Tu Jiayi
On October 22, the "First Incense" directed by Xu Anhua was released, ushering in a scolding that "should be". Since the initial casting of Ma Sichun and Peng Yuyan as the male and female protagonists, the film has been called a decline; and as soon as the trailer came out, the mockery of "the first furnace steel" emerged in large numbers, and the Douban score has now fallen to 5.6 points, becoming the worst-rated of all the film works directed by Xu Anhua. The film brings together many big names in the film and television industry, but it has become a well-made, unclassified commercial romance film with Zhang Ailing's name.
"The First Burning Incense" is Zhang Ailing's first short story published when she entered the literary world. At the age of 23, she wrote about the social situation in Pre-War Hong Kong with a genius-style gloomy and magnificent text.
The First Burning Incense was published in the magazine Violet in 1943
The film basically follows the original book in the plot trunk, and the Shanghai girl Ge Weilong, played by Ma Sichun, wants to stay in Hong Kong to go to school and run to her aunt Mrs. Leung, and is used by her aunt to become a social flower in Vanity Fair, in order to help her aunt maneuver among men. In this process, she fell in love with the wandering child qiaoqiao played by Peng Yuyan, and although she was married, she could not really love. The English name of the film is set as Love After Love, and the "love is deeper than deep love" appears in the trailer as the main theme of the film. It can be seen that the film has amplified love into the main narrative through adaptation. The simple silly girl Ge Weilong, under the joint injury of the "scumbag" Ge Qiqiqiao and the vicious aunt, finally compromised in exchange for money for the end of marriage.
The poster of "The First Burning Incense", the English name Love After Love, is very conspicuous
Although the casting incompatibility of "The First Incense" has become the main reason for the audience to criticize the film, the shift in the theme of painful love has also become the core of the film's great failure. Beyond love, the theme of "First Incense" revolves around the personal fate of Ge Weilong, the main female character, sinking in the glitz of semi-colonial Hong Kong.
Ma Sichun's silly girl Ge Weilong's image is actually very contrary to the original work. In the original book, she was never a poor woman who was toyed with by her aunt and By Georgie Joe. From the time she had not yet officially entered the Liang Mansion as a young lady, she was shrewd. When she first entered the Liang mansion to "smoke feng" to Mrs. Liang and obtain the qualification to live in the Liang family, she secretly thought:
"As for me, I walked into this ghostly world with my eyes open. If I am caught in evil, who do I blame? But in the end we are aunts and nephews, she is bound by face, as long as I do the right thing, stand upright, not afraid that she will not treat her with courtesy. Outsiders gossip, do what they say, and I read my books. In the future, when I meet someone who really likes me, I will naturally understand and will never believe those boring rumors. ”
From this confession, it can be seen that Ge Weilong is very aware of her situation after entering the Liang Mansion, and she is introspectively looking at herself. But from this sentence, she is simple. She thought that she was her aunt's flesh and blood relative, and with this level of kinship, her aunt would never treat her harshly. In fact, this layer of kinship is not worth mentioning in the eyes of the aunt at all- why did the aunt allow her to fund Ge Weilong? The next plot is also revealed: she wants Veron to be a prostitute and recruit men for her. She said bluntly to Georgie Jojo: "When she can't earn money to support her family, you can divorce as much as possible." "It's cruel.
The aunt played by Yu Feihong in the movie
As she walked to the gate of the Liang family, she began to face three choices. Entering the Liang family was the first choice she made. As we can see, when she opens her wardrobe and sees a variety of gorgeous clothes, the bustling world of Hong Kong has since unfolded to her. She immediately fell at that second, scolding herself for not being much different from the people in the "Long Three Tangzi" (the allusion to the brothel), and spending two or three months in the closet. At the same time that she gained a foothold in Hong Kong's celebrity circles, her innocence began to gradually lose.
Wei Long is heartbroken by Georgie Joe - although she loves Georgie Joe, but in the movie, Ge Weilong slaps and is angry with Ge Qiqiao, and Ge Weilong in the novel will never do this to Georgie Joe. She knew Georgie Joe's true face from the beginning, but:
She knew why she had loved Georgie so stubbornly, loved him so inferiorly. Initially, of course, it was because of his attraction, but later, it was entirely for the sake of his not loving her. ”
Veron's sober self-torture shows that she chose Georgie Joe as a consideration of her interests. She does not want to be completely reduced to an aunt-like person, sacrificing youth and love only for money. But she is also reluctant to pay money, so she is willing to sell herself for her aunt's family Qinglou and marry Georgie Joe at the same time – at least this is her own love choice. This was her second choice.
She also had fierce resistance. After witnessing Georgie Joe's abusive affair, she had one last conflict with her aunt, and she said something shocking:
"I'm going back and willing to be a new person."
