Wen 丨 April
At the end of 2020, "Nanhai Thirteen Lang" finally released a restored version of the Blu-ray product, which is the good news that fans have been waiting for for many years. The film has always been the favorite of many Hong Kong niche film lovers, and it is also a god-honored work in the hearts of actor Tse Junhao's fans.
It's a movie that makes people laugh and cry. In the past two years, many video numbers have recommended the film, and the words are "unpopular masterpieces" and "the pearls of Hong Kong films". With a Douban rating of 9.2 and more than 30,000 people participating in the rating, the film will gradually establish its status as a classic Hong Kong film.
The Blu-ray version of "Nanhai Thirteen Lang" is also a product of this trend in a sense. The Texture of the Blu-ray print is touching, and I can finally see the expression of the middle-aged policeman in the film and confirm that he is played by Huang Xia.
"The Thirteen Langs of the South Sea" has a special place in Hong Kong movies. The film was released in 1997 and was highly favored at that year's Golden Horse Awards and the following year's Academy Awards. However, compared with "Made in Hong Kong", "Spring Break", "Sweet Honey", "Song Dynasty" and other films that won or were nominated at the same time, the aesthetic heterogeneity and roughness of "Nanhai Thirteen Lang" make it look different.
From the perspective of media attributes, the movie "Nanhai Thirteen Lang" seems to be closer to the drama, because it is originally a cross-media replica of the stage play of the same name. The stage play "Nanhai Thirteen Lang" was first performed in 1993 and was staged in Hong Kong for nearly thirty times when the film was remade.
The reason for the remake is, in part, the Hong Kong film industry's desire for convenience, the desire to produce a new product quickly and efficiently with ready-made scripts and actors. As a result, when it was released in Hong Kong, it was only supported by one or two cinemas, the box office can be imagined, and the film itself quickly faded out of the audience's general memory after the award.
For Hong Kong people, the influence of the stage play "Nanhai Thirteen Langs" may far exceed that of the movie. For more than 20 years, the play has been performed on the stage of Hong Kong for a long time, and has established its status as a classic masterpiece in the year-by-year re-performance. Many older generations of Hong Kong people only know that there are dramas and do not know that there are movies.
Hong Kong people watch "The Thirteen Langs of the South China Sea" and have a sense of life.
Nan Hai Shi San Lang is a well-known beggar and crazy man in the Sheung Wan area of Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s. Passers-by do not know that his name is Jiang Yuwei, a famous Cantonese opera playwright and composer in the 1920s and 1930s. His father Jiang Kongyin was a former member of the futility side and had considerable political influence in Guangzhou in the late Qing Dynasty.
He was rich and wealthy in his youth, and gradually became crazy after middle age, and became a regular visitor to the Qingshan Mental Hospital. The most famous rumor is that he frequently called the police, claiming that one of his shoes had been stolen, and that one person stole his right foot, one stole his left foot, the one who stole his right foot was called Chiang Kai-shek, and the one who stole his left foot was called Mao Zedong, so that he now had no way out.
Du Guowei's script, the screenwriting method is not to give a real person a biography, but to let the legend return to the legend. The tradition of "speaking koo" in traditional Cantonese storytelling has been translated into a modern theater, presenting a legendary life with a set structure constructed by five storytellers. The time and space transition is extremely fast, which can be said to be narrated with the speed of Hong Kong.
From beginning to end, the script reveals a kind of Cantonese people's deep obsession and nostalgia for Cantonese opera and Cantonese culture, which is its most profound driving force in narrative. The Nanhai Thirteen Lang in the play is almost one such avatar.
In fact, few of his works in history have survived, making it difficult to verify his talent. But in the play, the world-famous figures in the history of Cantonese opera, from Xue Juexian to Tang Disheng, are attracted by his genius light and revolve around him, because he represents the soul of Cantonese opera in the play.
From the script to the performance, the success and popularity of "Nanhai Thirteen Lang" is largely due to Xie Junhao's stunning interpretation of a genius role. His performance may indicate that only a talented actor can interpret a genius role.
In 1993, when the play was cast, there were three actors who auditioned for Shi Sanlang, each with their own understanding and interpretation of the script, and director Gu Tiannong and screenwriter Du Guowei finalized Xie Junhao at a glance among the three. Xie Junhao later recalled that his interpretation of Shisanlang was not the result of reason and thinking, "I directly acted like this as soon as I read the script", "it was not what I was looking for, it was such a feeling that I was looking for".
Xie Junhao's thirteen langs are accustomed to looking at people with the whites of their eyes through their glasses, their eyes are flowing, the corners of their mouths are upturned, their hands are dancing, and their bodies are like a small universe that always stores 100% of electricity. Many people think that Xie Junhao plays the bully pride well, it is better to admire him for showing the sense of speed and neuroticism of the genius, which is the natural result of the collision between the genius and the mortal.
"Nanhai Thirteen Lang" has been staged for more than twenty years, and the actor team has changed countless times, but it is always Xie Junhao who plays the thirteen lang, realizing the permanent binding of the actor and the role, and becoming a classic living fossil.
