Yu Li
Note: This article contains spoilers
Previously, "Lyceum Theatre" was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the 2019 Venice Film Festival, but the score of the field was counted down, and the foreign media evaluation was not high, whether it was Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic or IMDB. At first, I thought that Lou Ye had lost his hand, but after seeing the true face of the movie, I felt that Lou Ye still had a lot of ideas, but I could understand why foreign audiences scored low.
Poster of "Lyceum Theatre"
"Lyceum Theatre" is mainly adapted from Hongying's novel "The Death of Shanghai", and draws some materials from the novels "Shanghai" and "Flies" by the famous Japanese writer Toshiichi Yokomitsu. Hongying's novels often have strange colors, high readability, and the spy war stories familiar to the audience are mostly thrilling and dangerous, how to get to Lou Ye's hands, this spy war story becomes obscure?
Spy war stories
In fact, if you dismantle the heavy fan obstacles that Lou Ye deliberately set up for the movie, the core story of "Lyceum Theatre" is still good-looking, and it has the basic elements of traditional spy movies.
To better enter the film, it is necessary to first understand the entire era background of the film. The following contains spoilers, but in fact, understanding may help to watch the movie, and it does not affect the feeling of the film's light and shadow charm.
The story is set from December 1 to 6, 1941, a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor. On December 7, 1941, Japan raided Pearl Harbor in the United States, which became the trigger of the Pacific War during World War II, and many countries declared war on Japan one after another, playing a key role in Japan's final defeat.
In that chaotic background, as the spy center of East Asia, Shanghai gathered all kinds of forces and intelligence. "Lyceum Theatre" also revolves around the battle for intelligence. At that time, the Allies knew that Japan might launch an attack, but where exactly was the attack? This is the core intelligence of the movie.
Yu Yan's (Gong Li) mission is to steal this information and pass it on to the Allied spy leader, the Frenchman Hubert (Pascal Gregory), who is also Yu's adoptive father. The source of the intelligence is the Japanese military officer Furutani Saburo (Oda Chejang), yu yan looks similar to his dead wife he misses day and night, or may become a breakthrough. In the film, the mission of The Viola is named "The Two-Sided Mirror Project".
Yu Yan (played by Gong Li)
Like other spy stories, Lyceum Theater makes a big fuss about the identity of the intelligence officer. The mystery of Yu Yan lies in the fact that she has multiple identities. She is a famous actress who came to Shanghai from Hong Kong to perform dramas; she is also an amorous woman, some people say that she came to Shanghai to rescue her arrested ex-husband Ni Zeren (Zhang Songwen), and there are also gossip that she starred in a play directed by her old lover Tan Na (Zhao Youting), in order to meet her old lover; but her real identity is an intelligence officer, rather than saying that she is a big actor to play a spy, rather than saying that she has always been a spy, the identity of the actor is her kind of performance.
Tan Na (played by Zhao Youting)
Under the cover of various identities, Yu Yan's approach to Furutani Saburo was quite smooth. They live in the same hotel, and when Yui appears, he attracts the attention of Furutani Saburo. Because Furutani Saburo returned to Japan earlier than expected, the Double-Sided Mirror plan had to be advanced. In a designed shootout, the wounded Furutani Saburo is rescued by Yuyo. Under the influence of drugs, Yu hypnotized Saburo Furutani and obtained the core intelligence of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Saburo Furuya (Oda Kiriki)
Here's the interesting treatment: Did Yu Yan give the information to the allied spy leader? If so, why did Pearl Harbor still break out? If you don't pay it, what is Yu Yan's motivation? Audiences can go to the theater to find out.
Although it is a spy story, the audience can still find the difference between "Lyceum Theatre". Yu Wei is very different from the protagonists of spy dramas that we are familiar with in the past. Before the great right and wrong, Yu Yan was undoubtedly firm, but it is difficult to say that she worked for some kind of big ism. So we've never seen a spy put her love in such a big position. She tells her adoptive father that she hopes this is the last mission; she has an ambiguous affair with Bai Mei (Huang Xiangli), a female agent who has a similar experience to her; when she can escape, she chooses to go to an appointment with Tan Na...
Yu Wei and Bai Mei (played by Huang Xiangli)
As a pawn in the chaotic world, Yu Yan is eager to live for herself, and she bravely dies for love.
It's a spy story, and it's an extraordinary story of women.
Minimalist and complex
In fact, the spy logic of "Lyceum Theatre" is very clear, and it should be very good to shoot according to the paradigm of spy movies. It's just that Lou Ye has never been a director who plays cards in a routine. For him, it was important what kind of story was told, but so was the way it was narrated—if not more so.
