In the author's movie-watching impression, director Lou Ye is a film artist who is favored by many fans.
In his image context, whether it is the early "Weekend Lover", "Purple Butterfly", "Suzhou Creek" or "Tuina", "A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind", Lou Ye's center of gravity is always locked on "the chaotic and real lust of the individual under a mottled space".
The dangling lens of handheld photography and the blurry picture of partial disfocus seem to be the best annotation for director Lou Ye to reveal lust through the password of the image.
As a nominee for the 76th Venice Film Festival, Lou Ye once again broke into the audience's field of vision with his masterpiece "Lyceum Theatre". With the consistent Lou Ye-style film language, a stage play of people and history of "flowers not flowers, fog and non-fog" has been constructed.
Text: Liao Zi
Edit: Dinosaur Humble
Editor-in-Charge: No
Curated: Leave the bookroom behind
As an adaptation of the literary novel "Lyceum Theatre", Lou Ye retained a precious "literary" video style when dealing with the story.
In the cold black and white picture, the turn of events is hidden in the lines of three or two.
In the film, set in Shanghai, China, seven days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Shanghai in the "lonely island" period, the famous actor Yu Wei (Gong Li) returned to Shanghai to star in the drama "Saturday Novel" directed by his lover Tan Na (Zhao Youting).
But for Yu Yan's return to Shanghai, everyone talked about it. For a time, Yu Yan's former fans, lovers, ex-husbands, and Japanese officers were all tightly concerned about Yu Yan's true intentions to return to Shanghai. This time, Yu Yan actually came to complete the "intelligence deciphering" plan of his adoptive father Hubert.
As an American spy, Hubert learned that the Japanese intelligence bureau would launch a new plan, but in many intelligence telexes, it was often impossible to decipher because of a code called "Yamazaki". It just so happened that the deceased wife of the Japanese captain Furuya Saburo (Oda Cejō), Miyoko, looked exactly like Yuyo, and under various coincidences, Hubert asked Yuyo to approach Furuya Saburo and obtain the final decoded translation of the code "Yamazaki".
Seemingly all the best, Hubert sent out the secret report. This was followed by the Outbreak of the Pacific War in which Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Yu Yan, who was shot in the middle of the bullet, snuggled tightly in the lover Tan Na, and ended the story in the beating melody.
There is no doubt that Yu Yan acts as an extremely overflowing meaning relationship in the combined passages of the narrative.
First of all, in the movie, Yu Yan occupies a passive object of action position. From the structure of the characters, it can be found that Yu Yan is a fatherless and motherless "orphan" who was adopted by Hubert from an early age, which makes Hubert's "elder" image as a "father" with authority and discourse power. Perhaps it is also this layer of bound "in the name of the Father." Yu Placed herself in a multi-role of "symbolic identity" to complete Hubert's intelligence decipherment.
In the narrative composition that seduces Furuya Saburo, Yu plays an extremely ambiguous "female figure". In the broken black-and-white photograph of Saburo Furuya's hand, the already absent "Miyoko" actually constitutes the narrative dynamics of obtaining intelligence.
Hubert will use Yui to resemble Miyoko's appearance, carefully setting up the encounter between Yui and Furuya Saburo. One is a man who lacks maternal healing/soothing (Furuya Saburo) and the other is a woman who exudes sinful maternal power/irrationality (Yu Yan). This becomes a rather dizzying part of the film. The Yu yan here seems to constitute a negative/radical/destructive force in some sense.
The true meaning of the code "Yamazaki" is deciphered through seduction. Whether yu wei here is an image of a "female spy" or a certain image of a "snake and scorpion beauty", its common inner image is an "other image" assigned by a "man" to a "woman". It was the order of the Father of Action (Hubert) to appoint an "adopted daughter" (Yu Yan).
