Structural midlife crisis
One of the major events of Hong Kong women in 2008 is likely to include meeting female friends to watch the movie version of "Sex and the City" (hereinafter referred to as SATC). Unfortunately, as far as the film is concerned, the SATC movie version is really inadequate. Its fetish and fairy tale packaging are frank and naive, and it is said in a very old-fashioned tone: "Every year, many girls in their early 20s come to New York City. Pursue famous brands and love. Twenty years ago, I was the same as them, but I knew the fashion trends of famous brands very early...so I focused on love." The dream wedding of the heroine Kelly is the focus of the SATC movie. It also implies that the women will live as before after marriage, just like the last sentence of the fairy tale, "The prince and the princess (and the princess's girlfriend) live happily together forever." The conservative consciousness is a bit surprising. What is relieved from the beginning of teaching people is that the story of "Girl" starts from where SATC ends: middle-aged women have no love, and the two outlets for middle-aged middle-class women are families born out of love, and The careers that have been promoted under the lowered tone of love have brought frustration to women and can no longer be practiced as life giving meaning to themselves. These are probably enough to constitute a "structural midlife crisis" for men; of course, Diane English is more mature than Ni Zhen in that the female characters she wrote no longer use love to solve emptiness.
Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) has a husband in the financial industry, a lively and lovely daughter, and a capable housekeeper and super nanny at home. She worked as a part-time designer in her father’s garment factory, and she also followed her mother as the chairperson of the Women’s Association. She organized a garden lunch for women in the community. She spent time studying gardening and cooking. She was educated, thoughtful, and neurotic. It's a little bit reckless. With eight legs and many claws, when there is a day of manicure, I heard from the gossip manicurist that her husband had an affair with the sexy perfume girl Kistou Crystal (Eva Mendes), and she was calm. His life collapsed. In the locker room of the lingerie store, she lost her battle with Kistu. She confessed that her husband and wife had a showdown in the dark. They lost their goals in life and suffered betrayal from Sha Fei at the same time.
Shafei, the editor-in-chief of a women’s magazine, gradually lost the trust of her boss, and found that her editing methods that emphasized depth, dignity, criticality and star-rated writers were gradually being marginalized; she was afraid of losing her life-long job, and she was temporarily worried. Randomly sells Mary's marriage incident to a "Sister Bazhen" columnist. But even if he betrayed his friends, and even handed over to the boss problems that he had originally disdained from his young men, he still failed to keep his job. The ultimate despair of professional women is that even if they sell themselves, they still cannot restore the defeat.
Feeling that she has lost her life goal (in fact, she went to the field to participate in a learning camp close to nature), but she was awakened by the magical Hollywood manager and lived for herself, so she designed her own fashion brand; she regretted betraying her friend. When Fei was looking for Mary, she accidentally became Mary's daughter's life mentor (i.e. mother). The two friends exchanged positions in life and reconciled as before—not a big breakthrough, but a reorganization of existing elements. At the end, Shafei started her own magazine and fell in love again. As for Mary, her husband expressed his renewed love for her, and the brand she designed was also favored by the Fifth Avenue store. However, because she cherished her single life, she was unwilling to The brand became mass production, but hesitated without a response. The script of "Female" started in 1939 "getting self-worth by engaging in creative work", and there are no surprises or miracles. Let's look at it this way: The symptom of the rebellion of the contemporary middle-class women in "Female", the small drug citation of the bomb, lies not in the grand plan but in the rejection of persistence, or the hesitation of a moment of considering rejection.
Adhering to Political Correctness
The Women was originally a stage play written by Clare Boothe Luce in 1936, in 1939. George Cukor filmed it into a Broadway musical. This time, Diane English adapted "Girl" with contemporary New York as the background. It is a middle-aged fairy tale (compared to youth fairy tales, middle-aged fairy tales involve more gender shake than recognition). There are some classic feminist solutions. The above "being in creative work" is a very politically correct suggestion.
The Women has always adopted all-female roles and no male roles. This time it is the same. The supporting roles who walk and pass the camera on the streets of New York are all women, not even a single male (this also symbolically illustrates the movie It is impossible to be truly "realistic"), this tradition is deliberately used by the director as a declaration of creating a world of "female self-sufficiency". In the previous game, Mary twisted all six people, and she would still be persuaded "to forget her arrogance and don't divorce", but this time she shifted the focus from the relationship between husband and wife to the friendship between women. For mothers and female friends, a woman who is out of love and family is like returning to the nest, so Mary's mother said to her with deep joy in her eyes: Your divorce is unfortunate, but I am very happy that you still need your mother. Mary believes that being betrayed by a friend is much worse than betrayal in a marriage relationship; and "phantom pain"-after losing a limb, but feeling that the limb is still there-describes not losing her husband, but losing friends. The film uses the tough, lustful and big-speaking gay female writer Alex (Jada Pinkett Smith) to completely replace the performance function of male characters. And Mary's first meeting with his girlfriends after knowing her husband had an affair was also in the lesbian bar.
