How about "Lanxin Grand Theatre"

Lanxin Grand Theater: The role-playing of the original novel The Witch trapped by lust in the tenth screening room.

After almost two years' delay, Lou Ye's new work "Lanxin Grand Theatre" was released.

Lanxin Grand Theatre may not be the best of Lou Ye's works, but it is definitely controversial. Some people accuse it of being the biggest Waterloo in Lou Ye in recent years, while others say it is a breakthrough in Lou Ye.

Two original novels in the film provided inspiration for the adaptation: Hong Ying's Death in Shanghai and Hengguang Yili's Shanghai.

The former provides the part about spy war in the film, while the latter is integrated into the play in the form of play, thus completing the intertextuality of emotion and characters in the film. Lanxin Grand Theatre tells the story of a spy war on the eve of the Pacific War in the 1940s;

The famous actor Yu Yan returned to Shanghai. On the surface, she came back to help her old lover Tan Na finish the rehearsal of Saturday Novel, but behind this, her return seems to have an increasingly complicated purpose:

Rescue your ex-husband and collect information for the allies? Working for an adoptive father? Escape from the war with your lover? No one knows her real mission. But her return has doomed the changes that the island will face.

The text of this film is very complicated, and the boundary between reality and reality has been broken again and again. It's not easy to understand, so let's cut into the stylized things in the film that are very Lou Ye for the time being. Hand-held photography, long shots, improvisation, black and white images ... these external factors are still very embarrassing. Only in terms of style, Lou Ye's black-and-white tone design and hand-held camera lens that obviously slows down the jitter give the Lanxin Grand Theatre the best direct impression.

Seeing such a long-lost film-filled image in the cinema, with every frame carefully carved, almost moved people to tears. The feeling of watching movies is hearty, pure and shocking.

sexual passion

None of the above image styles is the fundamental reason why Lou Ye is so charming. What Lou Ye wants to express by relying on special images has always been the feelings and desires of little people in extreme environments. Desire has been the theme of Lou Ye's films since Suzhou Creek. The ill-fated and involuntary individual life is an important motif of the sixth generation directors in the era of change. But in Jia's or Wang Xiaoshuai's view, this sense of helplessness of fate comes from the overwhelming pressure directly exerted on individuals by the historical wheel of the changing times.

The little people in Lou Ye's films have been passively involved in the whirlpool of the times because they have feelings and desires that they can't give up and don't want to fight against their fate. Yu Yan returned to Shanghai, because she had too much passion in the past, which was constantly reduced and confused.

She has too many demands and missions, and each mission is branded with affection: for Tan Na, for her ex-husband Ni Zeren, for her adoptive father Hubert, and for the fledgling Bai Mei.

Speaking of teacher Gong Li's performance, I have to say that Lou Ye is very accurate in casting this time.

Thanks to the aura of many classic characters, Gong Li's acting now has a unique charm. Almost as long as she appears on the screen, she will automatically become synonymous with desire. No matter who she plays opposite, whether it's Mark Chao or Oda Giorgio, the audience will unconsciously interpret the sense of outstanding desire from Gong Huang's senior face. This is also the reason why Gong Li hypnotizes Oda Girijo in the film. Saburo, Oda Girijo's old house, didn't know that his wife Miyoko had died, but he couldn't resist the desire emanating from Violet. In the original book, Cotani Saburo fell in love with Yu Yan at the first sight.

There is a scene in the film where Bai Mei and Yu Yan are intimate. Two women stripped down to their pajamas, whispering and caressing each other in a dark room. In the next shot, Yu Yan is already sitting in front of the window, and her clothes are messy and thin. The audience can't fully implement the relationship between the two people in the passionate drama Lily, and everything just stays at the level of lust.

The two people in this scene, Yu Yan and Bai Mei, both show their rare true selves in the whole film. It doesn't matter what happens between two people. Importantly, Bai Mei and Yan Yu are aware of this night, and they can temporarily unload their psychological defense. Both of them are women who love performing, but also spies, individuals who can't extricate themselves in troubled times, and people who still believe in art even if they can't extricate themselves. As a spy of Chongqing military system, Bai Mei's mission to Shanghai is to get close to Violet.

The closer two people are, it's like seeing themselves in the mirror.

Therefore, the lust between Bai Mei and Yu Yan stems from narcissism. Looking at another person is also a time to lament self-pity. Narcissism is almost the only emotion that Bai Mei and Yu Yan can bet on in troubled times. People around you are hard to rely on, and you have to constantly examine yourself to get the motivation to live.

So, after this erotic drama, Delia got Yu Yan's persistence and obsession. In the end, she chose the stage and sacrificed everything for pure art. In a sense, this is Lou Ye's own inner portrayal. However, such a symbolic figure, which can almost be abstracted as synonymous with art, was manipulated by Mo Yin Mo, played by Eric Wang and finally shot by Mo Yin Mo.

Bai Mei, representing art and beauty, was raped by Mo Zhi, a producer representing capital and power.

The metaphor here can only be broken to such an extent.

Let's look back at the erotic drama of Bai Mei and Yu Yan.

Before that, Yu Yan and Delia went into the theater together. Delia sat in the audience of the theater and watched Yu Yan rehearse and perform. Therefore, there is a hidden perspective in the theater space, and Yu Yan's performance is always observed from the third perspective.

This perspective, if you know a little about film theory, will naturally understand that it is the perspective represented by the camera.

Why Lou Ye uses hand-held lenses in most movies has always been a myth that puzzles the audience. This kind of lens is very unreliable and the imaging is extremely rough. So that in the end, it has only one advantage, that is, the authenticity of the perspective represented by the camera.

