Sohu Entertainment Special Article (Shanjin/Wen Xiaowan/Planning) As most viewers expected, the reputation of "First Burning Incense" is not good.
The Douban score has been repeatedly jumping between 5.6 and 5.7, and has never been able to cross the passing hurdle. This has also become one of the few films in Xu Anhua that has not passed the rating.
It's like a pre-publicized rollover.
From the moment the actors are fixed and the reuters are released on the set, to the sinking earthy marketing near the release of the film, the ridicule around "The First Burning Incense" has not stopped. The out-of-place lines in the movie even triggered frequent laughter from the audience.
Poor casting must be the most inconspicuous problem of "First Incense", but it is not the only problem. From the actors to the costume design, from the screenwriter to the director, "The First Incense" seems to be not right anywhere.
This film with a strong team unfortunately presents the effect of "1+1+1≈0".
01 Poor casting, painful acting
To be fair, of all the important characters with names in the movie, almost only Liang Luoshi chose the right one.
She plays Georgie Joo's half-sister Zhou Jijie, a mixed-race social flower with a complex pedigree and "beautiful with some suffocation". And Liang Luoshi himself is a mixture of Chinese, British and Portuguese, and the overall temperament and role are more suitable.
Other roles, Ma Sichun, Peng Yuyan, Yu Feihong, Fan Wei's casting was unsuccessful.
Not to mention the specific description of the role in the original work, from the perspective of personality and image alone, Ma Sichun and Peng Yuyan are not right.
Ge Weilong is a student who is still studying, because he lacks money to study to support his aunt. Born in the middle class, he has no knowledge of the flashy and corrupt high society, and can even be said to be a little curious.
When the upper class people downstairs gather, they will secretly try on the beautiful dress in the closet by themselves. The specific temperament can refer to Liu Yifei in "The Golden Powder Family".
But Ma Sichun obviously did not fit Ge Weilong's image. Her facial features are good-looking, but the overall feeling is that she is a down-to-earth and well-behaved woman, with some robust figures, and she does not quite meet the fragility of the character's needs.
The most cruel thing is that almost every outfit in the film magnifies the shortcomings of her body. Some thick waists and limbs, not good enough back lines, is really a bit unbearable.
The male protagonist, Georgie Joe, is a playboy who eats soft rice, and Peng Yuyan's healthy wheat-colored skin and well-trained muscles are far from the pale and fragile soft rice scum man imagined.
When the lines in the movie say that the mixed-race children are very gloomy and a little bit of a, Peng Yuyan's version of Georgie Qiao comes out wearing a vest and revealing a strong wheat-colored arm.
Georgie Joe said I couldn't support myself, but he looked like he could pull five rickshaws in one go, simple and disciplined.
Yu Feihong is very beautiful, and her cold, unique fairy temperament is not compatible with her aunt. Such a good-looking woman may not need her niece to help catch men.
Fan Wei plays the golden lord Situ Xie, who provides for Ge Weilong and his aunt's uncle, but he looks like a shrewd and urban little citizen who came out of "No Problem".
Since the image can not be saved, then the acting skills to make up? Unfortunately, the acting skills are not put together.
Yu Feihong and Fan Wei acted very well, supporting the role with their natural and in-place acting skills. The problem lies with the two protagonists.
Ma Sichun is trying to play a heartbroken schoolgirl who loves but can't help it, but often uses too much force, leaving traces of clumsy performances that are visible to the naked eye.
In the first half of the film, she plays a naïve little girl, slightly pouting, staring at the eyes, twisting the small movements, all of which are superficial routines, making people doubt whether she has really entered the role.
Ma Sichun played the best part at the end of the movie. After the plot enters the painful love, it comes to the link she is best at, and the acting is quite natural.
Peng Yuyan's performance is not much outstanding, he is trying to play the playboy of soft rice and hard food.
In the movie, he also performed the feeling of greasy tongue and flower heart, but it is far from the soft rice scum man, and from time to time he will still exude the simple temperament of "Camel Shoko".
Negative and negative also fail to get positive. Under the obvious inappropriate casting and poor acting skills, Ma Sichun and Peng Yuyan failed to play the feeling of a couple, and the two seemed to be unfamiliar colleagues, just awkwardly saying the lines arranged in the script.
Although the casting and acting skills have been defeated one step ahead, the problems of "First Incense" are far more than that.
02 Sinking marketing, misplaced adaptations
Just as bizarre as the casting is the film's marketing strategy, which exudes a self-defeating flavor.
