After almost two years of postponement, Lou Ye's new work "Lyceum Grand Theatre" was released.
"Lyceum Theatre" may not be the best work in Lou Ye's works, but it is definitely controversial enough. Some people accuse Lou Ye of being the biggest Waterloo in recent years, and some say it is a self-breakthrough that belongs to Lou Ye.
The film has two original novels that provide inspiration for adaptation: Hongying's "Death in Shanghai" and Yokomitsu's "Shanghai".
The former provides a part of the film about espionage, and the latter is integrated in the form of a play-within-a-play, thus completing the film's intertextuality in the relationship between emotions and characters.
"Lyceum Theatre" tells the story of a spy war in the 1940s, on the eve of the Pacific War:
The famous actor Yu Yan returned to Shanghai. Ostensibly, she returned to help her old love Tan Na complete the rehearsal of "Saturday Novel", but behind this, her return seems to have more and more complicated purposes:
Rescuing your ex-husband? Gathering intelligence for the Allies? Working for an adoptive father? Fleeing war with a loved one? No one knows her true mission.
But her return has doomed the ups and downs that this isolated island is about to face.
The text of this film is very complex, the interweaving of virtual and real, the boundary between drama and reality is repeatedly broken, and it is not easy to understand it, so we temporarily cut from the very lou ye and very stylized things in the film.
Handheld photography, long shots, improvisations, black-and-white images... These external factors are still very Lou Ye. Only in terms of style, Lou Ye's black-and-white hue design and handheld photographic lens that significantly slows down the degree of shaking make the direct look and feel of "Lyceum Grand Theatre" the best.
To see such a long-lost cinematic image in the theater, where every frame is meticulously carved, is almost to move people to tears. It's a thrilling, pure and shocking feeling.
lust
None of the above video styles are the root cause of Lou Ye's charm. What Lou Ye relies on special images to express has always been the feelings and desires of small people in extreme environments. Since "Suzhou Creek", lust has always been the theme of Lou Ye's films.
The ill-fated and involuntary individual life in the changing times is a very important common theme of the sixth generation of directors. But in Jia Zhangke or Wang Xiaoshuai, this sense of helplessness of fate stems from the pressure that the wheel of history has directly imposed on individuals and cannot be resisted.
The small characters in Lou Ye's films have always been because they have inseparable feelings and desires, and they have the unwillingness to fight against fate again, and finally passively get involved in the vicissitudes of the times and cannot extricate themselves.
Yu Yan returned to Shanghai because there were too many lusts in the past that were constantly cut and chaotic.
She has too many appeals and missions, and each mission is based on an emotion: to Tan Na, to her ex-husband Ni Zeren, to her adoptive father Hubert, and to the new girl Bai Mei.
Diverged to talk about the performance of Teacher Gong Li, I have to say that Lou Ye's casting this time is very accurate.
Under the aura of many classic roles, Gong Li now has a very unique charm in acting. Almost as soon as she appears on the screen, she automatically becomes synonymous with desire. No matter who she plays against, whether it is Zhao Youting or Oda Cerang, the audience will unconsciously interpret the sense of lust from The High-level Face of Emperor Gong.
This is also why the confession scene in which Gong Li hypnotizes Oda Chirang in the film can be established, and the Saburo Furutani played by Oda Chijang is not unaware that his wife Miyoko has died, he is simply unable to resist the lust emanating from Yuyo. In the original work, Furutani Saburo was fascinated by this woman at the first sight of Yu Yan.
There is a scene in the film, which is an intimate scene between Bai Mei and Yu Yan. The two women stripped off their pajamas and caressed them at close range in the dimly lit room.
In the next shot, Yu Yan is already sitting in front of the window, his clothes disheveled and thin. The audience cannot fully implement the relationship between the two into Lily's passion play, and everything only stays at the level of lust.
The two people in this scene, Yu Wei and Bai Mei, both show their rare true selves in the whole film. It doesn't matter what kind of affection has arisen between the two, what matters is that Bai Mei and Yu Yan are aware of this night, and they can temporarily unload their psychological defenses. Both are women who love to perform, who are also spies, who are involuntary individuals in a chaotic island, and who still have faith in art even if they are involuntarily.
