◎ The secretary of the round head
True art never comes from self-confidence, and you should be thankful for your many doubts.
- TV series "Mysterious Robbery"
Last month, the series "Lost Robbery," directed by French director Olivier Assayas, was serialized on HBO, a remake of his 1996 original film "The Lost Robbery."
The film "Lost Robbery" tells the story of what happened inside and outside the play when the former director Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léod) remade the 1915 French silent film "Vampire" in a "play within a play" structure. The title "Irma Vep" is both the name of the heroine in silent films, Irma Vip, and a recombination of the word vampire "Vampire". Therefore, we can understand the movie version of "Lost Robbery" as an attempt to reconstruct "Vampire". The drama version of "Lost Robbery" goes a step further, telling the various experiences of director Vidal (played by Vincent Macaigne) to remake the movie "Lost Robbery", thus forming a certain "play within a play" multiple structures at the beginning. As the story progresses, this structure evolves further, forming a more complex pattern.
The drama version of "Lost Robbery" is not a simple "remake", the length is the most direct embodiment - the 99 minutes of the original work have expanded to the current eight episodes, a total of more than 7 hours (interestingly, this length is close to the 417 minutes of the original "Vampire"), so at least in terms of capacity, the drama version is four times that of the movie version; Not only that, but the two versions of the cast are also completely different, and two of the protagonists have undergone a qualitative change, which deserves a more detailed discussion; The most fundamental thing is that the two versions of "Lost Robbery" have changed from movies to TV series, and the nature has changed. If the film version of "Lost Robbery" is a chaotic and fascinating review of the times, a willful low-cost independent production, then the drama version is co-produced by HBO and A24, presenting a semi-commercial, half-author, half-American and half-French intermediate state, which takes care of a larger audience, but also is more complex, and can better meet Assayas' cognition of the current development of the film and television industry.
From this point of view, whether it is for fans of movies or TV series fans, "Lost Robbery" is a work that cannot be ignored this year or even now.
Meta TV series
The remake itself means nostalgia, "Lost Robbery" can appear in the American drama market, undoubtedly also closely related to the nostalgic trend of American dramas, especially considering that some time ago, the nostalgic drama "Stranger Things" in the 80s of the last century almost set off the climax of American dramas since the epidemic, "Lost Robbery" such a TV series looking back at the beginning of the last century can be said to have come into being.
However, if you put "Lost Robbery" into the genealogy of American dramas, you will find that it is very different from most realistic melodramas, which are usually more genred and more keen to express imminent reality and implant social issues, especially in recent years, this trend has been significantly reinforced by the political reality of the United States. As a work directed by a French director, "Lost Robbery" is clearly "not in the five elements", it adopts a meta-method (meta-) to focus on the process of film/TV series creation itself, forming a "meta-TV series".
In fact, although the term meta-TV series is rarely mentioned, meta-movies are not uncommon in the field of film creation, and this subgenre appears more frequently in our vision at a time when the film industry is in crisis. The reason is that the dilemma faced by the film production process itself can already provide the necessary conflicts for general film dramas, so filming the shooting process itself has largely become a "life-saving straw" that creators can grasp in times of crisis.
Generally speaking, creative dilemmas can be internal or external, spiritual or material, and the film and drama version of "Lost Robbery" try to combine two dilemmas: on the one hand, the challenge of external factors such as investors, actors, and teams, and on the other hand, the anxiety and uneasiness of the creator, the choreographer, on the work, and the two types of challenges reach their peak around the fifth episode of the show: German actor Gottfield (played by Russ Eddinger) almost hanged himself to get pleasure, At the same time, the director doubted the original intention of his creation and disappeared, and the entire crew was on the verge of collapse.
Before I really saw the drama version of "Lost Robbery", the author had very low expectations for it, because whether it is "yuan" or "remake", it makes people have a not very good premonition - a director begins to constantly return to his own experience, looking back to the past years, which is most likely a sign of aging, and also somewhat indicates the lack of creativity. To make matters worse, the choice of protagonist: how can American actor Alicia Vikander replace Maggie Cheung (not to mention whether the role could have been written for another actress, Kristen Stewart)?
