A friend said to me in small talk: I think "Lolita" is the best contemporary literary work, as for the film...
I don't agree with that at all.
Count Dracula is to vampires as Lolita is to precocious maidens, and the two-dimensional pronoun "Lolita" that we are familiar with comes from Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita.
Due to the content's bold depiction of deformed love, the distribution of the novel was extremely controversial, but its realistic subjective description made it impossible to ignore the value of its words, so it was listed by American Time Magazine as one of the top 100 novels in 1923-2005.
The sensational theme and highly rated market reputation make such a plot how encounterable and unattainable for many directors, but it was not until 1962 that the original story was put on the big screen.
It's a highly controversial story, and the story itself has a strong taboo color: the story of a man in his forties and a twelve-year-old underage girl falling in love.
Lolita "Lolita" originally meant a young, charismatic, capricious girl.
The original book is actually about a man who cannot control himself in love with a young girl, and his love for the girl is unrelenting, even if he is toyed with by her or controlled in turn.
At the beginning of the novel, the name has been introduced to everyone, and the three syllables of "Lolita" have teeth on the tip of their tongues, ambiguous words, and simple three words have aroused the lust of the male protagonist.
His lusts are not all vulgar. In the novel, he is a gentleman-like university professor, and the film shows a cowardly little man who was originally married to Lolita's mother, Charlotte, and his identity is actually Lolita's stepfather.
He was the ideal husband at the mercy of the will. As for why he could put up with his wife? Just so that you can stay with Lolita, spy on her, take care of her, love her...
The Chinese title of Lolita translates as "A Tree of Pear Blossoms Pressed Begonias", which at first glance looks confused.
In fact, this is an allusion from the literati Su Shi, "Mandarin ducks are turned into double nights, a tree of pear blossoms press begonias", he uses white pear blossoms and red begonias to compare the phenomenon of old husbands and young wives.
Nabokov's Lolita was adapted into a film twice, once in a 1962 version by Stanley Kubrick and once in 1997 by Adrian Lane.
Interestingly, these two sets of movies are like a difference of 18,000 miles except for the same story trunk.
It is also the story of a middle-aged man falling in love with a young girl.
Kubrick interprets it as a comical parable of men's inadequacy, while Ryan sees it as a love tragedy in which men are conquered by desire.
What's more, these two films are also inseparable from the original work - Nabokov carefully portrays the male protagonist in his writing to a complex and perfect, not only a bitter man who is at a loss for adolescent girls, but also an affectionate man who cannot seek true love, a cunning narcissistic and lying villain, and a pervert who kidnaps girls.
However, both films deliberately play down this plot.
The explicit depictions of the novel do not appear in the film, but ambiguous footage reveals that they had a bed relationship.
In the original work, the heroine is set to be 14 years old, and has not yet reached the legal age of marriage in the United States.
The film actors are more mature, so they can simply remove the "she is a minor" setting from the original book.
Due to the strict censorship at the time, Kubrick specially removed all the explicit complexes in the novel, and the film rating was only universal. But these compromises for the society of the time did not affect the brilliance of the story or the film itself.
The director spent nearly three hours to explain the complete story, delicately brewing the emotions and transformations of the actors.
Originally, the title of the film Chinese had a different intention, the film was really as clear as its name but very obscure, and the faint black humor was like the poet playing with the fun of words, but it could be more focused in the limited pattern.
If it had been as blunt as you and I would have expected, it would never have been so interesting and intriguing.
Of course, this can also be understood, after all, this is a story for the audience to see, in the plot, can not be too overstepping.
In addition to adding a new humorous color to the story and slightly diluting the atmosphere of heterochromatic color, the most successful part of the film is definitely the three main actors who are superb and suitable for their own skills.
Let's talk about Charlotte, Lolita's mother, played by Shirley Winters, who first saw her in "The Diary of Anne Frank", and her graceful and luxurious temperament and plump beauty were impressive.
In this film, it is not too pompous to release provocative messages to the male professor, full of mature confident charm, but when the young daughter appears, a look of arrogance and uncontrolledness, so that she loses her dignity as a mother, the suppressed jealousy and anger are clearly visible in her voice, and the delicacy and courtship after marriage to the despair and sadness of discovering the facts of the two, Winters has done all kinds of performances.
But she is always a simple person and the only character in the film who deserves sympathy.
James Mason, who plays Professor Humbert, gives a kind of hypocrisy characteristic of the intellectuals of the '70s.
Relying on his personable appearance, he secretly calculated, deceived Charlotte, and also deceived outsiders who suspected him. But his profession and external image were also one of the main reasons hindering his progress, and he could not grasp the prey at will, but cautiously probed.
I think many people see him and don't directly think of the word "perverted", timidity and ignorance are more suitable adjectives for him.
