Wong Kar-wai's unaired clip of the classic film "Fantasia – A Moment" has just been auctioned by Sotheby's in the form of an NFT (non-homogeneous token) for 1 minute and 31 seconds. At the same time, there is also a set of precious stills that are not in the film of "Fancy Years".
Released 21 years ago, "Fancy Years" won the two awards of "Best Actor" and "Best Artistic Achievement" at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival, and was listed as one of the "100 Best Films in the World" (ranked 42nd) by the famous British film magazine "Empire" in the year of its release. Since then, it has frequently entered the list of major films.
Although some people have criticized "still repeating themselves", Wong Kar-wai's royal photography partner Du Kefeng once said that "Fancy Years" is the easiest one for him to understand in Wong Kar-wai's films, "This is a kind of progress". Perhaps this also explains why this movie full of strong old Shanghai style and about the theme of "love and can't" can be popular all over the world!
In fact, Wong Kar-wai originally wanted Leung Chao-wai and Maggie Cheung to co-star in a love music film called "Summer in Beijing", and even shot some materials and made a poster in Beijing, but for various reasons it did not work.
Wong Kar-wai retained part of the plot, and at the suggestion of Maggie Cheung, it developed into "Three Stories About Food". The first story about a late-night convenience store, which the crew took ten days to shoot— in 2003, it was screened in Cannes under the title "Fantasia 2001", and a few years later, the story was developed into "Blueberry Night"; the second story was about how a male and female neighbor developed an extramarital affair, set in the same 1960s as the movie "The Legend of Ah Fei".
With the beginning of filming, Wong Kar-wai showed more and more irrepressible passion - "Ah Fei Zheng Biography" was actually planned to be divided into two episodes that year, but because of the box office fiasco, the sequel also vanished, but Wong Kar-wai has always been "Ah Fei's heart is not dead", so he simply decided to make the second story a separate feature film, and Maggie Cheung's role is still called Su Lizhen.
Despite the theme of love, Wong Kar-wai set "Fancy Years", a neighborhood story that took place in the 1960s in the Hong Kong and Shanghai ghettos, as a suspense genre: the male and female protagonists are both victims at the beginning of the story, and the audience follows them to investigate. Wong Kar-wai also borrowed the structure from Hitchcock's "Rear Window" to let neighbors play an important role in it. In terms of story inspiration, "Fancy Years" is also derived from a short story by Japanese novelist Sakyo Komatsu and Hong Kong writer Liu Yihuan's "Opposite Down".
People who have watched "Fancy Years" may be impressed by the beautiful style of Su Lizhen, played by Maggie Cheung, wearing a variety of qipao, which also laid a swaying and gu pansheng style for the film. But in fact, in the setting of zhang Shuping, the art director of the film, the effect to be achieved in the film is "a kind of tacky and unbearable not pretty", "the previous Shanghainese loved face, no matter how bad the family situation was, going out to meet people always had beautiful scenery, Su Lizhen should be such a woman dressed vulgarly: exaggerated appearance, there are many weaknesses and conflicts in the heart, and these qipao are more colorful. ”
As we all know, Wong Kar-wai rarely has a complete script for films, so in the 15-month intermittent shooting of "Fancy Years", the plot direction and character shaping have been groping.
According to Liang Chaowei, in the early stage of filming, the male and female protagonists Zhou Muyun and Su Lizhen were more similar to "adulterers and adulteresses", for example, the two would play and eat in the streets and alleys. In the four major cut passages that were exposed after the release of the film, in the hotel room numbered 2046, the two wanted to try to "deviant", but a sentence of "you are not like my husband, I am not like your wife" made the atmosphere abruptly stop; after that, the sick Zhou Muyun told Su Lizhen the reason why he did not want to go home: afraid that he would be unable to control his feelings for her; and then, Su Lizhen said "I don't want to go home tonight", and the two finally took that step...
And this round also appeared a lot of light-hearted plots, such as the two also used to cook together, live a "husband and wife" daily life, but the oil smoke was protested by the hotel staff, and even when Zhou Muyun carried a live chicken upstairs one day, the contradiction finally broke out. Food actually occupies an important place in this movie, and during the filming of "Fancy Years", Wong Kar-wai was fascinated by "Shanghai life" to a certain extent, and even designed a special recipe for the landlady and Su Lizhen according to his mother's memories.
In addition, this deleted scene also features a widely circulated clip of the two dancing in a hotel room in a 60s swing dance.
The second one was cut off to explain the causes and consequences of Su Lizhen's coming to Singapore to find Zhou Muyun: first Zhou Muyun sent a postcard to Radio Television Hong Kong, ordered a song for Su Lizhen's birthday "Fancy Years" (in the public version, it became a song ordered by Su Lizhen's husband), and then Su's boss gave her a ferry ticket to Singapore. There is also a famous scene in this section where Zhou Muyun eats durian alone - Liang Chaowei ate more than 20 for this.
In fact, in Wong Kar-wai's vision, there was a "dog blood" scenario that happened in this passage: Zhou Muyuan spent the night in Singapore with Su Lizhen and told her: "I am doing this for revenge." I just want to prove that you are no different from my wife, and that you are also a troublemaker. Years later, Zhou Muyun returned to Hong Kong and passed by Su Lizhen with a child at the wedding of his friend Ah Ping...
The third cut-out scene takes place in the '70s: A young girl who calls herself Lulu and wears heavy makeup comes to Su Lizhen, who is planning to sell her house, and seemingly inadvertently says that her husband's surname is Zhou, works at a newspaper office — in short, with a sense of probing and provocation. As soon as the camera turns, Zhou Muyun and Lulu quarrel in the street, reprimanding her for being suspicious of ghosts, and Lulu, who is obsessed with Zhou Muyun, echoes Lulu in "Ah Fei's True Biography" - just in response to Wong Kar-wai's "Fancy Years" as a sequel to "Ah Fei's True Biography". In this clip, Su Lizhen, who no longer wears a cheongsam and wears a mink, also meets Zhou Muyun at a roadside stall.
The last deleted clip, Angkor Wat at the end, also has an untold reunion here. On the day that Zhou Muyun, who had become a journalist, went to Angkor Wat to tell the secret, he once again met Su Lizhen, who came to play with her husband's boss's wife. In the promenade of Angkor Wat, the two reminisced about the past, and before parting, Zhou Muyun asked, "Have you ever called me?" Su Lizhen said with tears, "I don't remember." It is said that when Liang and Zhang filmed this section, they could not help but cry.
And "Fancy Years" is the first time cambodia has approved the film crew to enter Angkor Wat for filming, Wong Kar-wai chose here because it is full of mystery and sense of history, Zhou Muyun's "tree cave", so that his and Su Lizhen's story has become part of "history", and at the same time, as a French colony, it also reflects Hong Kong in the film. Some empty shots at the end of the film, Wong Kar-wai admits, are paying homage to the end of Antonioni's Eclipse.
It can be said that it is Wong Kar-wai's "simplification" that makes the style of the film more inclined to the "sense of repression" of moral bondage. It inspired Sophia Coppola to make "Lost in Tokyo" (some people also analyzed that Coppola was inspired by "Chongqing Forest"), and at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, this film also made a couple feel a lot of emotions and fell into a deep touch, and her husband was called Alessandro González Iñárritu, and it was the impact of "Fancy Years" that made him firm in his belief in becoming a film director.