The film's nourishment and shaping of Gong Li determines that she is the kind of big actor who must have enough background of the times and the depth of the story to play, this kind of big is not the bluff in "Three Dozen White Bone Essence", "Miami Storm" and "Mulan", but Gong Li, as an actress who has experienced the golden age of Chinese and even world cinema, her momentum and her broad vitality naturally determine that she cannot play those entangled, fragile, and too small children's love roles too successfully.
Text | Dwarf wood
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Two years later than originally agreed, "Lyceum Theatre" was finally released. After Lang Ping, Gong Li played a female spy with star status in Lou Ye's wet and shaky shots, and the fifth-generation muse and the sixth-generation standard-bearer met in the cold and warm self-aware years, presenting us with a tense and ambiguous Shanghai past in the twists and turns.
Compared with Lou Ye's most successful works that show the inner world of women, gong Li this time, not Hao Lei in "Summer Palace", nor Zhou Xun in "Suzhou Creek", Lou Ye, who is good at shooting emotional animals, gave Gong Li a more complex and obscure life this time, and willfully concealed all the previous plots of the story, which made Gong Li always maintain a nervous mystery in the movie, everyone wanted to get close to and see the superstar on the beach, but until the end of the movie, No one ever really saw the person named Yu Yan or Miss Qiulan.
Lou Ye mentioned in an interview with Southern Weekend that a scar was originally designed on Yu's neck, which counted as a key for the audience to answer the mystery of Yu Yan. But in the end, the film concealed this detail, and he felt that such a design was superfluous: Gong Li's own charm was enough, and the mystery and feeling of her predecessors were completely enough.
Gong Li smokes, Gong Li draws a gun, Gong Li plays fake love in the moment of hypnotizing the Japanese, Gong Li skillfully touches the young girl who loves her and entrusts her body, and one can see an atypical Gong Li in "Lyceum Grand Theater", a beauty that requires care, patience, and overcoming lou Ye's iconic sense of vertigo and psychological anxiety brought about by the handheld lens.
Gong Li is as dedicated as ever, showing the outside world the professionalism of a top actress of this era. For this film, she practiced Japanese and firearms. Lou Ye finally chose a men's M1911 pistol with a net weight of more than one kilogram, and Gong Li held this real gun for two months to practice holding and shooting accompanied by two security officers. In order to strengthen her arm strength, she also specially tied a sandbag to practice. When the gun was taken out of the storeroom, there was still rust on the gun, but under Gong Li's daily mozi, the gun became polished and shiny, and even had a paste, which had the final gun battle in the movie.
During the publicity period, Gong Li described Yu Yan as a bit of a hundred years without encountering Yu Yan, and with a kind of hard work that almost did not know what year it was, she hoped that everyone would go to the cinema to enjoy this pure movie. She was very pleased with the complexity that seemed to make her addicted, and such a role had a fatal appeal for any actor who wanted to challenge himself.
Lou Ye, who provides this fatal attraction, is very satisfied with Gong Li's performance, and can clearly distinguish the kind of actor's unique desire that surges behind this enthusiasm, and she is willing to make some risky attempts. The so-called "adventure" is the way she is not familiar with the way of acting and shooting. If an actor wants to take risks, I think it's very good.
The source is stills of "Lyceum Theatre"
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The story of the adventure starts from the beginning.
Counting from the 1987 movie "Red Sorghum", this year is Gong Li's 34th year since she has been in the film. Before the fate changed, Gong Li was a sophomore at the Central Academy of Drama who had lost the list twice, Zhang Yimou wanted to shoot Mo Yan's "Red Sorghum", and was touched by the vitality emitted by Gong Li among the candidates, and forced gong Li to play the role of my grandmother.
Mo Yan, one of the novel's authors and screenwriters, was not satisfied with Gong Li at first, but to be honest, I had a general impression of Gong Li at first. She was carrying a wooden barrel around the compound of the Gaomi County Guest House, dressed in an unusual costume, and her face was full of worry. This is too different from the image of my grandmother in Gaomi Township in Mo Yan's imagination, in my mind, "Grandma" is a bright and dazzling thorny rose with sufficient moisture, and Gong Li at that time was more like a schoolgirl who did not understand the world, I suspected that Zhang Yimou looked away, worried that this play would fall into her hands.
