"Lyceum Theatre" was finally released.
Premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2019, after being finalized and postponed, the film finally met with the audience yesterday.
Everyone's two years of expectations have also fallen to the ground.
From the screening of the North Film Festival at the end of September to the premiere in Shanghai a few days ago, every screening of "Lyceum Grand Theatre" has set off a wave of word-of-mouth topics.
Some people praise the touching immersion of the story -
"It can make people withdraw from reality and immerse themselves in reality";
It has also been mentioned that the film's rare sense of ceremony —
"The thrill of a good movie makes going into the theater to watch a movie a ritualistic blessing."
"Lyceum Theatre" Shanghai premiere
Interestingly, the lead actor Gong Li also issued a call for "purely watching a movie" at a post-screening event before:
"When we make this film, we hope that the audience can seriously and quietly watch a pure movie and find out what the movie itself looks like."
The word "pure" represents a return to the original intention without mixing thoughts:
For the creators, it is honesty and awe for the film itself;
For the audience, it is to return to the original meaning of the film and devote themselves to a ceremony of light and shadow;
In fact, behind such a call, there is an implicit confidence and confidence of "Lyceum Theatre":
This is a film that can make people deeply attracted and immersed in it.
It is not difficult to see that "Lyceum Theatre" has a special position in the sequence of works directed by Lou Ye.
The film uses a team of commercial actors that are rare in previous films, and also involves rare genre colors.
The lead actor Gong Li defines it as the biggest, best, and most macroscopic film that Lou Ye has produced so far.
The story of the film focuses on Shanghai in the isolated island period of 1941, a time and space in which the situation is full of winds and clouds, and the undercurrents of forces from all sides are surging forward.
Against the backdrop of a grand era, the film captures a subtle incision:
In terms of time, the story is compressed in the first six days of the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor;
From the perspective of spatial dimension, it always revolves around the woman Yu Yan portrayed by Gong Li.
Yu Yan's identity is an actor and a well-known star figure in the drama industry.
On December 1, 1941, she suddenly returned to the "isolated island" of Shanghai.
No one knows whether the purpose of her trip is to re-star in a play directed by the old Love Tan Na, or to save her ex-husband who was detained by the Japanese army, or to tell a deeper secret.
Yu Yan's fate is tightly pulled by the torrent of the times, and her every choice is also affecting the rapidly changing situation.
Like all of Lou Ye's films, the era itself is one of the characters of the story that cannot be ignored.
Adhering to the supremacy of truth, in the process of creating the background of the times, he has always adhered to the ultimate pursuit of details.
Streets, interiors, lighting, costumes, and language, every level is trying to get closer to that era.
These can be seen as tools, because they are extreme and real, and they also open up a bridge for people and actors to enter the story and characters.
At the Gong Li master class of the North Film Festival this year, Zhang Songwen, who participated in the film, shared an interesting thing during filming.
When he first went to Shanghai to shoot, the film's styling director took the clothes that people had worn 100 years ago from all over the country and let the actors wear them, and the choice of colors, the combination of costumes and costumes was profound.
However, when the film premiered in Venice, Zhang Songwen learned that it was a black-and-white film, and those far-reaching ingenuities were contained in the layers of gray on the screen.
Lou Ye's filming has always been such a "luxury": the elaborate costumes, the scenes that have been painstakingly built, in his dim, turbulent shots composed of natural light and hand,are easily hidden in the ambiguous background outlines, or even the unseen frames.
He put a lot of effort into creating the environment and image design, and finally made these efforts appear "without a trace", so that they were hidden in the background of the story.
To some extent, he is constantly showing the times, but he is constantly dissolving the shackles of the times through a process of "de-symbolization", so as to cast the characters and stories into a more macroscopic and more universal field.
However, the meticulous creation of the era environment is also a kind of protection for the actors, making them more undistracted and more naturally integrated into a realistic theatrical world.
When an actor feels credible about his environment and the identity he plays, the state he presents can allow the audience outside the screen to immerse, enter the play and believe.
Like the standards of sets and props, Lou Ye believes that the best acting skills are to "forget the acting skills", so that the behavior of the characters become instinctive, and the actors become the characters themselves.
And when such a standard meets Gong Li, who is good at methodistic performances, the final effect is also very shocking. After the premiere, Gong Li was mentioned in many praises.
Probably no one is better suited to interpret a role like Yu Yan than her.
The story of the film shows the different characters in the three forces, Yu Yan is the absolute center of the circle, she has a connection with everyone, and has been entangled.
And Gong Li's shaping makes people feel as if they are attracted by a magnet from beginning to end, and they can never take their eyes off her.
In fact, the film's depiction of this character is not detailed, many of her previous histories, many personality dimensions are hidden in the dialogue and plot, and even when the story is carried out, Gong Li rarely shows strong emotions or desires, as if all the joys and sorrows and stories are suppressed under the calm and indifferent face.
However, when she naturally shed a tear or squeezed out a smile shallowly, it also gently twitched the heartstrings of the audience.
It is these intentional or unintentional gaps that allow people to peek through her closed and tight appearance into the deeper souls that exist in the subtext of the characters.
Lou Ye's films are always about specific and real individuals, no matter how grand the background is, what kind of strange color the plot has, the characters are the biggest suspense and tension of the work itself.
The same is true of the process of watching "Lyceum Theatre", people will not stop at watching a legendary spy battle on Shanghai Beach that does not care about themselves, but step by step deeply immersed in Yu Yan's experience, follow her choices, and feel the weight of her life.
Just like the suspense of the film does not come from the screenwriter's clever arrangement and careful design of the plot, but from people's attention to the fate of the characters, as well as the perception and empathy of the characters, naturally emerging.
"Lyceum Theatre" is real, but in a way, it "cunningly" blurs the boundary between truth and falsehood through the dual theatrical structure of "play within a play".
In the movie, Yu Yan and her lover Tan Na rehearse a much-needed drama "Saturday Novel", and in addition to the drama, Yu Yan is also staged dangerous espionage in the real world.
When the plot of the drama and the real reality coincide playfully, the boundary between true and false is also unconsciously eliminated by Lou Ye.
As a result, the story becomes practical but ambiguous, concrete but also ambiguous, and in the director's iconic jumping and turbulent shots, it becomes an interaction and reflection with the audience.
It allows people to participate, perceive human nature under extremes, judge the reality of the story, and construct each person's own interpretation.
Zhao Youting once said in an interview that the process of filming "Lyceum Grand Theater" was like a dream.
For the audience, watching "Lyceum Theatre" is also like an immersive dream.
Film itself is the art of dream-making, and the purest cinematic experience may be immersed in a dream woven with light and shadow.
Good movies seem to have such magic, when the subtitles on the screen are finished, the theater lights up, people are withdrawn from a life or fate, back to reality, but it seems to be like a different world.
When was the last time you had a similar experience?
Especially in the past two years when the theater line has been cold, the emergence of good movies is also worth cherishing more.
So like the opening paragraph said, this weekend, just watch a movie!
Lou Ye is worth it, and "Lyceum Theatre" is worth it.