Wong Kar-wai's " Blossoms " has made Shanghai's urban culture resound across the country, successfully achieving the linkage effect of "using culture to shape tourism and using tourism to highlight culture". The obvious historical rupture and the suspended feeling of images and narratives in "Flowers" highlight a lot of Chinese multicultural aesthetic expressions. The literary and artistic tone of "Flowers" is deeply loved by the audience, and it helps to change the aesthetic fatigue of homogeneous content, light art, and hollow value of traffic-only films. I hope that future film and television art creators will pursue more diverse cultural and aesthetic creative expressions, and not let "Flowers" become the last success of domestic TV dramas.
"Flowers", the first TV series in director Wong Kar-wai's career, was a complete "ring".
If the original novel "Flowers" by Jin Yucheng is about the wealthy parents in Shanghai alleys, then Wong Kar-wai's lens uses group portraits of women to outline a spectacle-like legend of the times. The drama broke through the 2% ratings in just 10 minutes after it was aired on CCTV 8; Shanghai landmarks such as Huanghe Road, Peace Hotel, Moss Holy Garden (the prototype of Zhizhen Garden) ushered in a wave of tourism peaks, and Ms. Wang’s Rice cakes and pork ribs, "Bao Zong" style pickled rice, etc. have become new features in local restaurants in various cities... Wong Kar-wai's "Flowers" has made Shanghai's urban culture resound across the country, successfully realizing "the culture shapes the tourism and the tourism highlights the culture" linkage effect. The obvious historical rupture and the suspended feeling of images and narratives in "Flowers" highlight a lot of Chinese multicultural aesthetic expressions.
The three female images in "Flowers"
Description of group portraits of women in Shanghai
The public's deepest misunderstanding of Wong Kar-Wai may be that he is placed in the position of director of "artistic films" as opposed to "commercial films". This classification not only ignores Wong Kar-wai's superb image-making ability, but also unreasonably opposes "commerce" and "literary art", creating the illusion that the two are incompatible, and to a certain extent, it also limits the options for literary and artistic creators.
In fact, Wong Kar-wai is not only an excellent "artistic film" director, but also a very creative genre film director.
The famous Hong Kong cultural studies scholar Akbar Abbas once believed that each of Wong Kar-wai's films starts with a popular genre film and is "deliberately lost" in this genre, such as dressing up as a martial arts film. " Ashes of Time ", " Fallen Angel " based on Hong Kong gangster movies, etc. The same is true for "Flowers". He is based on the "Shanghai-language literature" writing style pioneered by Jin Yucheng, and "pretends" Dressed in the guise of a period drama.
So, how did Wong Kar-wai become "deliberately lost"? The most dazzling part of the
drama is the group portrait depiction of the ambitions and desires of Shanghai women with different personalities, identities, and experiences, which is extremely rare in domestic TV dramas.
Jin Yucheng also borrowed Tao Tao's words and said: "Why do women look at crabs the same way they look at men?" In the TV series, Wong Kar-wai used his unique post-modern image narrative style to break the conventional audio-visual language techniques and linear narrative. , instead of using emotions to drive the narrative and emotions to shape the characters, using a 45° profile mid-range shot and the urban neon lights outside the window as the background light to show the desires and passions surging in the hearts of different female characters. For example, Ms. Wang's courage and determination are reflected in the fact that she ran to Shenzhen, a place she was unfamiliar with, alone in order to grab a deal; Lingzi is both a philistine and a loyal person, and she helped A Bao when they first met, and the "earring incident" and " After the "Night Tokyo" restaurant successfully transformed, it still treated the neighbors who were eating and drinking as before; Li Li, the seemingly cold-hearted owner of Zhizhenyuan who only focused on monetary interests, used the money earned from the stock market to pay off the debts of the dead Mr. A before surrendering and Lu Meilin, Xiao Jiangxi and No. 27 Mei Ping, etc., they express the desire for change of the times in different types. Women's ambitions and desires are both sexy and formidable, which constitute the personal struggle and reference for Shanghai's urban economic vitality during the initial establishment of the market economic system in the 1990s.
In contrast, after eliminating the characters of Xiao Mao and Hu Sheng in the original work, the only remaining character that runs through the whole story, Abao, as the only male protagonist, is slightly flat: he has a shiny oily head and an evil smile from time to time. Close-ups of masculine symbols such as expressions, cufflinks, and suit collars, as the escorts between Miss Wang, Lingzi, and Li Li, occupying the absolute center of Ferrers, as well as the simple and honest Mr. Fan, the "eye bag" Other male characters such as Mr. Xiao Wei and the greedy and lustful Boss Jin are also relatively stereotyped, showing typical male self-imagination. From character creation to character growth and transformation, they are far less plump and three-dimensional than the female characters in the play.
Uniquely Wong Kar-wai's literary accent
Furthermore, the core of Wong Kar-wai's films is not about writing about people, but about writing about emotions, about cities, about the forgetfulness of history, and about the never-reachable ideals.
