It took a few days to finish watching Tony Leung Ka Fai's movie and the original book "The Lover", and write down my thoughts.
Friendly reminder contains spoilers. "The Lover" is adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel "The Lover" by the well-known French writer Margaret Duras. The film was released in 1992. When John Lone rejected "The Lover" for the filming of "Farewell My Concubine", the male protagonist It is played by Tony Leung Ka Fai. About the plot: It was the French colony of Vietnam in 1929. Tony , the son of a rich overseas Chinese from northern China , and Jane , a fifteen and a half year old girl from a sickly and poor fatherless French family . Tony met Jane, who was dressed maturely and beautifully, on the ferry. He trembled and chatted with the white girl in front of him...
Naturally what happened later, Tony took Jane to his mansion, a place where wealthy Chinese people often used to hide their pets in a golden house. They meet here, have sex, bathe, play, and Jane doesn't even go back to school at night. It was soon revealed that, ironically, the elder brother who stole and smoked opium, the mother who was collected by Indian creditors, and the younger brother who was often crying, all these constituted Jane's broken home. Jane's family is really short of money, so her mother found the school and asked the school to give her daughter freedom. In this way, under the semi-acquiescence of the family, the two spent a long time together. In the process, Jane has always emphasized that she is with each other for money , but they fell in love with each other over time. In fact, the chances of them being together are practically nil. Although there is little hope, Tony still asks his father to marry Jane. The father does not agree and asks him to marry a Chinese woman of the right family, otherwise Tony will be kicked out of the house.
Tony without money is nothing, he is just a rich second generation without any ability to work. Tony finally married the woman he didn't love, and he was addicted to opium, just like his father. Jane and her mother are also going back to France. Before leaving, they will go to the mansion again. People go to the empty building, and a sense of desolation fills their hearts. At this time, Jane was eighteen years old. Tony helped her family pay off all the debts and the cost of returning to France. She and her family took the ferry back to France. The picture is the same as the beginning of the movie, except that it was her first encounter with Tony, and now it is a farewell .
The content of the movie "The Lover" itself is not very complicated, but the things expressed are relatively obscure. If you don't read the original book and understand the author's life, then watching this movie will have a lot less content. So what exactly is this work trying to express? To sum it up in one sentence: If I hadn't met you, I would have been a prostitute on the Mekong River. The title is used for a sentence by the original author Margaret Duras: "If I don't write novels and are not a writer, then I should be a prostitute." "The Lover" author Margaret Duras is French, what is your first impression of France? French romance, a French woman wearing perfume, a creamy soup brewed for three hours, a street full of shit, or the Eiffel Tower? Napoleon or Balzac? Everyone has their own answer . For Duras, a French girl who was born in Vietnam, the word France was too far away for her when she was a teenager, and it was so far away that it was despairing . Since "The Lover" is a semi-autobiography of Duras, the following Duras = Jane Duras was born in Vietnam. There is no romance in Saigon, Vietnam, but only backward and sultry, and a future that is too dark to see hope.
Duras' parents remarried, and the two went to the French colonies to teach in French colonies. Unfortunately, my father passed away early, leaving behind a widow who was neither good at investing nor good at education. Duras's mother did not pay bribes with local officials because she was not humane. She was fooled into buying a piece of saline-alkali land that was not suitable for farming and lost all her savings. Although the mother worked hard to earn money to support the family, after this investment failed, the family's financial situation worsened and the family owed a lot of debt. Duras' mother is neither good at investing nor good at education , and her eyes are always on the waste eldest son Bill. Bill stole, smoked opium, often went to the opium shop for credit, and treated his younger brother and sister very rudely. As bad as Bill was, he had almost all the love of Duras' mother.
In the original book, Duras used a lot of words to describe her dress at the age of fifteen: a brown silk dress, her brother's belt, a men's hat, gold silk high heels, powder, and dark red lipstick. After describing a lot, he said indifferently: "You say I'm beautiful, you say that's what it is." In 1920's Vietnam, semi-feudal land, chaotic history and society, a fifteen-year-old girl dressed up like this means ostentatious. Duras knows what it will attract, and her mother should know too. But her mother didn't care , and neither did Duras. The mother doesn't care about Duras' academic performance, nor about her little details. Duras' hat in the movie is an example. She had been wearing the men's hat for a few months, but it took her mother a few months to realize that her daughter was wearing a hat that neither white women nor local women would wear.