The reason for this question is not from the contrast of acting skills, but precisely from the nationality of this face: it is no it's an exaggeration to say that the movie version of "Lost Robbery" can be established, largely because the protagonist is Maggie Cheung from Hong Kong, China - Assayas's wife at the time, a face from the East, and the dual identity determines the duality of the film: a love letter dedicated to Maggie Cheung herself, and it is also a cultural reflection on oriental films, especially Hong Kong films. It was Maggie Cheung's arrival that stirred up French cinema and even European cinema (at least for Assayas) at the end of the 20th century: East invaded West, sound invaded silent, color invaded black and white, television invaded film, film invaded life, close-up invaded deep focus, until the end of the film, geometric figures even invaded faces, hand-drawn patterns invaded frames of film carved by light and shadow.
As a critic of the Film Handbook, Assayas's excavation of oriental cinema in the 80s and 90s undoubtedly led him to a whole new world (culminating in the 1984 special issue of the manual "Hong Kong Production"), of which Maggie Cheung is just one of them, in Assayas's own words, "[Maggie Cheung] is a Polaroid photo that shows the vitality of Hong Kong cinema", and behind her is a series of gripping names such as Tsui Hark, Hou Xiaoxian, and Jia Zhangke. It is precisely because of this that when the drama version strips away Maggie Cheung's face, it means that everything after the face is stripped away, and it is easy to slip into a more personal, retreat to the West, and at the same time lack the meaning of film history in self-absorption.
Characters and doppelgangers
Fortunately, things are not as bad as I thought. At least after watching the whole play, the above preconceived impression of the drama version of "Lost Robbery" has basically disappeared. Assayas is not a player who fools the public and himself after all; For the "Maggie Cheung problem", he did not think about it, but tried to answer it from all levels, and finally gave a completely new work; He also urges us not to look at the work in the old way, as Vincent Marchanne, who plays director Vidal in the film, puts it, and it seems to be a "completely different work".
Due to the increase in filming time and funds, Assayas has more time and room to shape the character, which also brings many interesting color characters to his version of "Lost Robbery", multi-line narrative can be unfolded, and the appearance of characters like Gottfried also fills the fun and comedy effect. In addition to the color roles, the most important are Vidal and the heroine Mira (played by Alicia Vikander) who plays Irma Vip, both roles are directly appropriated from the movie version on the surface, but in fact they are very different.
Let's start with the director. Compared with Jean-Pierre Léaud in the original version, the comedian Vincent Marchegne, who has become popular in France in recent years, brings a different feeling to "Lost Robbery": the former is neurotic and even a little crazy, and the latter is more inclined to comedy, especially the contrast that holds the power of the director but often needs to break his teeth and swallow in the stomach, which is not available in the original version. More importantly, Leod's directorial role is closer to fiction and there is a certain distance between him and Assayas himself, and Makaine is the undisputed embodiment of Assayas: on the one hand, the film "Lost Robbery", which is constantly quoted in the play and directed by Vidal played by Makaine, was actually filmed by Assayas, and on the other hand, Vidal's nostalgic ex-wife "Jade Lee" in the film all the time clearly pointed to Maggie Cheung. From this point of view, the movie version of "Lost Robbery" is more like approaching Assayas himself from an abstract and fictional level, while the TV series version is largely specific to Assayas himself, so that some dialogues can correspond to Assayas himself without any obstacles.
It should be pointed out here that although Assayas fits the drama version of "Lost Robbery" so bluntly to himself, the heroine Mira cannot simply project Maggie Cheung into real life; He chose to magically let three characters share the functions of Maggie Cheung in the original film, including Vikander's Mira (given the name "Mira" for "Maggie"), Fala Chen's Cynthia (her surname "Keng" for "Cheung") and Wu Junmei's Li Yu (directly corresponding to "Manyu"), which respectively extracted Maggie Cheung's different levels of identity, such as occupation, nationality and family (there can also be other interpretation methods), making the play different from the previous complexity and particularity.
For Assayas, Maggie Cheung obviously cannot and does not need to be replaced, and the separate dialogues between Mila and Li Yu, Mila and Cynthia in the play also fully reflect the exchange of various identity levels on Maggie Cheung. For example, a conversation between Mira and Li Yu directly explained the choreographer's motivation for replacing Chinese actors with American actors, as well as the doubts about the so-called "cultural appropriation" behind this. Macaegne's Vidal (aka Assayas) argues that Maggie Cheung grew up in England and Mira was born in Sweden, neither of whom are products of a single culture, so instead of being a "cultural appropriation" as it appears on the surface, such a substitution has a deeper consistency, a speculation on the place of film actors in the industry. In this sense, the drama version of "Lost Robbery" is certainly a public love letter written by Assayas to Maggie Cheung (although he knows that Maggie Cheung may not read it at all), and he is deeply in love with their emotions and work past, but at the same time, it is an abstract refinement and thinking of Maggie Cheung.