As a spy on the Chongqing military command, Bai Mei's mission to Shanghai was to get close to Yu Yan.
The two men drew closer and closer, as if they were seeing themselves in a mirror.
Therefore, the lust between Bai Mei and Yu Yan originated from narcissism, and when looking at another person, it was also a time to lament and pity herself.
Narcissism is almost the only emotion that Bai Mei and Yu Yan can bet on in the chaotic world. The people around you are difficult to rely on, so you can only keep looking at yourself to get the motivation to live.
Therefore, it is also after this erotic drama that Bai Mei obtained the persistence and obsession that Yu Yan once had from Yu Yan, and she finally chose the stage, choosing to sacrifice everything for pure art, in a sense, this is also Lou Ye's own inner portrayal.
However, such a symbolic character, which can almost be abstracted into an artistic synonym, was manipulated outside the play by Mo Zhiyin, played by Wang Chuanjun, and was eventually shot and killed by Mo Zhiyin.
Bai Mei, who represents art and beauty, is raped by Mo Zhiyin, a producer who represents capital and power.
The metaphor here really can only be broken to this level.
Let's pull our eyes back to before bai mei and Yu Yan's erotic drama.
Before that, Yu Yan took Bai Mei into the theater. Bai Mei sat in the audience of the theater and watched Yu Yan rehearse and perform.
As a result, there is a perspective in the theater space that is hidden in the shadows and observes Yu Yan's acting from a third perspective at all times.
This perspective, if you understand a little film theory, will naturally understand that it is the perspective represented by the camera.
Why Lou Ye uses handheld lenses in most of his films has always been a myth that has plagued audiences. This lens is very shaky and the image is extremely rough. So that in the end it has only one advantage left, that is, the authenticity of the perspective represented by the camera.
In order to set up a handheld shot in the film in such a way that the camera exists, the director must first answer the question of whose perspective the shot represents.
Since he is not a God representing a macroscopic perspective, he must be a bystander perspective with a reason to be present.
This is not the first time Lou Ye has used this bystander's perspective.
In "Suzhou Creek", the photographer "I" has always been such a character who only exists behind the camera, and no one who sees him only hears his voice, and the handheld lens in his subsequent films can almost be understood as a variation of the role of the observer.
In "A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind", the observer can be understood as the surrounding civilians, coldly looking at the absurd stories of Jiang Zicheng and others.
In Tuina, the observer is the guest of the massage parlor, replacing the masseuses looking at the world they can't see.
What is different is that the observer in "Lyceum Theatre" is both Bai Mei and Yu Yan himself.
The ghost that constantly follows Yu Yan around is not very well substituted for a specific role, other actors? Another spy? Reporters onlookers? None of them make sense.
It can only be Yu Yan himself. Bai Mei's gaze toward Yu Yan was a variation of Yu Yan's various gazes that pulled out of the flesh to observe himself.
To say this less mysteriously is that Yu Yan, as an actor, is constantly examining his performance from a bystander's point of view. The reason why this withdrawal and bystander is necessary is because Yu Yan, in the role of multiple identities, has a premonition that the self is about to be engulfed.
play
Acting is another key word in this movie.
"Lyceum Theatre" tells the story of the Lyceum Theatre in Shanghai in the last century. But the "theatrical performance" in the film is never confined to the theater.
Shanghai in the isolated island period seems to be calm and calm, but it is already surrounded by war. Everyone on an isolated island is pretending to be playing the illusion of prosperity and prosperity.
Therefore, Yu Yan's performance has already begun from the moment she arrived in Shanghai.
She wants to play the heroine Qiulan in the drama "Saturday Novel", the old love of Tan Na, the director of this play, the wife who saves her ex-husband Ni Zeren from the sea of suffering, the daughter of an adoptive father, and the deceased wife of a Japanese military officer.
The communication of these complicated identities is the real Yu Yan, which cannot be seen clearly and cannot be guessed.