It seems to have succeeded, but it is only a desperate effort to keep what he can't really get, and finally he is angry, discouraged, and frequently in a dilemma, and a man over forty years old has become selfish and naïve in love, which is very helpless.
And the most important thing, of course, is the soul of Lolita, who is a girl who decides what kind of movie it is, and Sue Lane, who was only 18 years old at the time, is the best candidate.
To exaggerate, it was as if she had fallen from the sky and was destined to act in this movie.
Compared to girls of the same age, she is indeed precocious and very beautiful in appearance, and her voice is not sweet but with a hint of natural childishness.
Her appearance is always eye-catching, but it is not sue Lane's good looks, but natural ease and feminine charm.
Although Lolita is still a child, her uncaring appearance seems to be completely unrestricted, not that the world has retained her, but that she just happened to fall here; she has a pair of bright eyes, but you can't say what her eyes see, or that what she sees is always more interesting than what you see.
Sue Lane definitely performed something outside of the script – temperament!
Director Kubrick actually spent nearly a year looking for the right hostess, and when Sue Lane auditioned, he immediately identified it as her, and even remembered the situation lightly:
It's a lot of fun to watch her, and it's fun just to watch her walk in, sit down casually, and leave. She's cool and not smirking, she's mysterious, unpredictable, but never gloomy. Everyone who sees her will think about how much Lolita knows about life, and she has such magic. When she left after the audition, the crew shouted at each other: no matter how good her acting skills are, as long as she can act!
Whether it's drinking Coke, chewing gum, or playing a grimace, what she does seems to be fun. Especially when speaking, there is no sense of rudeness, and her carelessness and directness are natural for her.
And her behavior is very calm, any untimely is not like a deliberate temptation, just ignorant of social norms. It's a bit like flirting on both sides of the ambiguous line between a girl and a woman.
Because of her, I feel that I have a Lolita character who is so well-known.
In fact, compared to the arbitrariness of Stephen King's "The Shining", Kubrick's shooting of "Lolita" actually made the original author Nabokov's participation quite large, of course, the later changes were even greater.
When he asked Nabokov to write a script, he wrote a 4-hour-long script that described the details "too" carefully (he even wrote about how the camera should move), and assumed that the script was basically useless.
So Kubrick drastically reduced the story to 152 minutes and asked Nabokov to write the screenplay.
However, the difference between the original work and the film is not only in the details, but in the fundamental focus is completely different.
Of course, Kubrick also had no responsibility to be faithful to the original.
Sue Lane's Lolita is vivid, beautiful, young, rebellious, and an object of lust that the public can agree with, and it is also in line with people's common sense that Humbert, played by James Mason, can fall in love with her.
However, the endless entanglement of the male protagonist in the novel is his abnormal deformed lust, because only the "little goblin" between the ages of 9 and 14 can arouse his desire.
Humbert called them "leprechauns", they were both naïve and mature, willful and cute and knew how to confuse men, and men would unconsciously follow them.
In the 1962 version, Kubrick minimized the erotic color of the story, and at the same time changed its center to the inability of middle-aged men to pursue girls without self-control, in which the sense of tragedy disappeared, but a black humor was permeated.
The film does not see the detours and contradictions of the original first-person unreliable narrator, and Kubrick bluntly shows Humbert's ambitions for young girls.
We laughed and worried about him when he encountered every obstacle to black humor.
He lives in the girl's house, and the girl's wolf-like mother pesters him and wants to create a two-person world, but for him the mother is the "third party" who should be excluded from the two-person world.
In addition, the star of the literary and artistic world, the screenwriter Quiddi, is eyeing the tiger, with the discussion of the people around him and Humbert's lack of heart, threatening him and harassing him...
The film is changed to a funny midfield transition in which Humbert kills Quiddy, which on the one hand creates a sense of suspense and makes the audience wonder what deep hatred the two have, and on the other hand, humbert changes the cunning and clever image in the book to an ordinary man who can even hold a gun.
Such changes take the story out of the original frame from the beginning.
Humbert in the original book is deliberately trying to keep the girl for himself, thinking that everyone else around him is an inferior fool, and has thought about how to shake off this hot potato after Lolita is no longer a "little goblin", just as he wanted to get rid of Lolita's mother's entanglement.
In the novel, Humbert abuses her prerogatives as a "father" to satisfy her possessiveness toward Lolita: she cannot stay at friends' houses, attend parties with boys, and talk to boys casually.
Others look at him like an overprotective father, but in fact he is a jealous lover.
In Kubrick's films, however, Humbert must beg for the girl's love and obedience.
In one of them, after Lolita rehearsed a stage play, Humbert debunked her lie that she was going to learn the piano after class.
