[The revised version of this article was first published in "Southern People Weekly" on November 14, 2016]
British writer Sarah Waters was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for " The City of Thorns " (Sarah Waters, Fingersmith , Virago, 2002. Chinese translation) Published by Baihuazhou Literature and Art in 2009, the translator Lin Yuwei) has a paragraph, saying that the eldest Miss Maud was poked by one of her fangs and felt uncomfortable, and the maid Su put on a thimble to grind her teeth. This detail coincides with the title of the book and has strong sexual implications, and the reader knows more information than the characters in the book, and the resulting drama brings reading pleasure. However, the Korean director Park Chan-wook, who became famous with "Old Boy" ("올드보이", 2003), read it here, but he was a serious occupational disease and decided to put the novel on the big screen. In almost all interviews, when he traces the motives of the filming, he will mention the grinding scene: the friction between metal and teeth, the intimacy of the flesh, the gasp and sight of the woman - the sound and image are so rich, the tension between the characters is so strong, if you can break through the paper How wonderful is the fence of the page?
This is the only East Asian film "Miss" ("아가씨") in the main competition at Cannes this year. After the film was released in South Korea in June, it finally met with audiences around the world. The background of the story has changed from England in the 19th century to Korea during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s. Earl Fujiwara (played by Ha Zhengyu), who was born in the lower class but made a name for himself in Japan because of deception, deliberately set up a plan to win the Japanese aristocracy. The property of Hideko (Kim Min-hee). He finds Shuxi (Kim Tae-ri), a young woman in the thief group, to be Hideko's personal maid, in order to entice the young lady to marry him.
Like the novel, the film adopts a three-paragraph narrative, roughly "positive-negative-combination" structure, and gradually deviates from the original novel. The director is acutely aware of the different nature of film and literature - while Waters can wrap a protracted and repetitive plot with literal beauty and narrative style, film is nakedly exposed in a fixed time period and must be narratively clean. neat. He left out all the plots in the original work that were clarified by the characters' confessions, and the repetitive narratives in the first two parts also made people feel no procrastination at all because the details were first hidden and then revealed. Waters himself said that "Miss" is not an "adaptation", but a completely different work.
"City of Thorns" has been adapted into a TV series by the BBC before. After learning about it, Park Chan-wook decided to add his own element to the script of "Miss": the self-colonial tendency of Korea during the Japanese occupation. Both male characters in the film pretend to be Japanese, Hideko's uncle is out of cultural inferiority, and the earl is out to make a living. The two women are the exact opposite. The Japanese lady and the Korean maid both have a mild self-identification, skillfully alternating between Japanese and Korean bilinguals without any particular obsession or preference. It is in this master-servant relationship that is neither humble nor arrogant, the feelings between the two women are born, and the hypocrisy of the two men is the starting point of their downfall.
After the Cannes release, Western film critics generally held a positive attitude towards "Miss", while the domestic response was somewhat mixed. The main reason for the Chinese people's criticism is that they feel that the two female characters are "sex and ruthless" and cannot see the emotional portrayal. The problem is that the emotions of the characters depend on the specific works, and you can't use your own understanding of love to rigidly set the emotional world of others. Hideko was controlled by a cruel and perverted uncle since she was a child, who trained her to recite erotic works to please the male guests who came to participate in the book auction. She has long been numb to any narrative of love and sex. However, these blushing pictures and texts are all on paper, the pages are like a cage, and the uncle's library is like a prison, using the shell of civilization to imprison the purity of desire to satisfy his own perverted desires. Hideko's relationship with the illiterate maid is a metaphor for escaping the cage, which is concretized in the second paragraph as destroying the book, becoming a symbol of subversion of patriarchy and the pursuit of freedom. Xiuzi's emotional world is closed, and facing the possibility of freedom provided by Shuxi, both of them are at a loss, the only thing they can do is to deduce the sex on paper on the bed. This is the truest emotion.
There is also a game of identity exchange between the master and the servant, starting from the two people changing clothes to each other, until the flirting scene in front of the lunatic asylum. This was originally a drama that was made clear by the confession of characters in Waters' original work, but Park Zanyu just used images to express it within the narrative clues. In the process of exchange and fusion, the two women rejected others and built a fortress with a sense of intimacy. "The New Yorker" film critic Tolentino, Although "Miss" is completely different from "City of Thorns", it has won the essence of the novel, that is, the kind of freedom that can only be found in the private world among women. In the ending scene, Hideko and Shuxi on the run take out the golden bell and practice a sex scene in Uncle's lewd book. They laughed out loud, as if mocking the fierce but pedantic and fragile patriarchal society. Park Chan-wook understood the complete freedom from the physical to the social level in Waters' book.
Private collection recommends
Park Chan-wook's " Robot Love " ("싸이보그지만괜찮아", 2006)
Reason for recommendation: In addition to revenge, violence and strange octopuses, madhouses are also elements that Park Chan-wook likes. In his work, the line between madness and normality is blurred and constructed, as the French philosopher Foucault put it. This pre-production, which won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, uses the dream-making art of film to turn the rich inner world of the mentally ill into wonderful art.
BBC's " Fingersmith " (2005, TV series)
Recommended reason: This three-episode mini-series is the earliest film and television adaptation of Waters' novel "City of Thorns", and it is more faithful to the original. Many of the BBC's dramas are not very original and artistic, but the classic directing techniques and meticulous costumes, makeup and art design make people have to accept them. Of course, there is also a high excess of acting resources in the UK, with Sally Hawkins and Imelda Staunton two Oscar nominees among the show's actors.
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