Recently, I suddenly wanted to watch Duras' "The Lover". I don't know why, maybe it's because the weather in Shanghai is too hot, maybe it's because I miss Southeast Asia.
I went to the library to borrow a book, but I didn’t find it. Last weekend night, I lay in bed, found this 1992 movie from the Internet, and watched it again. It was almost two in the morning, but I couldn’t sleep at all. .
1992, think about it, it was already 25 years ago, so scary!
The first time I watched "The Lover", I was still in junior high school. What age was junior high school? Fourteen or fifteen years old, about the same age as the heroine in the film. Fourteen or fifteen-year-old boys who are in puberty, you should understand what is going on in their minds. There was no Internet at that time, and the small county in Hubei, my hometown, was blocked from information. Apart from TV programs, the only channel we could access to the "outside world" was probably VCD.
That's right, I live in the VCD era, and I'm an ancient.
Because of the strong demand of the people, video stores were very popular. At that time, the social atmosphere in China was far from being open now. Even the normal Hollywood sex scenes would be considered poisonous "porn films" by adults. Therefore, the owner of almost every video store They all have a few secret drawers, and in the drawers are those "shameful" VCDs. Unless you know the boss well, he won't easily show you the small drawers that may cause him trouble, especially is for minors.
I am a good boy with good academic performance. I have listened to my teachers and parents since I was a child. I didn’t even dare to enter the game arcade, let alone go to the video store to ask the boss for those mysterious VCDs hidden in the small drawers.
But sometimes, the owner of the video store will put the mysterious VCD that was originally in the small drawer on the outside shelf, especially those movies whose covers look very simple, for example, this "Lover".
The cover of the poster of "Lover" is the face of a 15-year-old French girl, yellowish, nostalgic, pure but with hidden desires. On a hot afternoon in the summer vacation, I borrowed this movie I don't know what the content is. , took it home, oh, there may be another reason, I know Tony Leung Ka Fai, a foreign movie actually has a Chinese actor I know, which makes me curious.
My parents were not at home, I was lying on the mat in the living room by myself, the one outside the window was screaming, the ceiling fan above my head was spinning, I was nibbling on the iced watermelon, and casually watched the picture of "The Lover" on the TV screen gradually unfold. , Just after I watched it for about ten minutes, I suddenly realized that I might have dug up a "treasure", and subconsciously got up quickly, pulled the curtains tightly, and locked the door.
Compared with the covert sex scenes in Hollywood movies, the expression of eroticism in European movies can be called "shameless" unscrupulous.
I can't say it was "The Lover" who educated me about sexuality, but at least the naked and tragic scene of Tony Leung and a French girl in a sultry and restless street hut in Saigon, Vietnam made me realize for the first time in my life what it means to be real So "sexy" that I didn't take it seriously when some classmates took me to peek at those low-level and vulgar real porn films. Because "The Lover" actually allows a teenager to vaguely feel some kind of beauty that is exclusive to eroticism in adolescence when the sperm is full of worms, this starting point seems to be a bit high.
Relying on this method, I have collected a lot of mysterious and sexy VCDs in various corners of the video store one after another. Now that I think about it, it is really incredible, because they are all masterpieces that I only learned about later, such as Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction", such as Almodóvar's "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Up", such as Jane Campion's "Piano Lesson", etc., fourteen or fifteen years old I did not really I understand those movies, but because of the strong primitive impulse in my heart and the erotic aesthetics that I was hoisted up, I was able to get in touch with these movies early in the isolated and remote hometown of a small county. Is it some kind of fate?
On the hot afternoon of the summer vacation, I hid at home and watched "The Lover" repeatedly, fast forward, slow down, fast forward again, slow down again, I couldn't explain the reason, I just thought it was beautiful, beautiful, everything was beautiful, Vietnam This country, which is very far away from me, became a combination of stuffiness, noise, depression, eroticism, and release in my still young mind. Until I grew up many years later, I actually went to Vietnam. This deep-rooted impression Still nothing has changed.