At the same time, Hubert' symbolic body as a concretely visible "symbolic order" of some kind of history/power is a process of constant internalization of the "father's law" (history/order/). Thus, Yu Yan is a constantly filled signifier, a signifier vacancy wrapped in the demands of history and the times, and an object "gazed" by the symbol of the great other (specifically referring to historical situations/logic of war in the text).
In other words, in the violent historical field, under the scene of the twists and turns of various forces in various countries, Lou Ye's lens locks on the life history of a female actor, and the image identity of the "other" is created inside and outside the play.
It seems that once again, relying on the rhetoric of gender, a meaning that relies on the beauty of women's physicality and spiritual healing/nurturing/power, through the dual construction of women's body and spirit, obtains a power/war logic/(male) meaning confirmation and reference.
But what is quite interesting is that in "Lyceum Theatre", the female figure of Yu Yan does not seem to be a definite landing point, not a timeless portrait of complete meaning.
In the face of the intelligence code "Yamazaki" that was lured. Yu Did not refer to "Yamazaki" as telling her adoptive father truthfully in Hawaii, USA, but arbitrarily modified and misrepresented "Yamazaki" as "Singapore". This makes the whole film seem to be mixed with a subtle variation of meaning.
What is particularly obvious is that in the second half of the film, the characteristics of spy films are closer, and the "spy" played by Yu Yan enters the climactic stage of confrontation with Japanese officers.
It is worth reminding that when Yu Yan rushed back to the Lyceum Theater to make peace with Tan Na, the coat was carrying a gun containing bullets. In classical theory, the "gun" is a symbol of male identity, a strong/violent/active meaning.
At the same time, in the face of life and death, Yu Yan seems to have transformed from a passive gaze of action object in the first half of the film to an active resistance action subject. Cramped theaters, vertigod swaying shots. In the black and white picture, Yu Wei fights layer by layer to produce a bloody road.
At the same time, for Yu Wei's misinformation of information to replace "Hawaii" with "Singapore" in order to make Hubert send false information, the setting of this narrative plot seems to symbolically deviant a certain order and logic of the "father", which refers to both the specific "adoptive father" Hubert and the political "father" of the specific war background/culture in the film.
Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the pattern of World War II, confronted Japan, and rescued the plight of Shanghai's "isolated island". In the midst of the guns and bullets, Yu Yan snuggled up to Tan Na's side, which is the saddest scene in the movie.
In connection with the issues that director Lou Ye is good at dealing with, it is to express the lust of the individual nakedly. In "Lyceum Theatre", full of summons is the emotion of Yu Yan and Tan Na in the wandering and chaotic world.
Dragged in the torrent of history and the times, the first awakening of a certain female consciousness in Yu Yan, a certain self-affirming value naming, seems too weak and sad.
And the position of this so-called "agent of action" is always confirmed by reference to the "great other" of society, either concrete or abstract, in a silent but unshakable "symbolic order".
As a result, Yu Yan, who was in Tan Na's arms, slipped heavily off the pistol he was holding in his hand, and in the fragility of being shot, he returned to a female identity position and leaned closely on Tan Na's arms.
At the same time, in the movie, the author believes that Yu Yan's lyrical passage full of psychedelic/desire/double circumlocution with the fan Bai Mei can also be interpreted as Yu Yan's self-pity identification with the mirror. Yu Yan and the "Bai Mei", who is also a spy, form a "mirror structure".
A "lone shadow" that overlaps but confuses the "self" (female) with the "other" (social/historical), a constructed female identity. Therefore, when Bai Mei woke up naked, Yu Wei was deeply tired, smoking a thick cigarette and looking out the window, but it was filled with infinite pity and helplessness.
At the end of the film, the actors in the theater swim through the bodies of the duo, and the sound of bright music is heard.
And Yu Yan and Tan Na hugged each other on the edge of the crowd, as if everything in history could not be suspended, and the historical drama was still in progress.
The individual's life and emotional imprint complete a history of the demise of romanticism in the stage created by the times.