As described by Zhang Jiande, the earliest scholar who studied Hong Kong films, the urban space and images captured by Wong Kar-wai’s lens are often interactive and integrated. “On the one hand, it presents the inexhaustible energy of the city itself; Obvious marks, which may be called 'systemic flaws'." In the TV series "Flowers", we can often see this kind of "systematic flaw": the use of scene mise-en-scène to replace the conventional front-reverse shots of dialogue scenes in TV series, or the use of abstraction when just explaining the narrative without emotional purpose. The images of each frame are intentionally separated from the narrative, which invisibly creates a TV drama image style that breaks away from the confinement of storytelling and uses the emotional drive of the characters in the drama to promote the development of the plot, that is, using emotions as the reason The reverse order and interlude narrative create a certain suspense. For example, when Po said goodbye to Li Li, as the "farewell" emotion intensified, the scene flashed back in reverse order to the farewell scene of the body of his first love Xuezhi in Hong Kong, explaining Xuezhi's ending to the audience, and metaphorically speaking when Po , why he went to Hong Kong to attend the funeral. So, how does Wong Kar-wai's literary style composed of this emotionally driven narrative write urban and cultural history?
For Wong Kar-wai, who was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong with his family when he was young, the twin cities of "Shanghai and Hong Kong" have always been the core expression of almost all his works. For example, in his "Trilogy of the 1960s", "Days of Being Wild", "In the Mood for Love" and "2046", Shanghai's urban nostalgic space and the emotions lingering in the exotic music are presented. A kind of illusory imagination derived from individual memory, just like the contemporary Shanghai of reform and opening up under the filter of romance and nostalgia in "Flowers". If you try to find real Shanghai and real life in Wong Kar-wai's films, you will inevitably It's a futile effort. Because that is the Shanghai in his imagination, a lost memory and a broken history, and a rootless expression of Wong Kar-wai's self-identity.
The ending of "Flowers" shows that the former capital heroes on Yellow River Road have died, and the cigarette seller changed the name of his stall to "Passenger". This is exactly what Ah Fei in "Days of Wild" said to himself. The self-trope of "footed bird" is also the wandering narrative lacking a sense of belonging in the novel "My City" by Hong Kong writer Xi Xi. It is also the fate of the knights heading away into the desolate desert in "New Dragon Gate Inn" directed by Tsui Hark, or It is Stephen Chow's "Nonsense" and New Arts City's "Happy Ghost" comedy series that deconstruct grand narratives in a way that both point to a "Hong Kong fable" at the end of the 20th century.
"Ashes of Time" directed by Wong Kar-wai looks like a martial arts film, but it actually tells a story about forgetting; just like "In the Mood for Love" is about love on the surface, but it actually expresses historical nostalgia and the experience of nothingness. ; "Fallen Angel", which looks like a Hong Kong gangster film, actually reveals a sense of anxiety and uncertainty of fate. The protagonists in almost all of Wong Kar-Wai's films embody a sense of dissociation and distance, with predetermined fate-style voice-over narration. Not just to explain the plot, but as a metaphor as a historical footnote.Although the knights and killers on the screen are the protagonists, they are actually passing by in a city. For example, the reshaped Mr. Bao in "Flowers" is like the "footless bird" Ah Fei. He has been the all-powerful man on the Yellow River Road for many years and can only be this city. The passing ending of the city is Wong Kar-wai’s own “Shanghai-Hong Kong complex”.
The biggest problem in "Flowers" stems from Wong Kar-wai's "Shanghai-Hong Kong complex". The epilogue of the original work depicts a pair of French young people who want to make a Chinese movie. Abao and Husheng discover that the French have a completely misunderstanding of the emotional structure of the Chinese and the city of Shanghai. They complain: "The French don't understand Shanghai. Just dare to take random pictures." The completely opposite conversation between the French youth and A Bao and Hu Sheng seems to have become a misplaced metaphor for Wong Kar-wai's writing of the history of reform and opening up in "Flowers". Hong Kong director Tsang Kwok-hsiang's spectacle writing of the college entrance examination is also reflected in "Young You". The latter weakens the significance of the college entrance examination system in changing the fate of millions of candidates and families. The former also weakens the fundamental changes that reform and opening up brought to the fate of hundreds of millions of Chinese people at that time, such as the narrative passage in which Miss Wang was sent to the factory to study. wait.
The literary and artistic tone of "Flowers" directed by Wong Kar-wai is deeply loved by the audience. It is a gratifying performance for Wong Kar-wai and the future development of domestic TV dramas. It will help change the homogenization of content, lightness of art and value of only traffic. The hollow aesthetic fatigue proves that not only TV series with stereotyped genres, stylized narratives, and reliance on popular stars have a market, but well-produced, high-investment, and pursuit of artistic quality works can bring both economic and social benefits. In the future, many excellent literary works such as "Protagonist" and "Echo" will be adapted into TV series, and famous directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige will also join them. I hope that future film and television art creators will pursue more diverse cultural and aesthetic creative expressions and not let "Flowers" has become a masterpiece of domestic TV dramas.
(Author Chen Yishui Source China Women's News)