In this way, female student Gong Li entered the most beautiful and ugly, most detached and most worldly, the most holy and dirty, the most heroic and good man, the most kingly, the most able to drink and love the most high-density northeast township on the earth, and starred in the frank and spicy Jiu'er. The eternal silence of the yellow land, the wild combination in the sorghum field under the moonlight, the fledgling Gong Li has become the best spokesperson for a certain oriental aesthetic in a way that is both traditional and avant-garde, silent and turbulent, depressed and open, naked and frank, daring to be bold.
Image source "Red Sorghum" stills
It is said that Mo Yan was greatly shocked after watching the finished film and corrected his previous ideas, and it turned out that my judgment was wrong. In the late 1980s, as the literary boom gradually receded, Red Sorghum was just a novel that was occasionally discussed in literary circles. Once the movie was released, especially after winning the first Berlin Golden Bear Award in Asia, on the streets of Beijing late at night, from time to time, someone shouted a voice, sister, you boldly go forward, go forward, don't look back.
Shandong girl Gong Li boldly went forward, and in the nineties that followed her, following my grandmother in Gaomi Northeast Township, Gong Li successively played Qiu Ju, who was bent on seeking an explanation, Ju Dou, who was insulted and damaged in the dyeing workshop, Song Lian, who was driven crazy in the ancient female competition in "The Big Red Lantern Hangs High", and the two female characters of Biao Bing's film history that could never be avoided, Ju Xian in "Farewell to the Overlord" and Jia Zhen in "Alive".
Before the deformed standard of white skinny children destroyed the aesthetics of generations, Gong Li, along with her screen characters, defined a robust and plump aesthetic. Mo Yan said in his early years that my grandmother was 160 tall and weighed 120 pounds, and she could speak for the ancient land and the nation, who could reflect the obscenity and weakness of the feudal patriarchal world, and who could witness the endless suffering and the heavy reincarnation of fate, should be the kind of woman with strong carnal desire and vitality.
In the 1990s, Gong Li wrote the only epitaph and hymn for such women in one work after another. They exist, they bear, they rebel resolutely, they are inevitably destroyed, they gain eternal life as specimens of beauty and life. The cracks in the history of the collapse of collectivism and the eve of the monstrous waves of capitalism have given Chinese filmmakers such a sweet and abundant few years, and Gong Li is the flower that grows from the earth under the nourishment of this sweet abundance, a kind of person who has not seen the ancients without half an exaggeration.
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Unlike the later actresses who collectively lost their hearts and minds and worried about the loss of girlishness, Gong Li's big-screen journey never really played a girl. The only attempt that is not typical is Zhou Xingchi's "Tang Bohu Dian Qiu Xiang", zhou Xingchi in his heyday is a existence that is greater than everything, he successfully turned Gong Li into a vase without any vitality in his nonsense comedy, and to some extent announced the isolation of Gong Li herself from the role of a young girl.
In "Lyceum Grand Theatre", she took the shot of Zhao Youting, which can make the audience with good memory flash back to the smoking addiction scene in the middle of "Overlord Farewell", the collapsed Cheng Dieyi whispered in Gong Li's arms, Mother, I am cold, the water in the river is frozen, Gong Li gently shakes cheng Dieyi in her arms, and plays Cheng Dieyi's mother who was absent prematurely at that moment. After a long confrontation, the pair of lovers, uncles, family members and even confidants, became mothers and babies in that moment, and in the shadows before the sad ending that belonged to them, they returned to the beginning of life together and enjoyed the last bit of peace.
Image source "Overlord Farewell" stills
For the role she plays, Gong Li has always had a romantic superstition. In an interview many years ago, she said that every time she sat in the movie theater after acting in a movie, she would feel that the characters she played were actually watching with her, even if she was a virtual character, she was a, soul. I think she'll come and see me playing her... So a lot of times, it's that I'm already possessed, that is, I must be this person, and when I play this role, I feel that this role is already around me, and she is telling me that I have such a story, this is a story of mine, you tell everyone.
This kind of momentum of not being crazy and not living can explain the two-way shaping and symbiotic relationship between the actor and the character. Those strong and strong women in the 90s movies, while opening up an altar for Gong Li in the world of light and shadow, also made Gong Li herself a realistic specimen of such women. It seems that only such a woman can survive in the land of the most heroic and good men, in the midst of endless suffering, and can give the first and final comfort to all impulsive, nested, willful, weak men.
Compared with Maggie Cheung, another recognized genius actress in the Chinese film industry, Gong Li's best performance is always related to this kind of solid and silent vitality, if Maggie Cheung is a natural French woman in her bones, a charming mixture of mood and romance, then Gong Li was born in the East, is the Yellow River of the Yangtze River, is mother earth, Gong Li may not have believed in evil, like "Tang Bohu Dian Qiu Xiang" tried other types of roles, but almost without exception, are failures.