The mother doesn't care that her daughter's French grades are very good. She only needs her daughter to learn mathematics well and become an accountant in the future. Or obey the arrangement of the French government and get a job after graduation to take care of lepers. The mother doesn't care about the younger son either. In her eyes, most of the time in her heart, she is the eldest son who is ineffective. She is always worried that the eldest son will not survive. When she talked about her eldest son, she always said, "My son," and when she treated Duras and her younger brother, she simply and rudely called them: two little ones. The younger brother is always crying because of the neglect of his mother and the intimidation of the elder brother. Duras, who had lost her father and lost her father's love, has never experienced much family affection . If people who have had this kind of growth experience can empathize with it, it is an attitude that nothing matters .
So Jane in the movie will discuss with her classmates: instead of taking care of lepers after graduation, it is better to be a prostitute. It is a reflection of her childhood and family ills, a psychological challenge that arises from the absence or dysfunction of the relationship with her father, mother, siblings. This is why in the film Jane agreed to be taken away by a rich second-generation yellow race after she heard that her classmates were working as prostitutes. On the one hand, she needs money, and on the other hand, she wants to challenge this line of psychological defense, which is the madness of suppressed desires to the extreme .
In this way, the fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl lied that she was 17 years old, and then was taken to an apartment in Chinatown and an indescribable happened. For an underage girl, this is a terrible gamble. If she hadn't met Tony, her future would have been a prostitute on the Mekong River. Passers-by can ask the kind of romantic woman how much money. But what Duras met was Tony, the second-generation rich man in China, who regarded her as a treasure. Tony would carefully scrub her blood, hold her for a bath, take her to eat expensive Chinese food, and buy Duras cosmetics, clothes, and shoes. Tony helped the impoverished family pay off the debt. If it weren't for Tony, the French girl would have to sell her body to many people. In fact, Tony fell in love with each other from the first meeting, as can be seen from the details of his trembling asking if you smoke.
Duras fell in love with each other later, but she was afraid to admit this feeling. She repeatedly emphasized that she was only selling her body for money, and she kept stressing to herself that this was a business , how could she fall in love with a weak yellow race! The funny thing is that she is obviously a poor Caucasian, but she is high in front of Tony. What's even more funny is that in Jane's eyes, admitting love is actually more shameful than admitting greed for money . When Tony invited their family to dinner, Duras ignored Tony's chat all the way, just like her family ignored Tony the whole time. This made Tony's self-esteem trampled. After returning to the apartment, he treated Duras rudely. After finishing the incident, Duras smiled and asked, "How much does a prostitute like this cost?" Tony angrily took it out of his wallet. Throwing the money to the other party, in fact, at this time Duras had already fallen in love with the other party. Duras was afraid that the other party would fall in love with her, and she was also afraid that she would fall in love with the other party, so she chose the cruel method.
A rich young man brought a French girl to see the prosperity of the world. When Duras, who had experienced vicissitudes since childhood, was fifteen years old, his mental age was already as old as a sixty-year-old old woman. She thought she had lost the ability to love someone. However, love is like a sneeze that cannot be hidden, and love is here. Their love is faced with racial discrimination, cultural differences, age gaps, and class differences. They all know this cruel reality. So they always emphasize the word "money", as if in this way, the pain of parting will be less. In the end, Tony was forced to marry the woman he didn't love. The French girl Duras returned to France to study, and she finally realized that she had lost her lover.
The misfortunes of the past are not terrible, but the loss of the ability to love someone is terrible. Fortunately, she met a "lover" who loved her. What the hell did "The Lover" say, I think it's almost here. This experience made her understand what "love" and "lust" are, awakened Duras, and made her understand how to express this passion. Duras later said: For me, love is not a skin-to-skin relationship, it is not a vegetable and a meal, it is an immortal desire, a heroic dream in a tired life. A French teenage girl who almost became a prostitute is lucky enough to meet someone who loves her instead of simply playing with her body. In the end, Duras chose to express in words. She became a writer and made a living from words.
