Some time ago, "Lyceum Theatre" was finally released.
It has been two years since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and two and a half years since the release of Lou Ye's last work, "A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind."
The film, which was finalized again, makes the opportunity to "see Lou Ye in the cinema" more difficult.
△ Poster of "Lyceum Theatre"
The appeal of director Lou Ye himself, coupled with the fame bonus of Gong Li, Zhao Youting, and Oda Chejang, "Lyceum Grand Theatre" has received great attention from the audience from the beginning.
However, the thunder and rain are small, the box office is only 16.9 million yuan in the 5 days of release, and the audience's evaluation is also polarized.
Very Lou Ye, handheld photography kind.
Very filmed, thirty-five millimeters of that kind.
Very six generations, don't ask about the box office kind.
Very economical, black and white film kind.
Very clean and rainy kind all the time.
It's very swaying, and I can't understand that kind of without taking notes.
Some people say that this is Lou Ye's breakthrough. Some people also say that this is Lou Ye's failure.
In fact, compared with other literary films, the box office and evaluation of "Lyceum Theatre" are not unexpected.
Lou Ye is still Lou Ye, the free and stable coordinate system among the "sixth generation" directors, with a consistent shooting method and visual style, and the rebellious spirit of the era is his unique charm.
1989-2021: Lou Ye's literary and artistic past
"In the end, it is the desire itself that we love, not the appeal behind the desire."
Nietzsche's words are mentioned several times in the movie "Lyceum Theatre", and it is not surprising that they are the title of the film's connotation.
In Lou Ye's films, the most marginal thing is not people, but love and desire itself.
Love, sex, desire, money, violence, women... These invisible social spaces, survival logic and emotional worlds run through Lou Ye's film works.
△ Lou Ye
After graduating from the Directing Department of the Beijing Film Academy in 1989, Lou Ye's career has been up and down.
In 1993, the film industry was still in the stage of state-funded and coordinated production, and any film had to be completed within the system of the film factory. At that time, Lou Ye found all the people he knew and brewed his first out-of-system movie" "Weekend Lover".
△ Stills from "Weekend Lover"
The film focuses on the lives and loves of young Chinese people born in the mid-to-late 1960s. This group of young people has heard the model play, but they have been fascinated by Teresa Teng and wore flower shirts, with shortcomings and faults, but also left enthusiasm and dreams.
The film took 40 days to shoot, but the review took two years.
It was hard to approve, but only allowed to be screened on a small scale at midnight on weekends. "Weekend Lover" has become a veritable "weekend lover".
In 1995, Lou Ye made a commercial attempt to turn his work into the system and filmed a stream-of-consciousness psychological thriller "Dangerous Girl".
△ Stills of "Dangerous Girl"
But the exploration of commerce and art did not impress audiences at the box office.
At the same time, the film industry has long been famous.
Wang Xiaoshuai's debut work "Winter and Spring Days" was selected by the BBC as one of the "100 Best Films in the History of World Cinema"; Jiang Wen's "Sunny Day" became a classic as soon as it was released; Jia Zhangke was seriously preparing for "Xiao Wu" after filming his graduation work "Xiaoshan Homecoming"; and the "fifth generation" represented by Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and others was also famous.
△ Stills from "Sunny Day"
Lou Ye, on the other hand, adhered to his professionalism and free and random "amateur spirit", silently prepared the third feature film "Suzhou Creek".
The cost of this film is extremely low, the two leading actors Zhou Xun and Jia Hongsheng only got a few thousand yuan of remuneration, the director, screenwriter, producer all have no salary, but the international copyright of "Suzhou Creek" sold to the first place in the global art film in 2001, and was selected as the top ten films of the millennium by Time magazine in the United States.
"Chinese mainland director Lou Ye's film, gorgeous and dazzling, and in depth you will see the romance of postmodernism."
△ Stills of "Suzhou Creek"
"Suzhou Creek" reveals the rudiments of urban love full of secrets, suspicions and desires under Lou Ye's lens, although it was banned for illegal participation, it also won 30 million yuan in investment for his next commercial film "Purple Butterfly".
Unfortunately, this highest-cost "Purple Butterfly" is Lou Ye's "comprehensive failure in the sense of the market".
△ Stills of "Purple Butterfly"
For Lou Ye, this is a wayward attempt.
For a long time after that, in addition to participating in several film festivals, Lou Ye only made one DV film "Spring Breeze Drunken Night" and a foreign language film "Flower".
△ On the left is the poster of "Spring Breeze Drunken Night"; on the right is the poster of "Flower"
In 2012, Lou Ye's third feature film "Floating City Mystery" released in theaters surfaced.
This film is a metaphor for the dilemma of contemporary people, and describes money, status, family affection, and the objects of desire that everyone chases, seemingly right in front of you, but out of reach.
△ Stills of "Floating City Mystery"
In 2014, "Tuina" was released.
From words to images, this film adapted from the Mao Dun Literature Prize's work of the same name, Lou Ye has brought blind masseurs and their world to the screen like never before.
△ Stills of "Tuina"
He puts himself in the same position as the subject, "If they are vulnerable, then we think of ourselves a little higher, and we don't seem to be stronger."