If you want to set up a hand-held camera in the film in such a way to emphasize the existence of the camera, the director must first answer the question whose perspective this camera represents.

Since he is not a god who represents the macro perspective, he must be a bystander perspective and has reason to be present. This is not the first time that Lou Ye has used this spectator perspective.

In Suzhou Creek, the photographer "I" has always been such a role that only exists behind the camera, and the hand-held camera in its subsequent films can almost be understood as a variant of the observer role.

In the cloud composed of rain in the wind, the observer can be understood as the civilians around him, coldly looking at the absurd stories of Jiang Zicheng and others.

In massage, the observer is the guest of the massage shop, not the masseurs looking at the world they can't see. The difference is that the audience of Lan Xin Grand Theatre is not only Bai Mei, but also Yu Yan.

The ghost who has been following Violet is not suitable to be replaced by a specific role, other actors? Another spy? Watching? It doesn't make sense.

Only for Violet himself. White-browed staring at Yuzi is a variant of Yuzi staring at herself.

In a less mysterious way, Yu Yan, as an actress, has been looking at her performance from the perspective of a bystander. This detachment and bystander exists because Yu Yan foresaw the danger of being swallowed up by himself in multiple role-playing.

play

Acting is another key word of this film.

Lanxin Grand Theatre tells the story of Shanghai Lanxin Grand Theatre in the last century. But the "dramatic performance" in the film is never limited to the theater.

Shanghai in the isolated island period seemed calm, but it was already surrounded by war. Everyone on the island is pretending to play the illusion of prosperity. Therefore, Yu Yan's performance started from the moment she arrived in Shanghai.

She will play the heroine Qiu Lan in the drama Saturday Novel, the old love of Tanna, the wife who saved her ex-husband Ni Zeren from fire and water, the daughter of her adoptive father, and the dead wife of a Japanese officer. These places of communication with complex identities are real Yu Yan, which he can't see clearly and can't guess.

Back to my original view of Lou Ye. I say "Lanxin Grand Theatre" is a controversial work because the former protagonists in Yu Yan's and Lou Ye's works are different.

Peony, Pony, Lu Jie and Yu Hong are all involuntarily involved in the torrent of the times, full of helplessness brought by passive choice.

Yan Yu, on the other hand, chose to take the initiative to return to the island and take the initiative to perform on stage again, playing a hero who saved the day. Little people who try to play heroes are doomed to tragedy.

This tragedy first presents a kind of unreality, interwoven with reality and blurred with dreams.

Lou Ye hinted at the theme of this film in form from the beginning:

The relationship between the drama on the stage and the spy war in real life was arbitrarily broken. One second it was a bloody battle, and the next second it was back on the stage.

So that the audience lost their judgment on the plot, and it was difficult to tell which was true and which was fiction.

Therefore, it is not important to interpret the text structure of Lanxin Grand Theatre. On the one hand, the context is too chaotic and unclear, on the other hand, it is the integration of reality and drama. Only the truth is hidden, only the tragic ending.

What blocks the truth is human lust.

Yu Yan has finally come to the point where she can't tell what is real and what is role-playing, so she needs a pair of eyes to observe herself from the side: Am I really a hero? Am I really myself?

The gun battle scene at the climax of the film pushed this contradiction and entanglement to a climax.

The first intuitive feeling of this gunfight scene is that it is unreal, as if someone specially rehearsed an action stage scene, hiding some truth in reality.

In the version of the story presented on the stage, Yu Yan is a super agent whose force value is worse than that of James Bond.

Zhen Yu Yan: There is no time to die. Shortly after the gun battle began, the audience thought that Yan Yu would fall because of the bullet. But she can continue to stand up like a god of war and destroy the enemy: those who hide in the dark and suddenly come.

No matter how fierce the confrontation between the opponent and Yu Yan is, Yu Yan can miraculously dodge bullets and kill each other.

This is too amazing to be true.

This episode about the spy war hero is more like an intracranial daydream of a little guy who becomes a hero.

The real part is that Yu Yan went to the restaurant to find Tanna, and they were surrounded by the long-awaited Japanese, watching all the possibilities of escape lost. In the last scene of the film, Tan Na and Yan Yu stand on the chairs in the restaurant. As soon as the camera turns, they return to the stage as if they were not killed.

But before that, there was another scene that concealed the truth. After the Japanese army surrounded Tan Na and Yan Yu, the camera switched to the window, and Mo Zhi, played by Eric Wang, fled for his life. Two shots were faintly heard behind him.

Obviously, the ending of the second shooting is the reasonable truth. Yu Yan and Tanna were finally shot by the Japanese. But the attitude of the whole film from beginning to end is to avoid this tragic ending, escape it, erase it, and leave another layer of half-truths and half-truths on the stage.

The theme of Lou Ye's films is that individuals want to be heroes, but they can't escape the fate of ordinary people in the end, and they are trapped by lust and secularity.

Life is like chess, but most people still can't get rid of the fate of becoming chess pieces.

I spent a lot of courage to change my destiny, but in the end it was an empty tragedy, which was more cruel than passive involvement. In the final analysis, Lou Ye, like Jia, is a director who believes in his bones and is most suitable for civilian narration all his life.

All the characters in Lou Ye's films surprised the world because the world was forced into a dilemma and turned to say goodbye like a moth: I would rather choose the ideal and the truth than compromise.

So, this time, the observer behind the camera became so unspeakable. It was a self-ghost of Yu Yan/Gong Li/Lou Ye, who painfully escaped the tragedy he would face in a short time, and managed to maintain his self-consciousness of becoming a hero before the grand historical narrative engulfed the individual.