One of the recent topics of the public account is "the attractive Chinese actresses of forty years old have no play to act". However, I thought of a French movie from 2014 ---
Sils Maria
In fact, this phenomenon does not only occur in China, it may be a characteristic of the film market in today's era.
Of course, the reflection of this movie far exceeds that.
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"Sirs Maria" is directed by French director Olivier Assayas, starring Juliet Binoche. There are also two popular American flowers-Twilight female Kristen Stewart, and the heroine Chloe Moretz in "King of the Sea".
The story of this movie is like this: the heroine played by Juliet Binoche (for everyone’s convenience, I’ll just use the actor’s name) is a star actor in her 40s. When she was 18, she played Produced a drama "Maloja's Snake" written and directed by the big movie star. There are two characters in this drama: one is a young, free, ambitious girl with "fatal appeal" Sigrid, and the other is a middle-aged, mediocre, fragile "middle-class tragic woman" Helena. These two The woman meets in the play, Sigrid releases a strong attraction to Helena, which makes Helena fall into it, but is finally abandoned by Sigrid and ends in suicide.
At the beginning, the young Juliet Binoche became famous with the role of Sigrid. This is also the most glorious record in her entire acting career, which directly established her sense of accomplishment and literary temperament as a female star in all aspects. Until the age of 40, she was still a star-studded star, a beautiful middle-aged artist with both virtue and art.
However, one day, the director passed away. Juliet Binoche was very sad, but received an invitation to perform: a young director of the new generation wanted to remake the show, and hope that Juliet Binoche would play the forty-year-old character Helena. And Sigrid is played by the current normalizing traffic Xiaohua Ke Luo.
This request made Juliet Binoche uncomfortable, and it also gave her a sense of self-doubt and crisis. However, perhaps out of nostalgia for the lost director, or out of hidden confidence in her own charm, she finally agreed to play this role.
Next, she began to seriously prepare to integrate into this role. She had her hair cut short, dressed in a neutral dress, and lived with a young female assistant (played by Christine Stewart) in the mountain villa where the director lived during her lifetime, practicing her lines and rehearsing attentively every day. The result was very frustrating for her: she found that it was in vain that she wanted to give the character charm or personality anyway. This role is pathetic, mediocre, weak, and at the mercy of others. On the other hand, she also tried to understand how she felt in the face of young women, consciously or unconsciously substituting it into her relationship with the assistant.
With the rehearsal of the play, the originally harmonious and tacit relationship between the two gradually became contradictory. This young assistant, who usually seems to admire and admire himself, is calm and sophisticated, suddenly turned into a rebellion. why? As I said before, Juliet Binoche has always been a mature artist with both virtue and art. In order to portray this role, she forced herself to understand the flow of the new Sigrid (she doesn’t even bother). Look at how she is usually followed by paparazzi, how she is stunned by reporters, how she is interviewed under a hangover state, she says incomprehensible answers, and how she starred in some rotten popcorn movies covered in science fiction.
Juliet Binoche sneered at all this. She made no secret of expressing all kinds of ridicule at the flow floret in front of the female assistant, and this made the female assistant unbearable. Because the female assistant and Flow Xiaohua are the same age, in her opinion, Flow Xiaohua is very personal and very self-directed. The movies she plays are what girls of this age like. Juliet Binoche's ridicule and disdain just make the assistant feel superficial and ridiculous. (From the depths of the female assistant's heart, she herself deeply agrees with this, so she can't stand it even more.)
On the other hand, the female assistant has to bear the negative emotions of Juliet Binoche during the rehearsal of the drama. She also had a deep insight into Juliet Binoche’s inner fears and doubts: As time goes by, does my charm really disappear? Have I finally become that sad and fragile woman?
In short, it was the accumulation of contradictions that was not a day’s cold. One day the two broke up because of a small matter, and the female assistant left Juliet Binoche alone without a trace.
Juliet Binoche still has to continue to finish the play. She finally met Liu Xiaohua, and she was also observing this Xiaohua. Xiaohua also has all the characteristics of Chinese traffic Xiaohua: business is not good, but long-sleeved dance, likes to socialize, is trapped in lace news, and the media's attention to lace news is obviously greater than her drama achievements.
During the rehearsal of this play, Juliet Binoche noticed that people didn’t pay attention to the play itself at all.
When Juliet Binoche was a little frustrated, a little-known director sincerely invited her to play a role in a sci-fi movie, and she suggested that the little director find Flow Xiaohua to play it. But the little director felt that Flow Xiaohua didn't have that kind of strength and aura. The role he wanted was outside of time. The irony is that such a little-known director who seems to be making a loss-making movie knows Juliet Binoche. It also seemed to wake her up.
