◎ Zhang Yue
Recently, the "Max Ofels Retrospective" screened by the Shanghai Art Film Alliance led the audience through the world of yesteryear, we not only saw the street scenes, dances, costumes, etiquette, but also immersed in a variety of nearly lost spirits, such as the obsession with honor, the attachment to love, the falsehood and sincerity hidden under the appearance of decency and restraint... Ofels presents the "world of yesterday" that Stephen Zweig loves, and the film of the same name, based on his most famous novella, A Letter from a Strange Woman, is the most crystal clear diamond in Ofels's time crystal. In fact, there are many films based on Zweig's novels and biographical works, and this article only selects four or five for a brief discussion, through the film tunnel, to explore the writer's own literary character.
"Strange Woman": Innocence and empathy or dust and indifference
Ofels adapted well, mainly capturing Zweig's intentions on a spiritual level. Ofels's observation, exploration, and display of the diversity of human nature without moral judgment, gentle and curious, are also the characteristics of Zweig, who is known for his psychological novels.
In "A Letter from a Strange Woman", Joan Fontaine's acting skills are amazing, and the countless expressions of this "strange woman" who has been obsessed with a man all her life in the three stages of girl, youth and young woman are real, and a look is better than countless lines, so that the sentences from the original book of the second person epistle are not abrupt when they appear as narration. Joan Fontaine keeps the character in a state of innocence, and only a woman with a faith-like passion for love can perform such extreme love with a lifetime of silence sacrifice.
There are several important changes that make sense of the original. First, the male protagonist changed from a writer to a pianist, changing the artist's dual personality of rigorous work and indulgence in life to his self-exile and squandering talent in career and feelings, which aggravated the dramatic sense of his career from prosperity to decline, as well as the emptiness, fragility and confusion that he needed to seek salvation and stimulation from women.
Second, the details of a few days of love are the original link, the two sit in the amusement train with mobile pictures as the window to talk about love, implying that this night is just a "mirror flower and water moon", a false dream.
Third, the heroine maintains the virginity of the body, but for the sake of raising the pianist's son, she becomes a socialite of high society, but the reader can understand her, and still feel that she is a pure woman, and Ofels paves the way for her to reject the marriage proposal of a young man of higher social status in her teenage years, disappointing her mother and stepfather, thus making her return to Vienna alone reasonable, and also making her marry the soldier who loves her more convincing.
And this change is connected with the fourth "benevolent" change, from "The Earl's Earrings" can be seen, in the logic of Ofels, men dueling for women, not only to maintain dignity, but also to sacrifice love, the male protagonist finally embarked on the road to death with her husband, this ending makes the heroine no longer just a vague wind in the novel, a burst of music from afar. The heroine's love was finally answered after her death.
We have also seen the adapted version of Xu Jinglei's failure. First of all, Zweig gave the heroine the spiritual temperament of "heroine of love", Xu Jinglei did not realize that her single expression on the heroine was a strong smell of wind and dust. She was still a weak woman with no opinion, and the heroine of Zweig made it clear that she did not hate the man who had never known her, only God, but she was proactive in her destiny. Secondly, Xu Jinglei has not been able to deduce the behavior of the female protagonist's obsession with hoping that the male protagonist will "recognize her", and the man can see the special individual in the crowd to be considered to have love. In addition, in the original work, the heroine understands the pain of love and cannot, and has understanding and compassion for her suitors, while Xu Jinglei's version takes the lack of sympathy as a personality. Finally, the image of the male protagonist is blurred, Jiang Wen seems to be only responsible for providing male hormones to guide love fantasies, his love scenes, there is no fit for the original kind of short tenderness that makes women melt, he only has the "daddy taste" of the above pairs, treating women as daughters - this may be the love pursued by Xu Jinglei's heroine and some contemporary female audiences who have been touched by this version. Or it can be said that this film adaptation of the atmosphere of the Republic of China is weak, and it also has a very local and contemporary component.
Bad "Restless": Rossellini's admonition to the big man
The Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini, who adapted Zweig's novella Fear into Restlessness, also exposed the antiquatedness of his male consciousness. The story tells of a woman who has a lover, but is suddenly blackmailed by a strange woman who claims to be her lover's ex, she has been anxious and uneasy, never dared to admit her sins to her husband, and finally found out that her husband hired an actress to torture her...