The most famous case of water and soil dissatisfaction is "2046", Gong Li's own exuberance makes her feel as if she has walked on the wrong set in Wong Kar-wai's films, and she is invisible in the star-studded "2046". At this point, Lou Ye obviously learned a lesson, or has a clearer understanding and intuition, and Lou Ye, who has a certain religious enthusiasm for human feelings and desires, must give Yu Yan a historical task to rewrite the direction of the war in the Pacific, as if only in this way can the story continue, and only then can the meaning of Gong Li be a little bit.
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As a living specimen and inheritor of a solid and silent vitality, Gong Li also constantly confirms, strengthens and practices this aesthetic in her own individual life.
Because of an emotional entanglement with Zhang Yimou in the early years of ancient times, there was a saying in the film circle that Gong Li could never walk out of Zhang Yimou in the movie, and Zhang Yimou could never walk out of Gong Li in the emotions, and after the two parted ways, a reporter asked Gong Li with this sentence, and Gong Li replied with great excitement, I don't know, no idea, just say it.
For the outside world's peeping at herself, Gong Li never seems to show too much interest. Just like she is not good at expressing small love in movies, in her 34-year film career, this past is only a past in Gong Li's life. Generations of actresses have been watched, spied on or played, but in Gong Li's case, not being afraid of words has become a tenacious philosophy of survival. This philosophy came from her mother, who told her not to look at the messy things in the outside world, and Gong Lizhen threw the gossip magazine aside and concentrated on her own plays.
But what is interesting is that for a while, Gong Li, as an insurmountable symbol, became the meta-unit of Zhang Yimou's film aesthetics, and every few years of The choice of girls, people enthusiastically discussed the similarity or difference between these girls and Gong Li. The audience was particularly excited by 2004's Memoirs of a Geisha, where two generations of girls competed on the same stage, and people were looking forward to a new generation of people replacing the old ones inside and outside the play. In a confrontation in the movie, Gong Li's Chu Tao took the lead in provoking, but I became a maiko with my own skills. Xiao Lily, played by Zhang Ziyi, sneered at each other, of course, but that was a long, long, long, long time ago.
The outside world feels that this is simply a power transfer between two generations of female partners, and laments that Gong Li is also going to play a supporting role for Zhang Ziyi. But Gong Li used her performance to fight back against the ridicule that thought she was no longer young. In a later interview, Gong Li said that Chu Tao was the only character who attracted her, because she had a paranoia that did not care about the eyes of the world, dared to hate and dare to love, and was extremely complex.
Stills from "Memoirs of a Geisha"
"Memoirs of a Geisha" can only be regarded as half a good play, and the exit of the first peach takes away the fierce and extreme complexity, turning the original sparkling duel between the two sisters into a boring and dry Cinderella waiting for the prince to save the rotten story. Rob Marshall, the director of Memoirs of a Geisha, later lamented the dominance of Gong Li, a powerful actress, and the staff on the set couldn't help but tell me how strong Gong Li's presence was, making people want to say when they mentioned her name, "Your Majesty Gong Li".
In 2006, after ten years, Zhang Yimou and Gong Li cooperated in "Full of Golden Armor", Zhang Yimou in the blockbuster era completed the format of himself, large-scale color blocks, Wu Yangyang could not see the face of people, collective battles and imperial expressions, the past became a cloud of smoke, it is difficult for people to see the former Zhang Yimou in Zhang Yimou's works.
In various ways, "Golden Armor" is not a passing work, and its only contribution may be that Zhang Yimou personally completed the belated coronation of Gong Li in his own film, and under the golden splendid costume and crown, Gong Li completed the advancement and became the Gong Emperor that everyone worshiped.
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After the completion of the coronation, domineering and powerful have become the words associated with Gong Li, and people jokingly call Gong Li's signature posture of raising his hand to take pictures corresponding to the body language of Zhong Aiqing's flat body, and she always reveals a sharp and murderous look that is also understood by everyone as the contempt and blindness of the king.
Gong Li even became an imitation object of packaging hype by some female artist teams at one time. Her speech and demeanor, dress style and even photo posture have become the object of reproduction, even if the word blanket star has caused group ridicule again and again, in a few years, Gong Li's imitation show on various red carpets is still a successor and wonderful.