She sat high on the dresser and accused Humbert of interfering too much in her life, while he almost fell to his knees begging the girl to leave the place with him.
Even the girl's seeming fulfillment of his wishes in the end is actually just one of her plans to escape with her lover, Quadi.
At this point in the plot, Kubrick's version of "Lolita" has completely jumped out of the original character framework.
Not only does Humbert become a confused and helpless infatuated man, but the heroine Lolita has also changed from a wayward, charming, but to some extent too naïve adolescent girl to a pure object of lust, a goddess to be worshipped.
In Kubrick's description, Lolita is an unattainable object of lust.
Humbert accidentally becomes Lolita's guardian and accidentally gets the opportunity to get close to the Iraqis, who appear to be father and daughter, but are actually lovers.
In this environment, the middle-aged man succumbs to the rebellious and charming girl's skirt and prays for her mercy.
Kublick, who is good at using space to oppress stories, this time "flirting" to the bathroom and bedroom, the most frightening secret hidden in the diary, the most frank sin in the lax look of the bath.
However, the most suffocating thing is that the most beautiful dream of a man lives in the nightmare brought by another man.
The film opens with Quidditch and Humbert clashing: Humbert breaks into Quiddi's chaotic, grotesquely decorated room and enters a "surreal nightmare" called Quiddi, where he faces Quiddi's frivolity with a gun in his hand.
One moment playing ping-pong, the next playing the piano, and responding sarcastically in a comedic way of "I am not yours".
For girls, old men will one day be the past tense, and little girls have always been futuristic for men.
The audience coldly looks at this simple law that is not a puzzle, and watches the man knowingly commit the crime, and he bet on the chips, thinking that he can follow up.
The desire to shoot, the flop has become the love of others; the secret room he has built for her, locked only himself...
This naïve irony is more cruel because it lies in men rather than women, in maturity and sophistication rather than ignorance.
Obviously, the flowering period has passed, but it is kept until the moment before the complete erosion is luscious.
This is clearly a Shakespearean tragedy.
The climax of the story is when Humbert picks up Lolita from summer camp after the death of Lolita's mother, who does not know she is orphaned, and takes her to a hotel, where she gives her sleeping pills, intending to take advantage of the opportunity to get close to his "little goblin".
He was both excited and nervous, afraid of arousing the suspicion of the hotel staff, and afraid that Lolita would wake up screaming for help when she saw him.
So he used a pseudonym to confuse the public, pretending that his wife would appear at any time, and pretending to ask the hotel for a small folding bed to "sleep for his daughter", but in fact, it was just a trick that did not make outsiders or Lolita suspicious.
The folding bed, which never appeared in the original book, became an important prop for Kubrick to use to silence the character in the movie.
In the movie, when Humbert was trembling and was about to kiss Yiren Xiangze, the hotel staff appeared with a folding bed, Humbert had to force the staff to enter the room to set the bed, the two crept for almost 20 minutes, during which Humbert was also worried about waking up Lolita in a deep sleep, and her expression was very nervous.
Finally, when he tried to climb into bed and sleep with Lolita, she woke up.
He had to go to the folded bed that he had not intended to use in the first place, and lay down, leaving Lolita to sleep on the double bed like a princess.
This scene shows Humbert's weakness and passivity in the relationship between the two, and implies that he cannot finally get the failed ending of the girl.
Doesn't this also hint at the classic saying that licks a dog and destroys everything with one lick?
Instead, in the original book, Humbert, in addition to successfully sleeping next to Lolita, wakes up kissing and teasing him, and finally the text is more subtly implied that the man violates the girl's expectations for this intimate game:
Although she tried to please me with naughty things, she was not ready to accept the difference between the child's world and my world.
In Kubrick's depiction, Humbert is clearly different from the novel's depiction of this relationship.
In the play, the middle-aged man is under the power and can only wait for the approval of the girl.
On the contrary, 16-year-old Lolita single-handedly dominated the relationship, and the two went further or abruptly, both sent down by the "queen".
If you think about it, such a plot appears in the video story, which is bound to cause an uproar in the folklore of the city.
With a full of black humor, Kubrick depicts Humbert as a fool and hopelessly courting a beautiful and wayward girl, but the girl conspires with another man to trick him into leaving the two-person world he has carefully managed.
But from Lolita's point of view, she was fleeing her own kidnappers.
All of the above shows Kubrick's interpretation of Lolita in a completely new way.
He transforms the bitter teasing in the protagonist's confession into clumsiness, but still creates an absurd sense of humor.
He adapted the middle-aged man's obsession with young girls, removing all immoral emotions and plots, into a sobering warning that satirizes ordinary men's lack of self-control in the pursuit of youthful flesh.
As a result, you get a completely different story from the original.