After all, the name of the original work is better, just like Mo Yan's "Big Breasts and Fat Hips", there is a kind of sensuality and tension that the text itself exudes.
Sister Gong Li's acting skills are also really good, but she is really not suitable for playing Songlian. In my mind, Songlian is like a piece of slightly yellowed paper, thin, pale, and somewhat neurotic.
The sadness performed by Gong Li is not the kind of neurotic sadness, it is too bland.
Perhaps the handling of the film itself, however, is also problematic. Song Lian is just "fresh", the novel is just about a fresh "person" how to be suffocated to death in that corrupt deep mansion compound, like a vine wrapped around a dying old tree, until it also melts for ashes. But in the movie, this was dealt with as corruption's strangulation of the advanced. Later, it seemed that he finally woke up.
When it comes to "corruption", the movie really failed to capture this atmosphere, and the desolation feeling of "a hundred-footed insect, dead but not stiff" is almost absent. In this regard, Lao Zhang really has to learn from Mr. Hou Hsiao-hsien of Taiwan.
Perhaps Director Zhang also felt the inadequacy of this aspect, so he added ritual things such as "lighting on", "lighting out" and "sealing the lights". No matter what, once it becomes a ritual and is repeated continuously, it will generate a special aura. I don't hate this add-on ritual, but it feels more like a remedy. No matter how good the pudding is, it still makes people uncomfortable.
What annoys me the most is that the well has become a "house of the dead". The word "House of the Dead" is more like the deep ancient castle in the West, which is blunt and terrifying like a ghost movie, but "well" is different.
"Well" is a rouge-smelling, fragrant thing, where corrupt things fall, and you can see your own reflection in the well. It is more suitable for the big mansion gate in China.
Song Lian finally couldn't roam around the well, and after all, she was just "crazy" in a rather mediocre way. Song Lian was not crazy because of Mei Shan's death, but because she saw her own reflection in the well.
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