Showbiz newcomers are always stubble after stubble, and this farce of putting the cart before the horse will probably not really end. Gong Li's own reaction to this was indifferent, and she mentioned the experience of "Farewell to the King" when she went to Cannes, she said that at that time, Chinese filmmakers were very confident, they would not feel particularly embarrassed, and they were very proud in their hearts, because we had works, unlike now.
In addition to these corner materials, as far as the long life of an actress is concerned, Gong Huang's title is difficult to count as a 100% good thing in Gong Li's acting career. This is naturally the praise that Gong Li deserves, and it is the breath of life that a woman naturally exudes under the blessing of time, but this breath has a natural requirement for the adaptability of the work, which has achieved Gong Li, but at some times, it has become a helpless obstacle.
In 1997, a magazine called "Maritime Literature" in Shanghai selected the top ten unpopular stars, gong Li on the list, on the grounds that there is no sense of idolism, acting skills are very unflattering, just a satisfactory prop in Zhang Yimou's hand.
Gong Li used her life to crush all the rumors related to this.
In 2014, Zhang Yimou invited Gong Li to star in "Return", the prop theory sounds like a complete joke, Zhang Yimou's reason for the invitation is that Feng Wanyu only has you to act, you are ready.
More than 20 years later, Gong Li has changed from a young female student on the set to the best actress of this era, and she has given Zhang Yimou a lot of advice, such as Lu Yanzhi's name tag pick-up at the train station holding a paper paste, such as Wanyu who has lost her memory and forgot how to write Lu Yanzhi's name.
She is no longer simply a carrier of inspiration or a muse waiting to be used, but a partner in Zhang Yimou's eyes, retracting freely and purely.
Stills from the source "Homecoming"
But the regret of "Return" is that after the change of time, the sadness and joy of the times experienced by Lu Yanzhi and Feng Wanyu can only be presented in the way of the Cultural Revolution version of "Fifty First Loves". Many years ago, when filming "Qiu Ju Fights a Lawsuit", Qiu Ju's idea was that the matter had already passed, and he threw the money on the ground again, and said some ugly words. By the time of "Return", Zhang Yimou seems to have no intention or no chance to express similar determination, and in the movie, Lu Yanzhi said to his daughter that all have passed, and the past has let it pass.
"Qiu Ju Fights a Lawsuit" was once Gong Li's most satisfactory work, because a good friend of Gong Li was going to give up a lawsuit that had persisted for a long time, but after reading Qiu Ju's story, her friend insisted on fighting the lawsuit, and finally she won. Gong Li has called for more than one time to pay attention to the social value of movies, and movies should not just eat the condiments of a bucket of popcorn, but should show and help a person to have the value of being alive and provide the value of fantasy.
And when the big set of the times quietly changed Chengdu past is not easy to do so, a protracted love story is naturally thin and unconvincing.
Gong Huang's lonely side also emerged, the film's nourishment and shaping of Gong Li determines that she is the kind of big actor who must have enough background of the times and the depth of the story to play, this kind of big is not the bluff in "Three Dozen White Bone Essence", "Miami Storm", "Mulan", but Gong Li As an actress who has experienced the golden age of Chinese and even world cinema, her momentum and her broad vitality naturally determine that she cannot play those entangled, fragile, too small children's love roles too successfully. Want to come to this adventure of the world of light and shadow, in addition to Jiang Wen or Zhou Runfa, who can fight sporadically, and the male actors who play emotional dramas with Gong Li are simply like fragile chicken cubs, and they don't fit together when they look at each other horizontally and vertically.
Almost fatalistic, Gong Li walked to the temple of the movie through one work after another, but after entering, she found that there were no companions left around. Her stage should be between the decline of grass and the changes of the song and dance field, in the fierce era of ruthless reincarnation, the lack of this theme and the overall weakening of related creativity is of course not only the plight of Gong Li's individual, if you think about it carefully, it is difficult not to make people feel sad.
The source of the picture is the stills of "Qiu Ju Fights the Lawsuit"
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This piece of melancholy inevitably acts on Gong Li herself in reverse, just like Chen Kaige's fable about paper shackles in the later "Mei Lanfang" in which the wind was finally blown away by the rain and the wind. For Gong Li, the crown cast by the glory of the old days on her head will inevitably show a false side.
Gong Li's desire for a film with social value is seriously misaligned with a pale and lively film market, and she envisions in her heart the audience who will achieve spiritual communication with her with pure film, and many times she cares more about the film under the halo of creeping queen than she cares about most. Compared with the dark, deep, and impatient patience that Gong Li hopes to lead the audience to, many times people are more concerned about the color or shape of the empress's lips when she is in business.