Despite the poor box office, the reputation of "Tuina" and its achievements in major film festivals are obvious to all.
It was not until 2018's "Clouds Made of Rain in the Wind", Lou Ye, who has always been low-key in the public field and public speech, that he was gradually pushed in front of the public.
△ Stills of "A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind"
The film continues Lou Ye's bold and casual style, the economic miracle and class differentiation are intertwined, desire and sin are intertwined, dissolving the purity of emotion, and the cutting and jumping of the timeline make the storyline hazy and blurred.
Returning to the new work "Lyceum Theatre", the highly shaky, rapid editing and large number of overlapping film techniques are always reminiscent of "Purple Butterfly" many years ago, and the rough and direct picture is so Loud and fierce.
As first Youth Film Festival wrote when it presented him the award:
"Leading, driving and actively changing are the common expectations of Chinese films."
When talking about Lou Ye, what are we talking about?
Looking back at the history of Lou Ye's film development, you will find that many people watch Lou Ye's films, starting from curiosity and snooping.
People who don't like him think that he is always repeating the desire to shoot men and women, and the dramatic storyline focuses on the individual, but there is a little less humanistic care.
People who like him think that this is a misreading of Lou Ye.
The seemingly inappropriate and diseaseless groaning of the individual that Lou Ye is concerned about is actually an exploration of society's neglect of the individual, and he successfully uses the language of video to speak out some unspeakable marginal, minority and sensitive histories, and brings them into the ranks of art films.
In past works, no matter which city or era the background is set in, whether the narrative tends to be propositional genre films, or more casual poetic expressions, Lou Ye can always infiltrate his own symbolic and authorial imprints.
Under his lens, the torrent of the times is often just an illusory canvas, "the subjective feelings of the characters, the soft and spiritual parts of the characters, are the real interests", just like the changes in the city.
High-rise buildings, viaducts, parks, roads... In Lou Ye's shots, the street scene of the city often appears. The camera moves forward, and the scenery is speeding forward, shrouded in an untold story.
The helplessness and despair in "The Drunken Night of the Spring Equinox", the collapse and madness in "The Mystery of the Floating City", the repression and release in "Tuina", the skewedness and silence in "Lyceum Theatre".
The love and desire in Lou Ye's film always pull the audience's emotions under the shaking of the camera.
He recorded one of the most authentic aspects of humanity, as well as a part of the truth of an era.
Cities will change, so will people, and Lou Ye is recording stories outside of the camera in his own way, recording more people in this era.
As the early Weekend Lovers said:
"The characters in the story are real, and they used to object to making their story into a movie because they said they weren't like that anymore, and they said the memories were painful for them, but we did it anyway because we believed they needed that help."
Peek into nothingness in the truth, soothe the softness in the hard, and escape again in the world.
Here in Lou Ye, you can't see the market preferences, all you can see is that he uses his favorite style to tell a special story, restore a special era, and go deep into the inner expression desire of ordinary people in several big eras.
Perhaps this is lou Ye's charm.
When will the gap between literary and art film audiences and ordinary audiences be crossed?
For the audience, literary and art films carry more of an indescribable sense of voyeurism and curiosity, and are mixed with the taboos of eroticism and violence.
This aesthetic, which is different from mainstream discourse, naturally makes a gap between the audience of literary and art films and the general audience.
Just like the polarized evaluation of "Lyceum Theatre", the shot that makes people want to vomit in the eyes of ordinary audiences is an immersive experience that can show the most authentic state of the characters in the eyes of literary and art film audiences. In the eyes of ordinary audiences, black and white pictures are completely unnecessary and not worth the ticket price, and in the eyes of literary and art film audiences, black and white pictures show the psychedelic illusion of Shanghai in the isolated island period, with a strong sense of atmosphere.
△ Stills of "Lyceum Theatre"
Everyone's aesthetic taste involves emotions, emotions, experiences and other factors, which are stimulated at a certain moment and eventually shaped into a view of a work, and it is difficult to achieve commonality in a real sense.
But it is undeniable that commercial films do not necessarily have no connotation, and literary and art films do not necessarily have to be dull and formalized.
Film theorist Ift Pilo said that film is a mythical expression, in the final analysis, a secular myth, which needs both a realistic and a mythical artistic expression.
A mature market requires a diversified living space.
Zhang Yimou's transition from commercial excesses to artistic returns, Jiang Wen's genius-style banter humor, and Diao Yinan's balance trojan in business and art are all looking for a better way to express the film.
The evaluation and controversy that Lou Ye faces is not necessarily a bad thing.
After all, valuable controversy is always a sign of an industry thriving.
What we need is not to fill the "chasm", but to let seriously produced, sincere films receive valuable feedback – whether it is box office, word of mouth, or a few comments.
We still look forward to more excellent film works in the future and bring more surprises.
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Reference material:
How many times can we still see Lou Ye in the theater? The Paper, 2021-10-18.
"Lou Ye's Literary and Artistic Past, 1989-2019", One Direction Street Bookstore, 2019-04-08.
"This time, be the audience of Lou Ye", Tao Tao Movie, 2019-03-16.