From Xu Anhua to Half-Life - The Film "Half-Life"

Tragedy is the crushing of beautiful things for people to see.

The film "Half Life" uses simple lens language to objectively describe and show love tragedies and female lamentations.

The film is pixelated, simple and timeless, with no superfluous embellishments. A series of life-like shots pull away, encounters, loves, conflicts, separations, reunions, throbbing, sweet, bitter, sad, sighing, whether beautiful or cruel, it is not responsible for bearing your joy or sorrow despite the eloquence. Even the pain of tearing the heart and lungs was only silently dried up. The first time I saw this movie, I felt very depressed and angry, but the helpless sense of fate made people unable to vent. Good things are meant to be destroyed.

The story of "Half Life" takes place in Shanghai in the 1930s, and under the lens of Xu Anhua, there is a cold and damp atmosphere of the old era everywhere. However, if you really think about it, at least in the movie, this story does not have a strong background of the times, and the location seems to be irrelevant, we can replace Lu'an, Nanjing, and Shanghai with our hometown, city, and big city, which has no impact at all. The choice of characters made the film a great success. Xu Anhua's adaptation has more human beauty and forbearance, or perhaps it beautifies the suffering of women, or perhaps it is the love of the Republic of China era.

We see the sharp vision of Xu Daoxuan's role, although there are big stars with distinct personalities such as Mei Yanfang and Li Ming, but their sharp edge is also very consistent with the temperament of Man Lu and Shi Jun in the book, the pure image of Wu Qianlian is also like Man Zhen, Ge You's obscene temperament is a realistic interpretation of the name of Hongcai, although I personally do not like the two scenes where Shi Jun also gloves and the reunion of the restaurant at the end, I still think it is a successful work of literary adaptation, and the overall perception is also like Zhang Ailing's book, sighing and touching, Although it received mixed reviews.

The two sisters of the Gu family were particularly well chosen. Ang Lee once said that Wu Qianlian had the face of a female teacher of Chinese language in primary schools. Once the gray-toned coat is worn, and then the dark red scarf is worn, there is indeed a kind of literary and cold and thin atmosphere. It's not very eye-catching, but it's still a bit windy when you look closely. Needless to say, the sister is best at playing this kind of poignant and fierce woman, with indifferent and white eyes, slightly protruding lips, and a thin and bone-like face.

Xu Anhua always writes about people. And Xu Anhua also admitted that he pays special attention to female themes, but unlike Zhang Aijia, who is accustomed to focusing on the gentle heart of young girls, Zhang Wanting, who has a euphemistic and dreamy style, and Huang Zhenzhen, who explores the boldness of lust, Xu Anhua's writing is always objective and calm, and he has an almost cruel and meticulous outline of women and a value judgment without distinct likes and dislikes. Man Lu is more like a product of that era, the ghost of the old shadow of the Republic of China in "Zhang Ailing". All her fate really ended in half a life.

When I watched the novel because of the movie, I didn't expect the novel to be so tragic. The "Love of the Fallen City" and "The Golden Lock" that I have read before can be regarded as the sadness and joy of the "Dream of the Red Chamber" at most, not tragic. In terms of plot, the most tragic part of the novel is the paragraph where Zhu Hongcai rapes Man Zhen, which may as well be recorded directly below:

He was still a little stunned until now, and repeatedly said, "I have never seen such a woman." Will bite! He was dragged off the bed by her, and he wrestled so hard that he almost couldn't hold it down, and let her run, only to feel a moment of heat under the tip of his nose, and a nosebleed was flowing down. She was so flustered by her screams that he was bitten by her, but he still grabbed her hair and slammed his head on the floor a few times before he knocked her unconscious. At that time, I didn't know that she was dead in the dark, and when she died, I wanted him to do this. Afterwards, I turned on the light and looked at it, and there was a breath, and before I woke up, I took it to bed and stripped off my clothes, like a corpse, this time he let him play enough, and he wanted to die on her, expecting to be the first and last night.

Most of the texts before this were relatively calm and delicate, at least on the surface. This is also the unique place of Zhang Ailing. If the text is lively and crying, it is likely to become a romance novel, which is popular reading. By this point, Zhang Ailing was still calm, but instead used a straight stroke, a deadly verb, and used the creepy metaphor of "yan corpse" to write out the rape process. This seemingly calm tone of writing is like a heavy punch, hitting me, the reader,in the heart.

The calm beauty of the warm wind that had been smudged by the previous two hundred pages of text was torn to pieces in this instant, and as a result, the first and second half of the novel had to undergo an atmospheric change. The first half of the novel, in fact, has already written the "half of life", and the second half is the continuation of the tragedy. This tragedy corresponds to Mr. Lu Xun's words: destroying something of value for people to see.

Director Xu's work on women's care and female perspective is very unique in the Hong Kong film circle, whether it is "Postmodern", "Jade Guanyin" or "Tin Shui Wai", her exploration of mother-child love and women's friendship is more profound and intense, but the camera is still very calm and objective, plainly recording the living conditions of marginalized people. Xu Anhua survives the gap between art and commerce.

Half-life, really just half-life. Man, although he lives as an individual, cannot simply live for himself. Secular ideas are as fierce as the internet public opinion familiar today, it is not easy to be born, and it is even more difficult to love.

Among Chinese film directors, Xu Anhua may be the one with the most extensive subject matter, covering thrillers, martial arts, literary adaptations, autobiographies, social phenomena, political changes, women's issues, etc. In terms of artistic pursuit, Xu Anhua has deep humanistic values and aesthetic meaning, because Xu Anhua, let me almost honestly believe that life is kind, warm, sad, touching, funny, diligent, tolerant, poetic, quiet, day after day silent, in her films, we can find the power to survive.

The half-life relationship may not be Xu Anhua's masterpiece, but what is really her collision and exchange with Man Zhen, with ManShu, with Shi Jun, and with Zhang Ailing in two time and two spaces is a grinding bone and flesh,000-like half-life fate.