From the death of Zhang Ailing in 1995 to the present, in the past 26 years, the momentum of domestic "Zhang Ailing fever" has gone all the way up. Almost every woman's bookshelf contains 3 to 5 novels by Zhang Ailing.
From the daily aesthetic taste to the concept of love and life, we are all influenced and shaped by her.
Zhang Ailing's rare thing is that she never disdains feeding readers sugar water. The men and women she writes about have no aura, but are incomplete "real" people. In love, there are not only unseemly careful thoughts, but also love and altruism. Full of contradictions, full of realistic considerations.
But love is not the focus of Zhang Ailing's novels. Instead, she wrote about the sadness of women of that era from her own unique perspective. Behind the flowery rhetoric is desolation. Adapting it into love literature between men and women is certainly biased.
Zhang Ailing's novels are notoriously difficult to adapt, her works and their emphasis on psychological description, sensitive and meticulous mind, a variety of environmental imagery, the reader's self-imagination space is rich, more suitable for literary reading, and the strong drama necessary for image presentation, her works are not very satisfied.
The difficulty of adaptation probably lies in the reality of being easily confused by the narrative style of the novel and ignoring the content. The extreme refinement of the original novel form and the extreme reality of the novel content are difficult to reconcile. After being filmed into a film and television work, it is even more difficult to reach a consensus on the creative team's ideas and the audience's perception of the aftermath.
Zhang Yueran commented: "The things in Zhang Ailing's novels, it can only exert the great energy and power beyond the objects in Zhang Ailing's novels, it is an image, many times it is a symbol, and many times it is as important as the main characters. However, how to reflect these things in the movie, how to let the moon infuse Zhang Ailing's emotions, is very difficult. ”
Guan Jinpeng's "Red Roses and White Roses" filmed in 1994 and Hou Xiaoxian's "Sea Flowers" filmed in 1998 are all masterpieces in Chinese films, but compared to "Half Life" and "Color Ring". The creative model of "Zhang Ailing + Famous Director" has been formed, but not all adaptations can be successful, and each success is not reproduced, which requires the efforts of all film production personnel
"Color Ring" can be said to be a good adaptation. The novel "Color Ring" is very short, and the original work is written very cryptically, Mr. Yi and Wang Jiazhi were not love before, but complex emotions. The adapted film plot makes the characters more plump and reasonable. "The First Incense" only focuses on love, which is contrary to the original idea.
Zhang Ailing's novel is exquisite and extremely delicate, her narrative is petty bourgeois, but the characters portrayed cover all levels of society, and the three religions and nine streams are all kinds of colors, not petty bourgeoisie.
It is said that Zhang Ailing is cold, but I think she is a very compassionate person, a person who is full of desire for worldly life and will observe carefully, otherwise she would not have portrayed the character so deeply and fullly.
Nowadays, it seems extremely difficult for people to accept the stories of people who do not conform to contemporary social values, and many people only see the protagonist's behavior, and it is difficult to perceive the subtle and complex emotional changes behind the behavior, pointing to black and white, and it is difficult to think and feel with heart. After all, there is an insurmountable gap between real behavior and the ideal self.
In addition, the people in the background of Zhang Ailing's novels are already far away from modern people, and the difficulties of people and society are also very different. Therefore, from words to screen, the most important thing must be the setting off of the atmosphere situation. Not only the environment and the background of the times in which the characters are located, but also the temperament of the characters. Therefore, this must be the most difficult obstacle for cross-era literary works to enter the screen.