Love is wrapped in thought, or conversely, thinking is infiltrated by love, the drama version of "Lost Robbery" is still rich in layers, but things are not people, and Assayas is also really "parting" with Maggie Cheung in reminiscence, and then turned over new tricks.
Film and television myths
It is not only the "Maggie Cheung problem" that should be considered and solved. In the final analysis, the most important thing that needs to be explained in the drama version of "Lost Robbery" is, why make the drama version of "Lost Robbery"? Is it just for the money?
Generally speaking, directors remake their own works for nothing more than a few reasons, from the market consideration, the original works are usually highly recognized by the market, worthy of using better and newer technology to remake, so as to gain the recognition of the latest wave of audiences in the market. From the perspective of creation, most creators are dissatisfied with the original work, or regret the creative conditions at that time, and think that it is worth further improving, expanding and extending. A good remake usually deals with issues that were not covered in previous eras, making the new work more directly related to the present.
In response to the latter question, the drama version of "Lost Robbery" has indeed made a good attempt. If the creators of the late 20th century, especially the film critic Assayas, had to respond to the question of digital versus film and the East versus the West, he had to respond to the current problems of the film/television industry. In fact, due to the large increase in space, Assayas finally has the opportunity to have a lively discussion, which is scattered throughout many corners of the show, making those parts that have no plot and seem to be cinematic even more worthy of fandom attention. For example, at the crew gathering at the beginning of the third episode, several characters started a discussion about the series, which even pulled out a "history of serials": the original serials function similar to novels, they are all adapting classic masterpieces, and their initial state is not "art", but full of commercial colors, which seems to be no different from the current streaming media-dominated TV series market.
Passages like this seem intended to break our bias against the "big data drama", but it doesn't seem to be that simple; They do not wish to convey a certain distinct attitude, but closer to a posture of discussion, a unique posture of a fan, critic and director. This gesture is vividly demonstrated in the fifth episode of the show, when several crew members challenge the director that a certain part of his remake of "The Vampire" is inducing rape or sexual harassment - undoubtedly in response to the feminist wave in today's society, which also became the fuse of the film's biggest crisis, and led to Vidal's response: adding a critical act behind the scenes of the filming of "Vampire". Through these paragraphs, the original "play within a play" has expanded again, and a richer and geometrically expanding history of film and television drama production has gradually surfaced in front of the audience, and the evolution of the relationship between the guide and the question of creative freedom have all brought the play to a breadth that the film version has never reached.
It's clear that Assayas deliberately created controversial moments in the show, and it seems that the biggest problem with film and television creation for him is that the creators are getting better and better at preaching, but these creators and the creation itself are "not bad enough": "Cinema was for bad guys and bad girls, just like rock and roll was to them," Gottfield says. In his post-finalization declaration, the Dionysian Gottfield asked the crowd: "Why do we make movies now?" Where has the spirit of adventure gone? Where is Chaos? And this is probably the inner question of the once chaotic Assayas. It is in this sense that we can understand Assayas's statement in an interview that "whenever the film is in crisis, it should be remade", which is reminiscent of Chekhov's letter to Suvorin, "If the artist whom the masses believe dares to declare that although he sees everything and does not understand anything, then this statement alone is a great understanding in the field of thought, a big step forward." ”
Everyone knows that the current movie is facing a crisis, but what exactly the crisis is, no one can say clearly. "Lost Robbery" shows us all aspects of the film and television crisis, but it also refuses to give an answer. Perhaps the question itself has enough meaning, and the process of searching for answers to history already contains a solution to the problem?
Just a few days ago, Jean-Luc Godard, the greatest chaos maker in the history of cinema and the chaos itself, chose to euthanize and die on his own. We can say that Godard's most valuable legacy is to break all the stereotypes of film creation, but what he left behind is not some theorized and systematic film aesthetics, but more of the chaos after breaking all courage and courage - "Chinese Girl", "Passion", "Book of Images", the whole world. As Godard did, whether it was a film version in the 90s or a TV series version of the current century, "Lost Destruction" has always been an attempt to express the chaotic world, although it is not perfect - because perfection may mean the end.