At the end of the film, Juliet Binoche will once again formally act in the role of Helena in "The Snake of Maloja". In the first few minutes of the curtain opening, her eyes are shining and thoughtful.
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Maloja's snake is a natural phenomenon. At the Maloja Pass in Switzerland, the accumulation of rain and vapor formed a white cloud, walking slowly along the mountains, like a huge white long snake. This allusion comes from the black and white silent film "Maloja's Cloud Phenomenon" shot by German director Arnold Fink in 1924. In the film, this is also the place where the director lived in seclusion. It was watching the beautiful spectacle of the long snake strolling, which inspired him to create the script of "Maloja's Snake".
In my opinion, the Serpent of Maloja is feminine charm, magic, freedom, and unpredictable nature. In this movie, all female characters can be mirror images of each other. Each projected itself on each other. An excellent European art director would not design the cliché plot of "playing someone else's mother when he was 40". The homosexual relationship he constructed in that play was not a deeper narcissism complex of women. ?
We may feel the female magic of the "Maloya Snake" in a certain golden age of youth. With the passing of years, the medium of age is gone, and after the narcissism ebbs, we can only face the mediocrity. Reality, withered and frustrated? Or is it kidnapped by the various female labels constructed by social values, so that you forget what it feels like? In fact, after watching this movie, you will find that the "Maria's Snake" on every woman has nothing to do with youth. She is a kind of self, but it is easy to be restrained, suppressed, and obscured.
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Olivier Assayas has always been a director I like very much. He is Maggie Cheung’s ex-husband and has previously made a movie "Clean" starring Maggie Cheung. The story is about an isolated and helpless Chinese woman who died suddenly of her husband, quit drug addiction in a foreign land, repaired her relationship with her son, and regained control of her own life. At that time, I was very impressed with the film's narrative method: the relationship between each pair of characters has a tacit understanding of ice and snow, but the relationship is completely constant and there is no tension. The heroine seems to be alone in the middle of the sea, only to swim desperately to find an island. Otherwise, it is the ups and downs in a blank and desolate state.
What this director is very good at is to make full use of the perspectives of the characters to examine each other. He doesn't make subjective judgments about anything, but instead allows you to constantly change angles to look at the same thing. In Sils Maria, Juliet Binoche's role is also very subtle. She is a successful actress who possesses one of the essential qualities of every person who dreams of a star, "feeling that she is the center of the universe" (sayings of Tsai Kangyong). Acting as the girl with "fatal attraction" made her feel the happiness blessed by the force of "Maria's Snake". On the other hand, it also made her more and more dependent on the role of self-construction. And when reality forced her to break this narcissism and jump out to see everything, how could she not be that young, superficial, and narcissistic flow flower?
Of course, this movie still reflects the characteristics of the two generations of film and television industry representatives. The heroine played by Juliet Binoche has always been artistic and humanistic. She would cut her hair short, let herself retreat in seclusion, and rehearse herself to get closer to the role; on the other hand, she was always grateful to the director who discovered her and established a relationship with the director’s wife. Very sincere friendship. After being questioned by the young assistant, she frankly admitted that she had admired the director, but she also had an instinct to make everything more passionate than polite, and did not destroy the purity and beauty of this gift of knowledge.
As for the small traffic, I didn't prepare for the filming at all, and didn't care if the show was good or not. Knowing that you are a popular one, you are paying attention to your every move, and you can fall in love if you want to fall in love, regardless of whether someone is already a husband. So, as I said at the beginning of this article, this may be reflected in the Chinese film and television industry that "40-year-old glamorous actresses can only act as mothers or have no movies to film." However, the flow of small flowers dominates, the mainstream of the commercialization of the film and television industry. Maybe it is a common problem in this era.
When watching Xu Zhiyuan’s interview with Yu Feihong, I felt Xu Zhiyuan’s anxiety and grief: Goddess such as Yu Feihong went to film vulgar TV series. In his opinion, this is Yu Feihong’s "betrayal of his own temperament." And Yu Feihong smiled and replied to him: This is a role for me, I will not rely on this role to get spiritual nourishment, the role itself is not the source of my spiritual nourishment.
Wisdom is like sister Feihong! Regardless of what is right in the film and television industry, the smartest is beyond transcendence. Not being kidnapped by any label and social ethics imposed on others, letting the "Snake of Mary" be excavated and maintained like a spirit of vitality is the kingly way that every woman should practice.
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