Wen 丨 Kaiyin
At the beginning of "City That Never Sleeps", when the subtitles are turned on, accompanied by the beautiful melody composed by Shigeru Merlin, the audience sees a well-designed mobile follow-up shot: the black-and-white picture follows the back of the protagonist Liu Kenichi's actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, who wanders the streets of Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and passes by all kinds of people of different nationalities and skin colors. We are like walking in an underground society of little "United Nations", where immigrants from all over the world are crowded, fighting each other for a chance to survive.
The City That Never Sleeps
In the film, Takeshi Kinjo plays the second generation of Japanese orphans who have no sense of belonging: he was born in China, but grew up in Japan, usually speaking fluent Japanese, but will be seen by the police as a Chinese. Chi Xingzhou, the original author of the novel "The City That Never Sleeps", is Japanese, but he depicts the enmity between a group of Chinese who are living in a foreign land.
In the film, Liu Jianyi is caught up in gang conflicts between Shanghainese, Beijingers and Taiwanese divided by China, but he is neither seen as a member of the Chinese nor regarded as a compatriot by the Japanese. To say why director Li Zhiyi would like the novel "The City That Never Sleeps" and remake it into a movie, the protagonist Liu Jianyi's confusion about the identity of the "lone wolf" who cannot confirm his belonging is exactly the state of the character he wants to convey.
Although he has been nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards, Lee is a filmmaker who is often overlooked. In the early 1990s, as a screenwriter, he collaborated with Zhang Zhiliang on "Desperate Double Heroes" and "Vow not to forget love"; and partnered with Chen Kexin to create "Tale of Two Cities", "Three Heroes of Wind and Dust", "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers", and "Golden Branches and Jade Leaves", the latter two of which were successful works with good reputation and box office.
《Golden Branches and Jade Leaves》
Probably because he studied art and film in Canada and the United Kingdom, Lee chi-yi began his career with characteristics that were not quite the same as most Hong Kong commercial filmmakers. The film he co-directed, "Marriage Don't Talk", is warm and serious, "New Difficult Brother" is absurd, and the popular "Rogue Doctor" has a sarcastic tone and rebellious meaning, which are far from purely market-oriented entertainment films, with a more distinct literary color.
Doctor Rogue
In Li Zhiyi's "Golden Branches and Jade Leaves", which Li Zhiyi wrote, he has consciously dabbled in the character's identity confusion (gender identity), and in 1995's "Rogue Doctor" and "Savior Stick", he has shown a strong interest in social issues.
In fact, in the second half of the 1990s, before the founding of Galaxy Image, in addition to Qiu Litao, Li Zhiyi was another Hong Kong filmmaker who tried to express serious ideas in commercial films. His intentions eventually converged into the theme of "identity confusion", buried in the two best films of his film career, "The End of the World" and "The City That Never Sleeps", which became the underlying core.
Before The End of the World (1996), Li Zhiyi's films were permeated with a mild market flavor with a literary atmosphere. Thanks to the amorous prodigal image created by Liang Chaowei in "Three Heroes of the Wind and Dust", "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers", "Rogue Doctor" and "Savior God Stick", these works, although the genres are different, and each implies a relatively serious issue, but they have finally returned to the commercial warm comedy route that communicates with the audience.
The Savior Stick
But "The End of the World" is clearly not here. At the beginning of the film, when the camera set up in the car moves out of the Hung Hom Tunnel, the high-rise buildings on Hong Kong Island appear in front of the eyes, and the audience hears Leonard Cohen's famous song "Dance Me To The End Of Love" (the lyrics alone can make people discern the intriguing meaning), which brings an indescribable sentimental atmosphere.
"The End of the World"
The heroine of the film, the rich woman Lynn, is terminally ill, but at the same time falls in love with the Mongolian boy who searches for lost things for people, and the Scottish seafarer Ade who wanders the world. She wandered between Scotland and Mongolia, yearning for the spectacular scenery of the ends of the earth described by Ade, and nostalgic for the native hometown where she grew up in Spain; she came to Scotland and found that the scenery was beautiful but could not be compared with her hometown, so she decided to marry the Mongolian boy who took the lost property back to her arms, but she was terminally ill and eventually died.
At her funeral, she lingered among her friends and family with joyful expressions, and finally snuggled on the shoulders of the Mongolian boy and left the last group photo with everyone, in which we saw "Scotland" and "Mongolia" standing side by side with smiles.
Seeing this, we may really understand that the complex and difficult to clarify history and geographical relations are lightly placed into the virtual three-person love world in "The End of the World". In it, the relationship and the region of the characters belong to their respective places, but the heroine's psychology and self-perception are faced with two very different lovers and have a short-term confusion that cannot be judged and cannot choose, and the decisions she has to make are closely linked to her final emotional determination of her identity.
Unlike all of Lee's previous commercial films, "The End of the World" carries a wong kar-wai style of free-spirited and freewheeling, it completely removes the structured plot, leaving only the dreamlike emotional wandering trajectory in the heroine's perspective. It is sometimes a childlike imaginary experience of personal psychological emotions (such as the fact that crew member Ade suddenly becomes a juggler in the guise of a magician in a shipyard); sometimes it sinks into the lowest level of market life, using white-painted fragments to hook out the joys and sorrows of ordinary people.
At the time of the most important moment for Hong Kong, many good wishes were fulfilled with the help of Lynn and the worm (the appearance of the red-billed duck and the early bloom of roses), and in the spectacular mountain cliff seascape and the sound of bagpipes, "Scotland" was surprisingly calm and even a little relieved of Lynn's arrival and departure. When the old people pass away and new people are born, and we are eager to see the appearance of newborn babies, the picture turns to the streets of Hong Kong and the ordinary people living in them - workers, hawkers, homeless people, lonely old people - accompanied by the song of "Dance Me to the End of Love".
The infinitely lost sleepwalking sadness, the eccentric mixture of melancholy and joyful emotions that choose to meet fate calmly, is a farewell song of the screen era that has never appeared in the history of Hong Kong cinema.
Two years later, in "The City That Never Sleeps", Li Zhiyi continued the inner theme of identity judgment through chi xing zhou's novel story. Interestingly, in Shinjuku Kabukicho, where people from different parts of China gather, only Hong Kong has become a symbol of alienation, which is just a distant sustenance for people to bet on the lottery and expect to make a fortune. What appears on the screen is a group of "identity outcasts" who have been left out of the times because of the historical flow.
Kenichi, Fuharu, and Xiaolian, the descendants of the remaining orphans of Japan, can only become tool people used by various gangs for power and profit, and in order to survive, they even have to suppress their inner desire for friendship, love and trust, and coldly betray, deceive and slaughter each other. The reason is that the psychological state of unidentified belonging is the scar that the characters cannot heal from permanent pain, the fatalistic sign of their lifelong loneliness, and the fatal weakness that is always targeted by the dark external real world.
"The City That Never Sleeps" "The City That Never Sleeps"
Whether it is "The End of the World" or "The City That Never Sleeps", it is a pioneer in the period of Hong Kong film transformation, and a pioneer of Chinese films that anthropomorphizes regional relationships. Even before one of the founding works of Galactic Image, The Birth of a Word (1997), "The End of the World" presented such ideas on the screen in a nearly perfect emotional way. It became almost an iconic text-handling technique in subsequent 21st-century Hong Kong films.
Relying on this, represented by the "Infernal Affairs" trilogy and following a unique way of expression, Hong Kong commercial films have officially entered the era of identity and regional representation.