Female genealogy, generations of mothers and daughters, a series of mother-daughter dialogues: Mary's mother said that forbearance of an affair is over; Sophie and Mary's daughter Molly even have "sex before love" as close to education Even Annette Bening is a little struggling to do the topic of TV. Even if Mary is married, she doesn't want to talk about every detail to her friends. This is an upbringing that refuses to peep. A scene that symbolizes the collapse of Marie Chingxu, but it says "No one can give Stephen greater happiness in bed. I can suck out the nails from the plank and it must be a fact!" These few sentences involve sex. Explicit lines. Well, it can be seen that the burden of middle-class women is really big, and they are too gentle to vent and lose control.
The only male character in the film is the son of Eddie (Debra Messing) who was born at the end of the film. The baby boy who sweeps across the screen like a star falls. It can be said that his very old land symbolizes a "new "Beginning", but it also symbolizes "cessation"-Eddie, who has given birth to four daughters, finally "chases her son" and fulfills the responsibility of "mother". Those who believe in "production" have already revealed the card of the Fordist era: this is probably not a post-feminist taste that emphasizes "consumption."
Downed feminism
"Female", which invested 16 million US dollars, was neither well received nor popular. There was a lot of scolding when browsing the American online short reviews. It seems that the original stage play in 1939 was too classic, and many people thought the adaptation was eclipsed. Without the context of the original work, no one has ever written a film review in Hong Kong. Do you think the average Hong Kong female audience would like it? No, they like SATC, and they don’t think there is no wonderful dialogue in "Girl"—I almost immediately remembered how Shafei was defeated by young women in a magazine meeting: she kept thinking about "make a statement" and be a magazine that can reflect on herself. Dissatisfied with the hypocrisy of slimming and beauty advertisements; the new young woman suggested that the topic of "revenge" is to find a young model to make the whole thing irresistible, and then make the magazine a guilty pleasure for the entire publishing industry. Shafei thinks that revenge is an old-fashioned way of thinking, contrary to what she thinks of "love herself"-and her colleague immediately intervened: But I will buy that magazine. Oh, relying solely on sensory intuition and waiting to be incited by consumers. Which is new and old? The "new" defined by classic feminism has been chased by consumerism. Like Sha Fei, some women groups with conservative thinking have a strong voice, but in fact, they are self-consciously weak, full of crisis, and make mistakes of conformity and betrayal at any time because of lack of self-confidence.
I would like to believe that "Female" is a counterattack of classic feminism wearing a consumerist guise, but it has not received the sympathy of the public. The director of a TV series is undoubtedly slow and procrastinated due to lack of skill. Everyone beats the water dog. No one thinks that looseness, procrastination and caring for details are also a kind of feminine traits. In the film, she opposed the trend of weight loss many times. When Shafei discovered that Molly was also fasting to lose weight, she wailed, "Look at what we have made the world like". This is the same as her three women or pretending to be hunting in a high-end department store. Good time is the difference between Tianyuan—maybe the director means: when facing the next generation, we are closer to virtue.
However, those cartoonish bitchys, which are often seen on TV, aroused strong reactions. Some online film reviews said, "No one likes those self-centered hate women." It feels a bit like Hong Kong men hating Hong Kong women. At the same time, under the film’s consumerism code, there is an external critical point of view, so the characters are so unlovable, and the female consumers’ sense of identity is not high. If the goal of the film is to re-enlighten the public with the ideals of classic feminism, in other words to judge its success or failure by relying on public acceptance, then the failure of the film will become a mountain of evidence, because they voluntarily abandon those who are measured by sincerity. category. Even this ideal seems to be outdated: pretending to be the public, walking between them, unknowingly changing them, in a society with well-defined barriers and over-skilled society, it is almost impossible.
"Female" is weak as a movie, but it is still easier for me to accept than SATC. But thinking about the reality of social, cultural and political politics, and thinking of all areas involving prostitution or social supervision, the division of the female group camp is frustrating. The same politically correct feminist enlightenment thesis is sung every day. Are those female groups no longer wildly vigorous and only left with conservative dignity? Before our spirits and energy are exhausted, and the woods are dead and the gray chickens grow up, at least sown a little more radical seeds.
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