "Saturday Novel" directed by her old love Tan Na (Zhao Youting), but caused various forces to pay close attention to her movements and wanted to find out the real purpose of her trip. A woman's fate is tightly pulled by the times, the drama is inseparable from the enemy, and under the undercurrent, she ushered in a choice to change the world... Director Lou Ye first focused the camera on Shanghai during the "lonely island" period, depicting a complex and changeable turning point of the times.
In "Lyceum Theatre", Lou Ye's image is still his signature handheld photography style, and many viewers do not adapt to it, and they will be dizzy because the lens shakes too much. During the release of Lou Ye's last work " Clouds Made of Rain in the Wind " , the filmmakers issued a movie guide , informing the audience that some of the shots in the film have certain "particularities", which may lead to a "feeling of dizziness" in the process of watching the movie, and suggest that the audience "try to buy 3 rows of seats to watch the movie". The guide directly explains that the film is 124 minutes long, and watching the film once is equivalent to "taking 12 jumping machines, 24 roller coasters, 41 pirate ships, or drinking ten glasses of condensed American".
For the problem of "camera shaking", Lou Ye once explained that handheld photography is because on the one hand, the actor's free play in space brings certain challenges to the scheduling of the camera, on the other hand, out of his pursuit of "documentary" photography, so that the actor can "live" in the role to the greatest extent and show the most real character state. ”
"Literary youth" is obviously more receptive to camera shaking than ordinary audiences, and many of Lou Ye's fans love his "shaking" style, believing that it is not Lou Ye who is "showing off", but serving the plot, like "Lyceum Theatre", hand-cranked shots, "making the film full of turmoil and uneasiness." Everyone is running for their lives, and calm is only its temporary disguise. ”
General audience: The plot is full of bugs Why is there something to say clearly "Literary Youth": the story is advanced This is the film narrative
In "Lyceum Theatre", many forces are entangled, Yu Yan, played by Gong Li, wanders between stars and spies, coupled with the structure of the play-in-play, making the film story very full, breaking time and space, many "literary and artistic youth" express their recognition of the story, thinking that it is a film masterpiece that maintains "literary", and Lou Ye's narrative technique is also very advanced.
However, the general audience has a lot of criticism of the plot, thinking that the film has many bugs, and the characters, identities and motivations are not reasonable, so many plots are not easy for people to understand, perhaps because of the editing, some emotional parts are edited to pieces and do not integrate into the plot, some inexplicable.
Ordinary audience: black and white films look uncomfortable "literary youth": black and white films with a strong sense of immersion
"Lyceum Theatre" is a black-and-white film, when the film premiered in Shanghai, Gong Li, who was sitting in the audience, noticed that individual pictures had signs of being red. The first time to find the staff to communicate, learned that it is caused by equipment problems, can not be changed. After watching the film, Gong Li apologized to the audience because she believed that it affected the audience's perception and bowed twice in a row.
Zhang Songwen, who played Gong Li's ex-husband in the film, also gave a tidbit at the 11th Beijing Film Festival Gong Li master class a few days ago, saying that the most impressive thing about filming "Lyceum Theatre" was that he was very particular about the color matching of clothes when doing modeling, and later he went to the Venice Film Festival to see the premiere, only to find that it was a black and white movie. "Our styling director took a hundred years old clothes from many regions, put them on, and told us what it meant to match that color. When I got to Venice, I learned it was a black-and-white movie... They say you don't know? I said no one told me. ”
For black and white films, some ordinary audiences are not very recognized, black and white + shaking, so that their viewing experience is not comfortable, some viewers said that the gun battle scene is uncomfortable to see the eyes, and some viewers think that black and white films deepen the sense of immersion, and feel uncomfortable for too many smoking shots in the film: "Every character smokes, yes, it is every one, the secret agent head smokes, Wenqing director smokes, beautiful agent smokes, lobby manager smokes, adoptive father smokes, Yu sister smokes every communication, it is every time." ”
And more "literary youth" praised the black and white tone of the film, thinking that the psychedelic taste of Shanghai in the isolated island period was filmed, giving people a strong sense of atmosphere, allowing the audience to invest in the emotions created by the film, and the black and white film, while weakening the visual senses, also strengthened the auditory senses, the film did not use the traditional subjective soundtrack form, gunshots, rain, jazz, etc., it is easier for the audience to feel empathy.
In short, the reputation of "Lyceum Theatre" is seriously differentiated, and the audience who likes "Lyceum Theatre" wants to brush two or three brushes, and the audience who does not like it even wants to leave the scene halfway, and the space for the audience to discuss the possibilities of the movie may be the value of "Lyceum Theatre".
Text/Beiqing-Beijing headline reporter Xiao Yang