Back to what I thought of Lou Ye at the beginning. I say that "Lyceum Theatre" is a very controversial work because the previous protagonists in Yu Yan and Lou Ye's works are not the same.
Peony, Xiaoma, Lu Jie, and Yu Hong are all people who are involuntarily caught up in the torrent of the times, and they are full of helplessness brought about by passive choice.
Yu Yan, on the other hand, chose to take the initiative to return to the isolated island, and took the initiative to choose to perform on stage again, playing a hero who turned the tide of the tide and fell.
A small person who strives to play a hero is doomed to tragedy.
The first thing this tragedy presents is a sense of unreality, where the virtual and the real are intertwined, the dreams are confused, and the real is true and false when it is false.
Lou Ye formally hinted at the film's theme from the beginning:
The relationship between the drama on the stage and the spy war in real life is arbitrarily broken, one second it is still a bloody battle, and the next second it is back on the stage.
So that the audience loses judgment on the plot, it is difficult to distinguish which is real and which is fiction.
Therefore, the interpretation of the text structure of "Lyceum Theatre" has become less important, first, the lines are too chaotic and unclear, and second, reality and drama are one.
Only the truth is hidden, only the tragic ending.
What stands in the way of the truth is people's lust.
Yu Yan finally reached the point where even she couldn't tell what was real and what was role-playing, so she needed to have a pair of eyes to reflexively observe herself from the side: Am I really a hero? Am I really myself?
The gunfight scene at the climax of the film pushes this contradiction to the peak.
The first intuitive feeling of this gunfight scene is unreal, as if someone deliberately rehearsed an action stage play, hiding some of the truth in reality.
In the version of the story presented on stage, Yu is a super agent with more force than James Bond.
"Zhen Yu Yan: No Time to Die".
Not long after the gunfight began, the audience thought that Yu Yan was going to fall down because of the bullet. But she was able to continue to stand up like a god of war and destroy the enemy: the enemy who hid in the darkness and suddenly came.
No matter how fierce the opponent and Yu Yan engaged in a fierce head-on sniper, Yu Yan could miraculously dodge the bullet and kill the other party.
It's too magical, not quite like what really happened.
This plot about spy heroes is more like a small person's intracranial reverie after becoming a hero.
The real part is that Yu Yan goes to the winery to find Tan Na, and the two are surrounded by the japanese who have been waiting for a long time, and see that they have lost all possibilities of escape.
In the final scene of the film, Tan Na and Yu Yan spread out on the chairs in the winery, and the camera turns and returns to the stage, as if the two were not killed.
But before that, there is also a scene that implicitly reveals the truth, after the Japanese surround Tan Na and Yu Wei, the camera switches to the window, and Mo Zhiyin, played by Wang Chuanjun, flees for his life in a hurry, and two gunshots are faintly heard behind him.
Obviously, the second shooting end is a reasonable real situation, and Yu Yan and Tan Na are eventually shot dead by the Japanese. But the attitude of the whole film from beginning to end is to avoid this tragic ending, to escape it, to erase it, and to leave another layer of half-truths and half-false heroic narratives on the table.
Individuals who want to become heroes, but in the end they cannot escape the fate of ordinary people, trapped by lust, trapped by the world, are the theme expressions that belong to Lou Ye's films.
Life is like a chess piece, but most people still face the fate of not being able to get rid of becoming a chess piece in the end.
Having summoned up great courage to change one's destiny, but still end up with an empty tragedy, it is more cruel than being passively involved.
In the end, Lou Ye, like Jia Zhangke, is a director who believes in his bones and is also the most suitable for civilian narratives.
All the amazing characters in Lou Ye's movie are because after the world was forced to get into a dilemma, they turned around like a moth to put out the fire: they would rather choose the ideal and the truth than choose to compromise.
So, this time, the observer behind the camera becomes so ineffectual, it is the common self-ghost of Yu Yan/Gong Li/Lou Ye, painfully escaping the tragedy that will eventually be faced in a short withdrawal, barely maintaining the self-consciousness of becoming a hero before the grand historical narrative engulfs the low sound of the individual.