I really set foot on the land of Vietnam. When I was on the streets of Saigon, I was already 28 years old. The Internet began to rule the world. No matter how remote and isolated the small county towns have been overwhelmed by the rapid explosion of external information, I no longer secretly harbor evil intentions. Adolescents who searched for mysterious DVDs in the corner of a video store, no longer had a long summer vacation while staring at the splendid and beautiful movie footage on TV while being alert to whether there was any movement at home.
When I was in Vietnam, there was no other special feeling, I just felt like I walked for many, many years before I finally walked into the scene of "The Lover", and the movie still doesn't seem to end, and it seems like I'm walking in Saigon At a certain moment on the street, I can pass the young Leung Ka Fai and the younger French girls.
Vietnam is such a strange country. It is strange that it is located in the laid-back Southeast Asia on the one hand, and was once a French colony on the other hand. On the one hand, it is a socialist country, and on the other hand, it has all kinds of love and hate with the United States. hatred. The complicated and ambiguous history makes Vietnam look like a half-old milf who has experienced vicissitudes of life and has a variety of styles, both sophisticated and passionate, both terrifyingly obscene and terrifyingly pure.
I was sitting alone in a cafe on the streets of Saigon, watching the drip coffee dripping into the cup in front of me. What I couldn't erase from my mind was after all, two warm and flushing bodies in a dim and cluttered small room on the streets of Saigon.
Last weekend, until I finished watching "The Lover" all over again in the early hours of the morning, I realized that something was wrong. Why are the erotic scenes that I have seen many times in my memory only clicked? Could it be that I was too young at the beginning, so that the erotic drama was enough to keep me watching all afternoon? Or, as I get older, I can no longer find the fun of my youth?
It turned out not to be the case. I learned in the comments below that the version played directly on the Internet has been cut for about half an hour. As for the content of the half hour, everyone should be clear in their hearts. The original era It has not developed as openly as we imagined.
Well, I haven't fallen asleep anyway, so I found the nearly two-hour full version on the Internet overnight, and looked at the deleted part carefully, as if to find the damaged one. After childhood toys, I want to work hard to piece it together.
When I am over 30 years old, when I watch Leung Ka Fai and the French girl entangle and pull in the hot Saigon hut, my mentality is completely different from when I was a child. What I see is no longer just lust, or the so-called beauty on the surface of lust. , and also saw the weakness and tenderness of the Chinese man played by Tony Leung, saw the struggle and shame of the French girl, and saw the fierceness that they used their bodies as weapons to try to break down the opponent to gain the upper hand, and at the same time they were afraid of hurting themselves. And retreat, I saw the arrogance of the market in Vietnam engulfing these two people who didn't belong here, and I saw that because of the passage of time, it was like a dream, but now it reappears in front of my eyes, like an eternal freeze in the back of my mind. An indelible scene.
So, I always wanted to go to Vietnam to see it for myself, always wanted to go, and it seems that this movie also subconsciously led me on the first step on the road of travel. After all, I have been to Vietnam, but I have been there, but I can’t tell it. Its depressing and dullness can more strongly stimulate the primitive desires of human beings. In that lustful place, you act like you are being pinched by something. Before I release myself completely, some things seem to happen in Vietnam, and they can only happen in Vietnam. Without Vietnam, everything will become untenable.
For example, "The Lover", a shocking story about a 32-year-old Chinese man and a 15-year-old French girl's erotic entanglement, can be generally accepted and regarded as a classic in the Western world where there is almost "zero tolerance" for pedophiles. In addition to the author's control over the subtle scale of human nature, I think that Vietnam, where the story takes place, is also a potent drug that has contributed to the rationalization of this unreasonableness.
(Okay, I talked a lot about Vietnam today, I will write about this country next time, although I didn’t have any stories there myself, ahaha)
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