Saw In the Mood for Love for about the fifteenth time (this has to be the 5th time on the big screen) and it still remains my favourite film, something which I also managed to say to Maggie the other day before I completely broke down into adolescent over-excitement. Maggie came on stage for the fifth and last time of the festival to introduce it, dressed casually in Jeans, one of those fashionable peaked caps and the Cinema China T-shirt. She rather generously spent the introduction downplaying her own considerable contribution to the film in favour of the work of the prolific William Chang, Wong Kar-wai's regular art director, producer and editor. She called him Wong's 'muse' and said that he was so talented that he could 'take three aprons and turn them into a dress.' Mark declared his intention to invite William Chang for a masterclass in next year's festival. I'm looking forward to it! I was very happy that In the Mood for Love managed to attract a bigger audience than hero (300 people in the screen plus a good many more queuing for returns).The second film of the evening was Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948), often cited as the greatest Chinese film ever made. It certainly was incredible, with Wei Wei's performance as the sometime submissive, sometime vampish wife of an ailing small town intellectual particularly striking. Her banal married life is shaken by the return of Dr Zhang Zhichen, a former lover and by coincidence also a friend of her husband's. Whilst the husband represents the outmoded past, quite literally 'the sick man of Asia', Zhang represents the modernity and progress that the Communists were claiming to be ushering in. In this sense the film's ending, in which the wife Yu Wen chooses to return to her husband and watches her lover leave, was deemed by critics at the time to be conservative.
The film is astonishingly subtle, slowly articulating the relationship between the characters through a series of disolves and camera pans, a style that, along with its sensitive portrayal of a woman suffering from a banal marriage, makes the film remeniscent of Mikio Naruse's work, particularly Repast (1951). Moreover pairing the film with In the Mood for Love, another film on the theme of sexual repression and social propriety, was a stroke of programming genius. Its fascinating to see the different films tackling the film from their different historical and social view points. I returned home that evening to find my housemates intently watching Chungking Express - In the Mood for Love clearly made an impression, and rightly so, it just gets better and more nuanced with every viewing.
1 comment:
I am not sure what kind of critics you refer to, but I doubt Fei Mu had intented to depict the two men as two archetypes at the time; and the idea of Yu Wen leaving her sick husband for the new modern intellectual would be out of the question, simply because it would be against social conventions and traditional morality. That's why Dr.Daruvala called it 'Fei Mu's Confucian humanism' (love in constraint).
In fact, Spring in a Small Town was critized in Zhong Guo Dian Ying Fa Zhan Shi vol.1 (Chinese Film History, 1963) for 'paralysing people's morale to strive for a new society', for, unlike other allegorical films, it dealt with individual romance without any regards to social currents and was, again I quote Dr.Daruvala, 'critized as an decadent reflection on the weakness of a bourgeois intellectual'. In other words, it was not Yu Wen's choice of lover, but Fei Mu's choice of subject matter that was deemed as conservative...
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