It was the last choice she faced. A sudden heavy rain and illness hindered her return to Shanghai. She finally chose to stay, not willing to say goodbye to the gorgeous clothes full of lice. She did not want to go back to face her father in a feudal family, nor did she want to leave this absurd paradise of capitalism, she thought of a person as beautiful as her, how could there be a more suitable position than a rich wife?
"Boundless desolation, boundless terror. Her future, too,— can't think, only boundless horror. She had no long-lasting plans. ”
At this point she no longer resisted. She had made her three choices, and the firm belief that "I read my book" had dissipated in her wandering and choice step by step. At the end, Veron tells the prostitutes in Wan Chai and Georgie Joe that she is no different from those people, but they are forced, and she is voluntary.
Ge Weilong's patheticity was never love. Her many struggles, her resistance, were convinced by herself. Her sadness is that she had many opportunities to turn back, but in the end she did not overcome herself. Materialistic or prosperous —my aunt knows her too well. "If you want to go back to your original environment, you're afraid you won't be able to go back."
Mrs. Liang, the character who lures Wei Long to fall, seems to stand on the opposite side of Ge Wei Long's "innocence" from beginning to end, an image of the demon Mephistopheles in Faust, exchanging money for the youth and innocence of a young girl. In the original work, the text description of the aunt's appearance is extremely subtle:
"The car door opened, and a petite young woman in a suit stepped out of the car, a black, black straw hat with a green web hanging from the brim, and a fingernail-sized emerald spider clasped in the web, shining in the daylight, crawling on her cheeks, bright and dark..."
The debut of the aunt in the movie
The power of Zhang Ailing's writing is evident in this description. Spiders are most apt to describe a snake-like aunt: on mating night, the female spider will devour male spiders to obtain the nutrition of breeding offspring — this is the origin of Mrs. Liang's fortune — at the same time, the spider is a waiting hunter, who never takes the initiative to hunt, but waits for the prey to cast a net — at the beginning of the whole book, Ge Weilong tentatively enters this colonial mansion that is not in the middle of the west. This little emerald spider not only tells the fate of her aunt in the past, but also reveals the fate of Wei Long's future.
Zhang Ailing writes about male and female love, but male and female love is just a shell for her to see this desolate world. In this world, people are killing each other – men betray women, women play with men, relatives betray each other, marriage is a transaction, and people can never escape. People have not been without pain, but in the end they all drink blood and laugh in this pain, and rejoice in the fall. How do you know that when your aunt married her aunt, she didn't suffer like Ge Weilong? Why can she hold Ge Weilong forever, sure that she can't be a "new person"?
When she chose to marry Mr. Liang as the fourth aunt in exchange for sky-high property, she also made a choice like Wei Long. She used to be Veron too. And from the relationship between the characters to observe the fate of the characters - Wei Long will certainly follow the old path of his aunt in the future. Therefore, as we said at the beginning, Zhang Ailing is writing about the personal fate of Ge Weilong, a female character, rather the collective fate of all the characters who have Ge Weilong's characteristics.
"Ge Weilong, a very ordinary Shanghai girl."
Turning back to see zhang Ailing's first sentence in the opening paragraph seems to be the first sentence of the background explanation, it is inevitable that people will feel chills. From the moment Ge Weilong stepped into Liang Mansion and made up her mind to become a "local upper class" from a "provincial person", she soberly and watched herself step into this hunting ground. She had been faced with many opportunities to choose, and even one step away from returning to Shanghai, returning to the state of the very ordinary Shanghainese female student who just wanted to finish her studies in Hong Kong, but she hesitated to follow the trajectory laid by her aunt. The moment the identity conversion was completed, she could never go back, never to go back. From such a description of the mental journey, Zhang Ailing actually pointed out bitterly: You and I have Wei Long in us. This side is the true source of all tragedy.
Stills from "The First Incense"
Back to the movie "The First Burning Incense", compared with Zhang Ailing's original work, it seems to tell an outdated joke: the indiscriminate pursuit of youth pain has become a kind of kitsch of commercial romance films. The audience likes to watch love, likes to watch idiot men and women, likes to watch dog blood, so the script waved a big hand, and it took away this core, leaving only the shell of tragic love. Pure love little girls love and can't help, the wandering children love field, some aristocratic, Republican elements, Shanghai, Hong Kong's bustling wind and moon field, coupled with the vicious villain beautiful aunt obstructed from it - all available, which also makes many people more and more misinterpretations of Zhang Ailing, it seems that she has also become a tragic love symbol of some kind of drunken gold fans. Director Xu Anhua's love for Zhang Ailing has made her insist on adapting her text into a movie for so many years, but it is more and more contrary to Zhang Ailing herself. The superficial temperament eventually made the film a joke, and the marketing of Zhang Ailing also made the film seem even more funny. As viewers and readers, when facing Zhang Ailing, we should also remove some "labels". When we no longer focus only on love, the interpretation of works and the understanding of life may have more abundant space to see.
Editor-in-Charge: Gu Ming
Proofreader: Luan Meng