People talk passionately about the crown on Gong Li's head, ignoring the real desire of Gong Li as an actor in the respect of following the trend, and even less heeding Shakespeare's proverb for all the coroners in his empty crown series, which encircles the king's flesh and mortal fetus - in addition to all the glory, people's warm observation and the respect of the snake, Gong Li is just an ordinary person.
The only consolation was that under the empty crown given by the outside world, Gong Li, as a mortal fetus in the flesh, had been doing what she believed.
Sometimes I have to lament the ideographic function of the Chinese character itself, fans call Maggie Cheung the god of Man, the god should be above the clouds, outside the world, play and go, without a little nostalgia. The emperor is the one who gives up on himself, is the long-term dominance, is to come and go all by the mood, an absolute freedom to make his own decisions.
In "Lyceum Theatre", the adoptive father talks about Yu Yan, with a little contempt and uneasiness, saying that she is an actress and she is also a woman. It seems that the identity of women and actors is naturally a disadvantage and instability factor. But for Gong Li, this sentence can probably be regarded as a kind of praise for herself.
In 1993, at the 46th Cannes International Film Festival, Gong Li walked by the sea
In her 34-year film career, Gong Li has miraculously maintained her position as a top actress while maintaining isolation from the ever-changing entertainment industry. The actresses of the same era are trapped by love, retreat from the rapids, marry into the rich, or the crowd of fangs in the era of big flowers, the group of demons in the era of small flowers, it seems that they have nothing to do with His Majesty Gong Li, and she herself is very clear about this, and I have no connection with the online market now. I'm not in this circle, I'm not in the entertainment industry, and I don't like to put my energy into useless things.
The Internet age can easily make the boredom of the group become a kind of tyranny, there was a period of time when netizens stared at Gong Li's perennial naked lips to do the article, Gong Li's response to this is that I will not go with the flow, others make a big red mouth I also want to get a big red mouth, thank you for reminding netizens, but I will not do that. It's my style.
For Gong Li, the only thing that is really useful and needs to be explained to the audience is the movie. She has almost become a lonely sample of Chinese film actresses, guarding the boundaries between personal and public life, and the absolute well water does not violate the river water. When there is no new work, she can be completely invisible, and the gossip shot is just an ordinary woman in a vegetable market wearing a suspender dress and living her own little life. When she appears with a new work, she can immediately shine, and the king returns, announcing to the outside world that her era is far from over.
The outside discussion about her getting old or fat, dark or strong didn't affect her very well. In one of Gong Li's most widely circulated interviews, Yang Lan asked her whether her young beauty could become a shortcut for a girl, and Gong Li's answer was that I don't think a girl can have everything after having beauty, which is a very childish idea. I think she must have her own value in society, if she doesn't have her own job or her own ability, I think this person will soon, how to say, will wither.
Many people have also asked whether Gong Li will go to be a director, her answer is no, at this point Gong Li and the stubborn Jiu'er, Qiu Ju and Ju Xian isomorphism, look for a road, there is no distraction, never look back, she said that she has not taken a detour on the road of actors, her life is limited, and she does not want to try too much. And she won't do anything else, and the only thing I want to do is to do the actor well.
In Gong Li's case, the secret of a person's non-withering lies in the long-term and constant self. Movies are getting harder and harder to make, good scripts are hard to come by, and audiences in the new era often don't buy her old totem, the empress who can't wait for an opponent on the empty stage, and even her own selection of films in recent years is not convincing every time. But what is valuable is that since stepping into the film industry in 1987, Gong Li said that she has lived a life of running around with a box all her life, she has never wanted to stop, her confidence, her pride, her full sense of security comes from her work.
When filming "Red Sorghum", Gong Li practiced carrying water with a flat shoulder, and her shoulders were worn out of the skin. Once she asked Zhang Yimou if she could practice with an empty barrel, Zhang Yimou did not speak. Since then, figuring out the role has become Gong Li's lifelong hard labor and enjoyment. During the five-month preparation period of "Memoirs of a Geisha", he practiced throwing fans 2,000 times a day, and "Lyceum Theatre" held up M1911 without seeing a trace of shaking his arm, which was a small thing that made Gong Li proud.
At this point, Gong Li may be a close friend of the American film actress Francis McDormand, and at this year's Oscars, mcDormand, who has been sealed three times, said when receiving the award, I have nothing to say, because all I have to say is on my sword. My job is my sword, and I love my job.
Gong Li at the 67th Cannes International Film Festival Image Source Visual China