The first is the narrative itself. Lou Ye does not tell the story in the most accessible way for the audience, but on the contrary, the narrative is minimalist, crisp, and at the same time complex and confusing. This seems to be somewhat contradictory temperament, perfectly integrated in "Lyceum Theatre".
On the one hand, the introduction of the film to the times, characters, etc., are all refined, the audience may not be able to receive information as soon as they are distracted, and even the understanding of the subsequent plot will form obstacles, on the other hand, the film allows a large number of characters to appear intensively, and it is really challenging to remember their names, identities, purposes and relationships with each other at once.
On the one hand, the film clearly advances the plot in a linear chronological order, and on the other hand, it continuously expands the capacity of "time" with a large number of parallel editing, which is rich and complex.
The sense of disorientation of the film is more clearly reflected in the dramatic structure of the play within a play. Yu is an actress who rehearses a left-wing play directed by left-wing director Tan Na. In the play, Yu Yan plays an "undercover" who plans a workers' strike and is being arrested. She was in danger. The situation of the actors in the drama echoes the situation outside the drama. Is the actor's response on stage a performance act or a real situation?
Lou Ye deliberately breaks the boundary between the stage and reality, virtual and real, so that an originally real spy story becomes shadowy and swaying. But there is a common direction: when violence enters the theater, no one is immune, whether inside or outside the play.
In the play, Tan Na is inside the play when she wears her glasses, and outside the play when she takes off her glasses
Lou Ye's obsession with narrative art has enhanced the artistic charm and artistic value of "Lyceum Theatre". But this also greatly sacrifices the popularity of the film, which greatly enhances the ambiguity and difficulty of acceptance of the film.
Black and white light and shadow
In addition to the narrative form, Lou Ye went deeper into the essence of the film narrative - the combination of light and shadow. Lyceum Theatre is a black-and-white film. This move is simply against the trend, and Lou Ye also has his considerations.
The audience already had a very complete picture of Shanghai in the 1940s. This is a flashy place in the chaotic world, with red wine and green lights, drunken dreams and deaths, night and night songs, spy girls who appear in this background, and often a wavy curly hair, a self-groomed cheongsam...
"Lyceum Theatre" intends to subvert this stereotype. As Lou Ye said: "We are an 'anti-qipao' movie, because it is too symbolic, when a shape becomes a symbol or a rule, it loses its charm, and it will also form some damage to the richness of the characters." ”
After using black and white photography, there was no flashy luster in Shanghai at that time, only black and white ash hiding dirt and grime, full of dangers; there was no graceful cheongsam girl, Yu Yan wore shirt strappy pants, trench coat, often a serious face that was not smiling, which not only highlighted her calm and heavy heart, but also did not allow the atmosphere of the film to go to light and frivolous; even the old Shanghai style soundtrack similar to "Night Shanghai" was gone, and the film's zero soundtrack was replaced by a variety of real stereoscopic sound effects.
Yu Yan was particularly heroic in the shootout
Black and white photography has its own artistic charm. Especially in the final gunfight scene of the movie, under the black and white images, the electric stone fire in the darkness and the loud gunshots appear to be more sharp, abrupt, intense, and burst out of an amazing sense of power.
However, the black and white photography of "Lyceum Theatre" is different from the fresh and fluent effect of "Roma", Lou Ye deliberately uses "bad black and white, bad images", with that even somewhat blurry and dull tone to create the chaos of the situation and the chaos of people's hearts, which is a bit of an ancient black film. The effect lou Ye wanted was achieved.
But its negative effects are also obvious. A large number of night scenes, the layering of black and white gray is not clear enough, the sense of space of the characters is not three-dimensional enough, resulting in many expressions of the characters indulging in darkness, indistinguishable, there is a distance between the audience and the characters, which can be understood but difficult to empathize. Although the shaky handheld photography is full of presence, objectively it also exacerbates the blurriness of the image, which is likely to make the audience feel visual fatigue - shaky and blurry, very dizzy.
It can be expected that "Lyceum Theatre" will attract polarized reviews. It has the framework of a genre film, but it is presented in an art form full of authorial personality and interest. For Lou Ye's creative process, "Lyceum Theatre" is a progress, Lou Ye's control of genre films is becoming more and more mature, and fans are happy to see Lou Ye's adventures; but from the production logic of commercial films, "Lyceum Theatre" is too risky, and the current Chinese film market may not be able to give it the market return it expects.
This issue is edited by Shan Zou