After two years, "Lyceum Theatre" was finally released on October 15, and the fresh partner of "Lou Ye + Gong Li" made the film expect a lot, and the current film Douban score was 7.4, and the box office exceeded 16 million. This box office is actually not unexpected, for fans who love literary and art films, literary and art film directors such as Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, and Bi Gan only need to calm down and make movies well, and the box office market and film quality are still a big problem for them.
Interestingly, the box office failure of "Lyceum Theatre" once again proves that for literary and art films, although "literary youth" is conducive to word of mouth, but it is released in the theater line, and if you want to have a high box office, you still have to rely on the general public. The aesthetic and appreciation tastes of the general public and the so-called "literary and artistic youth" are really very different in the experience and cognition of literary and art films, and "Lyceum Theatre" is an interesting example.
General viewer: The camera is shaking dizzy
"Literary youth": Lou Ye's style is to make you dizzy
The film "Lyceum Theatre" is adapted from The Death of Shanghai by Hongying and The Novel by Heng Guangli, directed by Lou Ye, written by Ma Yingli, and starring Gong Li and Zhao Youting. The film tells the story of the famous actress Yu Yan (Gong Li) who returned to Shanghai in 1941 to star in the drama "Saturday Novel" directed by her old love Tan Na (Zhao Youting), but caused various forces to pay close attention to her movements and wanted to find out the real purpose of her trip. A woman's fate is tightly pulled by the times, the drama is inseparable from the enemy, and under the undercurrent, she ushered in a choice to change the world... Director Lou Ye first focused the camera on Shanghai during the "lonely island" period, depicting a complex and changeable turning point of the times.
In "Lyceum Theatre", Lou Ye's image is still his signature handheld photography style, and many viewers do not adapt to it, and they will be dizzy because the lens shakes too much. During the release of Lou Ye's last work " Clouds Made of Rain in the Wind " , the filmmakers issued a movie guide , informing the audience that some of the shots in the film have certain "particularities", which may lead to a "feeling of dizziness" in the process of watching the movie, and suggest that the audience "try to buy 3 rows of seats to watch the movie". The guide directly explains that the film is 124 minutes long, and watching the film once is equivalent to "taking 12 jumping machines, 24 roller coasters, 41 pirate ships, or drinking ten glasses of condensed American".
For the problem of "camera shaking", Lou Ye once explained that handheld photography is because on the one hand, the actor's free play in space brings certain challenges to the scheduling of the camera, on the other hand, out of his pursuit of "documentary" photography, so that the actor can "live" in the role to the greatest extent and show the most real character state. ”
"Literary youth" is obviously more receptive to camera shaking than ordinary audiences, and many of Lou Ye's fans love his "shaking" style, believing that it is not Lou Ye who is "showing off", but serving the plot, like "Lyceum Theatre", hand-cranked shots, "making the film full of turmoil and uneasiness." Everyone is running for their lives, and calm is only its temporary disguise. ”
General audience: The plot is full of bugs, why is there something not to say clearly
"Literary Youth": The story is advanced, this is the film narrative
In "Lyceum Theatre", many forces are entangled, Yu Yan, played by Gong Li, wanders between stars and spies, coupled with the structure of the play-in-play, making the film story very full, breaking time and space, many "literary and artistic youth" express their recognition of the story, thinking that it is a film masterpiece that maintains "literary", and Lou Ye's narrative technique is also very advanced.
However, the general audience has a lot of criticism of the plot, thinking that the film has many bugs, and the characters, identities and motivations are not reasonable, so many plots are not easy for people to understand, perhaps because of the editing, some emotional parts are edited to pieces and do not integrate into the plot, some inexplicable.
General audience: Black and white films look uncomfortable
"Literary Youth": Black and white films with a strong sense of immersion
"Lyceum Theatre" is a black-and-white film, when the film premiered in Shanghai, Gong Li, who was sitting in the audience, found that individual pictures had signs of redness, and the first time she found the staff to communicate, and learned that it was caused by equipment problems and could not be changed. After watching the film, Gong Li apologized to the audience because she believed that it affected the audience's perception and bowed twice in a row.
Zhang Songwen, who played Gong Li's ex-husband in the film, also gave a tidbit at the 11th Beijing Film Festival Gong Li master class a few days ago, saying that the most impressive thing about filming "Lyceum Theatre" was that he was very particular about the color matching of clothes when doing modeling, and later he went to the Venice Film Festival to see the premiere, only to find that it was a black and white movie. "Our styling director took a hundred years old clothes from many regions, put them on, and told us what it meant to match that color. When I got to Venice, I learned it was a black-and-white movie... They say you don't know? I said no one told me. ”
For black and white films, some ordinary audiences are not very recognized, black and white + shaking, so that their viewing experience is not comfortable, some viewers said that the gun battle scene is uncomfortable to see the eyes, and some viewers think that black and white films deepen the sense of immersion, and feel uncomfortable for too many smoking shots in the film: "Every character smokes, yes, it is every one, the secret agent head smokes, Wenqing director smokes, beautiful agent smokes, lobby manager smokes, adoptive father smokes, Yu sister smokes every communication, it is every time." ”
And more "literary youth" praised the black and white tone of the film, thinking that the psychedelic taste of Shanghai in the isolated island period was filmed, giving people a strong sense of atmosphere, allowing the audience to invest in the emotions created by the film, and the black and white film, while weakening the visual senses, also strengthened the auditory senses, the film did not use the traditional subjective soundtrack form, gunshots, rain, jazz, etc., it is easier for the audience to feel empathy.
In short, the reputation of "Lyceum Theatre" is seriously differentiated, and the audience who likes "Lyceum Theatre" wants to brush two or three brushes, and the audience who does not like it even wants to leave the scene halfway, and the space for the audience to discuss the possibilities of the movie may be the value of "Lyceum Theatre".
Tidbits
What about Lyceum Theatre? Gong Li's husband commented on this
"Lyceum Theatre" was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the Venice International Film Festival in 2019, and after several gear removals and gear changes, it was finally released on October 15 this year. For this film, Gong Li's husband, the French avant-garde artist Jean-Michel Jarre, once commented:
"Lyceum" is a very unique film, not only as a Chinese film, but also in many films around the world.
"Lyceum Theatre" has the retro texture of a black-and-white film, but also has a lot of modern elements. It blends multiple genres, romance, thriller, action, and is placed in a specific historical context.
In terms of characters, especially Gong Li's role, the layers are very rich. Her multiple identities, including stars, lovers, and spies, allow her to switch between the softness of women and the strength of killers, from one extreme to another, the characters are particularly plump, and the story is more complex and three-dimensional.
The story of Lyceum is interesting, playing a game that revolves between reality and fiction. Including the presentation of Shanghai in that era, it is also like reality, but it is also illusory like a play.
As a sound designer and musician, I am very interested in the sound of guns. In Japanese and Western movies of the forties, every gun sounded like a big gun, but it wasn't. I hear more realistic gunshots in this film, a level that is closer to reality than fiction.
I read an American review that had a very high opinion of the film: "The images in the film, all the visual concepts, are very special, and every frame of the image is a painting." ”
I think the film could be shown both in a cinema and in a modern museum.
It uses digital equipment to present the feeling of an old movie. Its hue is not just black and white, but different layers of gray. The theme of "Lyceum" is also a gray area between black and white - the Pearl Harbor incident in Shanghai at that time.
"Lyceum Theatre", which is both commercial and artistic, will become an important film in Lou Ye's film career. Bravo!
Text/Beijing Youth Daily reporter Xiao Yang
Editor/Bow Lifang