After that, Duras' emotional history can be said to be very rich, and many literary works were born during this period, including "Hiroshima Love" and "Black Hair and Blue Eyes". In Duras' literary works, you can see her love for "love" "Pursuit: Hiroshima Love: You torture me, I feel so comfortable Lover: We are lovers, we can't stop loving each other Duras' last boyfriend is a die-hard fan who is 24 years younger than her, this young man's real name is Jan May Le, Duras renamed him Jan-Andre Steiner. At that time, Andrei was 27 years old and Duras was 66 years old. After writing letters to Duras for five consecutive years, he finally got a response from Duras and came to the other side. Andrei spent all day arranging chores and manuscripts for Duras, even sneaking out when he saw his mother. In addition, her boyfriend Andre had to endure scolding, and was often kicked out of the house by Duras. Duras would call Andre a liar when he was in a bad mood. This does not affect Andrea's love for Duras at all, and Andrea also wrote a biography for Duras, titled "I, Slave and Lover"
Going back to the beginning of "The Lover": I was getting old, and one day, in a public hall, a man came up to me. He took the initiative to introduce himself and said to me: I know you and will always remember you. At that time, you were very young and everyone said that you were beautiful. Now I am here to tell you that, for me, I think you are better than You were more beautiful when you were young, when you were a young woman, and I love your devastated face more than your face back then. The stream-of-consciousness writing of "The Lover" opens up another world, and its creation was largely inspired by Andre. ——"The Lover" was completed in 1984, when Duras and Andrea had lived together for 4 years. The stream-of-consciousness writing method of the original book makes many people feel a headache, and the movie "Lover" is easy to understand, and those who have seen it should understand what I mean. By the way, for the two leading actors, the casting of the male protagonist of the movie "Lover" has twists and turns. Arnold first looked for suitable candidates in Hollywood, but he found that most Chinese actors who could survive in Hollywood played a single role type: taxi drivers, restaurant waiters, gang members and so on.
These actors were too far from the refined and elegant aristocratic image that Arnold was looking for. Arnold then set his sights on Asia, looking for suitable candidates in Beijing, Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong. Most of the roles offered to him are martial arts actors, or local drama actors and Peking Opera students. The former may pass the test in English, but the image does not match. The latter has a better image but it is difficult to find candidates with sufficient English proficiency. When he was about to leave Hong Kong, Italian director Bertolucci recommended Hong Kong actor Leung Ka Fai to him. Tony Leung was hesitant before taking on "The Lover", worried that his English proficiency would affect his interpretation of the character. After learning that Arnold did not have a suitable candidate, Tony Leung decided to try to play the male lead. Facts have proved that Leung Ka Fai not only meets the requirements, but also adds a lot to the character of the young master through acting and appearance. The young master in the original book is not as attractive as Leung Ka Fai, but more cowardly and weak.
In addition to the sexy buttocks, Leung Ka Fai alone pulled the role of the young master from 7 points to 10 points. Many foreign netizens agree that he is a typical handsome and sexy Chinese man . Go to the comment section under Youtu Turtle's The Lover video to find out. The heroine's performance is also good, but the original author Duras was not satisfied with the choice of this role, because the actress Jane March is a girl from the English countryside, and she originally preferred Adjani. It's just that Adjani was close to 40 at that time, and the director Arnold felt that it was not in line with the character and rejected it. After excluding thousands of candidates, including interviewing more than 150 in person, it was Arnold's wife who discovered Jane March's picture in a British teenage magazine. After seeing the photo, Arnold thought that Jane would be the best candidate. After the personal interview, Arnold was more sure of his ideas, and finally settled on Jane March
Post a photo of Adjani when she was young. In terms of appearance alone, I personally think that Adjani when she was young is indeed more suitable, but this is also impossible. In the end, I watched the uncensored version. If those plots were deleted, the story would be less coherent, so try to watch the original version if you can find it. Returning to the movie, the content expressed in the film version of "The Lover" is too obscure, and eroticism is only a small part of the development of the story. The crew focused too much on "erotica" when promoting the film, which made most readers ignore the core of the story behind it.
So the movie's rating is around 8, which is a little bit high and low .
The content of this article is the original of the public z number [Zhou Keer's World], please contact me for reprinting
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