Today, the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival announced that the chairman of the Golden Goblet Award jury will be French-Vietnamese director Chen Yingxiong.
Many viewers may be unfamiliar with this name. Senior movie fans may have seen his masterpiece Vietnamese trilogy " The Taste of Green Papaya ", "Tricycle Driver" and "The Taste of Summer", or adapted from the original work of the same name by Haruki Murakami. "Norwegian Wood", or "Fondue" which helped him win the Best Director trophy at the Cannes International Film Festival last year.
Looking back on the film themes, style and award-winning honors of this director born in the 1960s, the sentence "China has Wong Kar-wai, Vietnam has Chen Yingxiong" may straightforwardly let everyone understand his position in the history of world cinema.
Like Wong Kar-wai, he has won the Best Director Award at the Cannes International Film Festival. The two of them started making feature films in the 1980s and 1990s, but their output was not high. The number of films they have directed so far is around ten.
At the same time, they all prefer in-depth discussions on the relationship between men and women in love and marriage, and interpret society and human nature with their own unique worldview.
There is no doubt that these two directors are masters of creating "atmospheric" literary films. Their respective styles are extremely outstanding. The audience can often feel the strong tension, delicate emotional portrayal, and various inclusions in their films. Metaphorical details.
The two of them have also portrayed typical oriental women with oriental aesthetic characteristics in many classic films. For example, Chen Yingxiong in "Tricycle Driver" portrayed a sister and boss lady who was full of tragic fate and sacrificed everything for the family. Wong Kar-wai in "Tricycle Driver" The stubborn and tenacious Gong Er portrayed in "The Grandmaster " is also unforgettable, and has become one of the representative characters of Zhang Ziyi .
looks back on Chen Yingxiong’s filmmaking experience. He was born in Vietnam. When he was 12 years old, he fled the Vietnam War with his tailor parents and settled in Paris. He studied philosophy at a French university. Influenced by the film "The Prison Break" directed by Robert Bresson, a representative of the New Wave,
decided to change his studies to film and entered the Louis Lumière Academy, which specialized in training cinematographers, to study photography techniques.
1993, Chen Yingxiong launched his first feature film "The Taste of Green Papaya", which won the Camera d'Or at the 46th Cannes International Film Festival and the Best Debut Award at the 19th French Film César Award. He also won the Nominated for "Best Foreign Language Film" at the 66th Academy Awards.
In 1995, the feature film "Tricycle Driver" directed by Chen Yingxiong won the Golden Lion Award at the 52nd Venice International Film Festival. The film tells the life story of a young tricycle driver in Vietnam. The entire film has a very stream-of-consciousness style and a storyline. It's not that coherent, but if you taste it carefully, you can feel the director's intention, the real Vietnam under his lens, and the exploration and lashing of human nature.
Chen Yingxiong also invited Wong Kar-wai's "Queen of Heroes" Tony Leung to star in the film. He played a silent and lonely poet in the film, and his true identity was a small gang leader.
We can see his familiar melancholy eyes, the contradictory pain and entanglement of personally pushing his lover into the "pit of fire" and becoming a prostitute, and the tragic ending of self-destruction is even more embarrassing.
There are rumors that in order to invite Tony Leung to join the film, Chen Yingxiong took into account that the actor did not speak Vietnamese, so he specially changed the script so that the role of "poet" had almost no lines. In the end, this lonely, contradictory and full of pathos was achieved. Textured character.
Last year, Chen Yingxiong won the Best Director Award at the 76th Cannes International Film Festival for "Fondue". The heroine of the film is French actress Juliette Binoche, who is very familiar to Chinese audiences.
As a movie with the theme of French food, the director directly gave up the narrative in the first half hour and just purely showed the protagonist's process of making food. The light and shadow pictures were as textured as oil paintings, and there was no background music but the sound of pots and bowls clashing. The director's bold "minimalist treatment" in the "cooking scene" is admirable.The subsequent director of
described the relationship between the characters through the actions of the male and female protagonists in preparing meals and cooking. Although there is no ups and downs in the plot, the audience can still feel the timelessness and vitality of love between people through this pyrotechnics.
is looking forward to the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival to be held in June, and will meet director Chen Yingxiong in Shanghai to enjoy this feast of light and shadow together.
