Tsui Hark "discovered" Yang Ying again in the movie "Dragon King of Di Renjie's God". He portrayed her as an oiran. For Yang Ying, this was just another popular choice, while for Tsui Hark, he rarely depicted a purely beautiful woman with no additional meaning.
Yin Ruiji, played by Yang Ying, appeared on the stage with her pipa half-covered. The cameras looked at her from various strange angles, but the audience just couldn't see her face, which made her appetite. In the whole film, Yang Ying mainly appeared in two scenes, one was Yin Ruiji's performance when she was an oiran, and the other was lingering on the bed after being attacked by monsters. This is really in line with the Chinese people's classic imagination of a peerless beauty: she must be ornamental, she must be weak and need protection.
Tsui Hark is known for being good at portraying beautiful women. The movie characters he creates often amplify and strengthen a certain characteristic of the actor, which is a rediscovery of both the character and the actor. So there is the heroic Lin Qingxia, the exquisite Maggie Cheung, the domineering Carina Lau, and the inhuman Wang Zuxian. When we mention the women in Tsui Hark's films, we always add the word "odd" because they have more interesting qualities besides beauty. In "Dragon King of Shendu", Yang Ying only acts with her face. She is the desire center of the four male protagonists, and one of them does not dare to look at her.
This is probably also Yang Ying's beauty trait. Her beauty is geometrically precise, so smooth that it is beyond words. Adding any adjectives, it seems out of place. Even beauty exists alone by controlling the individual. Yin Ruiji did not show any attractive qualities. Her entire value lies in her looks, so she naturally needs to be enshrined, she needs a rocker camera to bow her head to the court, and the Tang Dynasty needs to dispatch the army. Protection requires Wu Zetian's jealousy, and a man who turns into a monster to guard her infatuation.
Such beauty emphasizes the high maintenance costs, not only in beautiful clothes, but also in a commensurate story structure. In "Love in the City", Yang Ying plays a female textile worker, which always makes people feel unrealistic. In "Tai Chi", she plays a heroine, but her 75-pound body can only be played with moves. The part where she played the "lover" in "A Lovely Thing" is more convincing than her role as a policeman. "Dragon King of Shendu" is suitable for her. Her beauty has become a certain driving force for the progress of the story, but it is not the decisive driving force, so she will not bear too heavy meaning. She has to be moral, and not sell herself in a brothel, so that beauty is not easily devalued. She is extremely weak and requires strong, even supernatural powers to be able to protect her.
Whether on or off the show, Yang Ying has nothing to do with personality. Her most common image is the cover of one fashion magazine after another. As for her personality, no one summarizes her like Fan Bingbing and Zhou Xun. Yang Ying's exquisiteness is the porcelain on the upper shelf of the trellis, illuminated by a small lamp with soft light, and no one will use it to serve a bowl of fish ball thick noodles.
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