The only premise in the film that continues the original work consciously is that there is no deep emotion between the woman and the lover, and Zweig meticulously depicts the lover's thoughts and tiredness after the lonely and boring life of the rich wife. Rossellini moved the background to post-war Italy, the heroine was a prisoner of war when her husband was a prisoner of war, she ran a pharmaceutical company to find a lover, he can obviously change the story to two directions: first, to aggravate the husband's mental trial and abuse of his wife, into a Hitchcock-style commercial film; second, the wife's cheating and her husband's being a prisoner of war are both remnants of the war, and both sides are victims of war, how did this situation come about? Is the husband's "blackened" state still saved? How husband and wife should face the new relationship between men and women, etc., this is the direction of literary and art films.
As a result, I only saw Rossellini's exhortation to women to maintain their traditional chastity and family roles. Rossellini changed the plot of her daughter asking for gifts, she wanted air guns, the couple did not give her dolls, instilled in her the fairy tale of Cinderella, and after she confessed that she had hidden her brother's air guns because of jealousy, the father severely punished her. In the scene, which hints at the husband's attitude toward his cheating wife, he has no forgiveness, which is completely contrary to Zweig's intentions, which allows the couple to move from torturing each other to gradually forgiving, with a new passion for each other, as if giving birth to a delicate but real human glow in the exhausted relationship.
The wife who learned the truth was ashamed and committed suicide, and she sat at her desk tiredly, more like she wanted to cling to the most reluctant thing in the world. Work is like an air gun, her "super-gender" sense of subjectivity is immediately corrected, she runs to her children, giving up work. The heroine is Rossellini's superb wife, Ingrid Bergman, and we seem to see through the traditional man's marriage double standard, as well as the love fairy tale that is about to be broken outside the movie.
The Grand Budapest Hotel: An Alternative Adaptation Without a Trace
Wes Anderson has publicly stated that the inspiration for "The Grand Budapest Hotel" was Zweig's work, and his adaptations are so loose that it is almost impossible to see the specific traces of original works such as "The Anxiety of the Heart", "The Intoxication of Deformation", "Yesterday's World" and so on. In detail, he only borrows the old scene created by Zweig's works, the setting of several characters accidentally crossing the line in social class, the nested structure of one person pouring out or confessing to another person in works such as "Twenty-four Hours in a Woman's Life", and most importantly, he disassembles what he understands Zweig himself into the curious and listening young writers in the film, the elderly writers who have become national treasures, and the manager of the hotel, Mr. Gustav.
Anderson argues that Gustav or Zweig's world had actually disappeared before World War II, and that he had merely retained the illusion of perfection. Gustav has a high reputation in his professional field, his high art status, love to collect, especially to women, these are Anderson's gaze on Zweig, Gustav was persecuted and hunted down by Dimitri, which represented his fate of finally being burned and expelled by the Nazis, and just like the film, the Europe he loved was destroyed by lightning, and exile ended his life.
Before Dawn: A Gaze at Zweig
"Before Dawn" is the last years of Zweig in Brazil and New York, which is too strong to leave a little dream, but it is also a dream to make the past real. Joseph Harder performs the mental state of writing, thinking, and surviving in one place as a first-rate writer. This Zweig will always be taken away by people's words, immersed in his inner world for a long time, and his sincere and pure heart will be revealed.
The Jewish youth accused the best-selling German-language writer of the time, with the exception of Thomas Mann, of not speaking out against the Nazis, not knowing that he was a true pacifist and humanitarian, who could not tolerate any empty talk, who himself had been in exile for a long time, with his feet on the ground, but who had to help people escape from Europe. He would anxiously meditate on the most concrete destruction and pain, and no one around him would see that he had become desperately aware that his writing was meaningless for the unjust war, especially for the fate of their Jews in World War II, and could not predict his decision to eventually commit suicide.
Zweig's use of the human heart as a landscape to make a statement without moral judgment produces a strong shock, because the emotion itself has a moving attraction. The skillful writer will pay attention to seeing through but not speaking thoroughly, deliberately leaving an aftertaste to make people stunned, but Zweig continues the way he learned from Rodin who concentrated on his work in his early years, and does his best to write through the truth he sees, so that even readers without his experience will have a strong sense of substitution.
"Emotional Confusion", "Twenty-four Hours in a Woman's Life", "Fear" and other choppy spiritual stories will surely continue to be favored by film authors.