"Give love a day of remembrance", "I just pretended to want to go, and you really didn't keep it"... From copywriting to small videos, "First Incense" goes humble and painful, and the reference object should be "Predecessor 3".
At first, I was still lamenting why there was misplaced marketing, and the lessons of "The Last Night on Earth" and "Midsummer Future" were not enough.
As a result, after watching the positive film, I found that it was wrong, and the marketing strategy may be in line with the film itself.
Zhang Ailing's "First Incense" is a complete tragedy. At first, Ge Weilong just wanted to rely on her aunt, and the female students who returned to Shanghai after reading the book ended up "selling to their aunt and Georgie Joe", while getting money and getting people.
The girl's own desire and depravity, the pre-war Hong Kong that survived in the cracks, together created this twisted and repressed tragedy.
However, the movie "The First Incense" made the audience of the cinema burst into laughter.
"I am your man", "I am your woman", "He is the uncle of all of us", writing this kind of line that makes the audience laugh, the screenwriter may need to come out and memorize the pot.
Wang Anyi is a very good writer, but she did not write many scripts, and in an interview, she said, "The investor also said that my format was not right." Fortunately, later said that the format does not matter, you can help me sort it out, I think the script may have its own format. ”
For the lines in the original work, Wang Anyi said that he did not have the ability to make up the character dialogue, "I basically used the original words in the original book, and then slightly derived." "But it's a little bit of derivation that seems so out of place."
In fact, the original work is relatively short, and the screenwriter needs to supplement the details and expand it, and many of them have changes in place. For example, adding some memories of aunts, she became the fourth aunt to toast tea, and her delicate face was full of sadness and confession.
Xu Anhua also uses flashback and surreal expression techniques to connect the choices and fates of the two generations of aunt and Ge Weilong. Different times, but the same tragedy.
But more often, the directors and screenwriters adapt the original book to present a misplaced understanding.
Wang Anyi talked about Xu Anhua's vision of "The First Burning Incense" in an interview - "I just want to make a love film, I have reached this age, I have never loved well, you want me to love once." ”
This is probably the difference between Xu Anhua and Zhang Ailing.
Zhang Ailing is even more ruthless, she writes about Ge Weilong's own desire and vanity. Everyone in the story is a co-conspirator in the tragedy, all blending in with the gorgeous, lice-crawling high society, and pure, true love is almost non-existent.
But Xu Anhua was very soft-hearted. In the movie, she added a lot of external factors to Ge Weilong's choice. The first time was because of a typhoon, she was forced to stay; the second time was because she met a woman who insulted her on the boat.
Ge Weilong's fall was almost forced, by the times, by the environment. So that The Ge Weilong presented by Xu Anhua is a humble love that cannot be avoided, which is in line with the publicity copywriting and Ma Sichun's perception of the aftermath.
Although Xu Anhua likes Zhang Ailing, she is probably not the most suitable person to adapt Zhang Ailing.
She has photographed Zhang Ailing three times, and both times the reputation is very average. However, with realistic themes such as "Sister Tao", "Auntie's Postmodern Life" and "Day and Night in Tin Shui Wai", Xu Anhua's play is very stable.
Xu Anhua, presented in the documentary "Make a Good Movie", is a sincere, modest and very down-to-earth director, she has a cat, is unwilling to send her mother to a nursing home, and will still choose public transportation when traveling.
Perhaps such Xu Anhua could not reproduce such a cruel and twisted tragedy as "The First Incense".
Under the less than expected word of mouth, the market performance of "First Burning Incense" is very general, with only a box office of more than 20 million in the three days of release, and the total box office is predicted to be only about 36 million, which seems to be inconsistent with the powerful all-star creative team.
In the documentary, Xu Anhua talked about a certain period of time when his films did not make money, and it was difficult to find investment. She strides down the street and says, "I don't believe I can't make money."
Funding is a very real problem, and even a big director like Xu Anhua has to accept compromise.
Although she does not know whether the casting of "First Incense" is her compromise, she once said in an interview that all the staff in the film speak Mandarin out of market considerations. Unfortunately, such compromises don't seem to bring more markets.
From the perspective of word of mouth and market, "The First Incense" is probably a failure. But it's not the kind of shoddy, careless bad film that can be seen as a casting failure and an adaptation of the dislocation.
As for the director, like the title of the documentary, we still expect her to "continue to make movies" and "make good movies".