Xie Junhao's performance style is suitable for the stage, the rest of the characters in the play are also stage style, the film version of "Nanhai Thirteen Lang" in the adaptation of the corresponding adjustment of the performance method is insufficient, the audience may be difficult to enter the play at the beginning when watching the film, need to gradually adapt. However, the imitation of stage performances also has a time when the viewing experience is extremely comfortable in the movie.
The most important of them was the famous scene where Tang Disheng came to the door to copy the score for the thirteenth brother. In the previous scene, the three workers copied the score for the thirteenth brother in the form of a wheel war, and far from keeping up with the speed of the thirteenth brother's creation; in this scene, Tang Disheng and the thirteenth brother met the opponent, and the copy became the joint creation of you chasing after me. The chanting style is different from the daily situation, and the stage performance style is the most reasonable play in this play. This passage of the film is better than the stage version in terms of ornamentality.
A large number of close-ups and just the right close-ups are organized by a rhythmic and coherent splicing, creativity flows constantly between the two, and the potential and kinetic energy of genius meet genius are vividly displayed. Because the two are anti-string flower Dan, the performance comes with a kind of hilarious fabrication, which is the same as hong Kong comedy in terms of entertainment.
According to Xie Junhao, this paragraph took half a day to shoot, and it was shot on a single camera, which can be described as another embodiment of Hong Kong's speed. However, one of the results of single-player shooting is that the singing clip is not entirely in one key, which belongs to the nature of wearing gangs.
The most touching scene of "Nanhai Thirteen Lang" is the reunion of the two, the density of the emotional core has surpassed the pursuit of skills in all expressions, and the treatment of this paragraph by the film and stage drama has returned to simplicity.
"When I see my mentor again, my heart hurts in every way, as if the sword is half sealed in mud, and the ambition and talent of the past have all ended", these words and phrases are difficult not to remind people of Gu Zhenguan's two famous golden songs, "Ji Zi is safe, then return, everything in life, that can be looked back." "I have also drifted for a long time, and for ten years, I have lost all my gratitude and died as a teacher." The emotion in it deviates from the vitality and entanglement of Cantonese opera itself, and is a literati-style acquaintance and self-pity.
"The Thirteen Langs of the South China Sea" begins with Tang Disheng meeting the thirteenth brother, and the entire second half of the film is full of the color of the literati's words. Some of these lines can be excerpted and circulated.
For example, "I want to prove that the article is valuable." In another thirty or fifty years, no one will remember those stocks... But a good script, fifty years and a hundred years, is still appreciated." "You're so well-written that you don't have to write these vulgar scripts to cater to the audience... Looking a little farther ahead, the audience's standard is getting higher and higher..." Du Guowei in 1997 probably did not expect that these lines would be widely circulated on the mainland Internet twenty years later, cheering up the industry people who were still willing to pursue something in creation. This is probably also the reason why the reputation of this film in the mainland is growing day by day, and the topic is increasing day by day.
The film's adaptation of the stage play has a unique point. The five storytellers with the same costume and strong symbolic meaning become a specific "talk about the ancient xiang" in the film.
This character has several subtle changes in the process of storytelling. Temple Street opens with a standard gullies performance, with a sense of distance. When you get to the confined space of the police station, the story becomes routine and private. In the story, there is a scene where the little boy and the crazy thirteenth uncle praise the white phoenix of the snow mountain against an empty blank paper, and the naked child and the madman see the same thing in their eyes, and the audience will have a sense of trance that they do not know how many spaces they are in.
This naked son is talking about Gu Xiang himself. When the story was finished, the policeman played by Huang Xia asked him if he knew Nanhai Shisanlang, but he shook his head in denial, saying that he was just "a sloppy screenwriter telling the story of another sloppy screenwriter". The identity of the storyteller suddenly peels off his skin here, making his previous narrative an instantly illusory.
When Gu Xiang came out of the Yau Ma Tei Police Station and came to the street, the movie appeared here. Talking about Gu Xiang, the audience seems to be in a different kind of space in Hong Kong, and the streets are full of crazy people. He rubbed shoulders with the young Nanhai Thirteen Lang and turned to follow. This passage is the most cinematic clip in the whole film, like a random capture of sentient beings on the street, with a sense of realism that is very different from the previous theatrical style, and the realism is unbearable.
In the past two years, I have talked about Hong Kong movies around 1997 in my graduate class, and I will show "Nanhai Thirteen Langs" to students. Students from the north of the world and different undergraduate backgrounds, every time put to this end, there are people stupid in the audience, some people silently wipe tears, some people to the end of the subtitle "dedicated to the whole Hong Kong screenwriters to encourage" obsessed with the gods, for a long time can not be played, you can see the power of the film.
The second half of "The Thirteen Langs of the South China Sea" is in full swing, and the torrent of history pours down, and people do not know how to preserve dignity and dignity in it. The film seems to write a story of genius that cannot be tolerated in the world, but in fact it is like writing about how people bid farewell to the world with dignity.
Madness is decent, early death is also decent, the end of genius has a sense of the end of the era, and the film leaves the audience with infinite emptiness in the continuous reflexive self-portrait, in the narrative of true and false when pretending to be true.