Life is a futile snow, with only illusory beauty. ——"Kawabata No Me"
The evaluation of "The Legend of the Demon Cat" seems to be polarizing, and the box office is less than one-third of "The Ex 3". But that doesn’t stop it from being among the top three best movies I’ve seen in 2017.
The Tang Dynasty created by director Chen Kaige in Xiangyang is extremely majestic, with the eerie atmosphere of the dream pillow tapir monster idiom, and in the shell of Chinese film language, it contributes a literary dreamland from a Japanese perspective.
Every shot makes people stare; every actress is even more beautiful than the actor herself. Zhang Yuqi said in an interview that she filmed the scene where she was eating cantaloupe with her back to the camera. I asked Chen Daocheng more than ten times, but Chen Daocheng refused to bully me!
The most unforgettable thing is the moment Yang Guifei appeared on the stage, her beautiful eyes were as deep as the sea when she raised her head, and the bloody fingertips crisscrossed on the lid of the concubine's coffin at the end.
The clouds are like clothes, the flowers are like faces, the spring breeze is blowing the threshold and the dew is thick. This legendary beauty, who was worshiped by thousands of people as a symbol of the prosperity of the Tang Dynasty, was also pushed out as a scapegoat when the dynasty declined, becoming another spokesperson for the "beauties are a disaster".
The Japanese are very obsessed with this noble concubine. People not only rate her as one of the three beauties in the world, but also say that she survived the catastrophe and fled to Japan to leave her descendants. She even helped the Japanese Emperor defeat the enemy. There was a palace coup.
Chinese legends are much simpler. The first half of Song of Everlasting Sorrow is extremely luxurious, while in the Maweiyi Incident, there are only six sentences about the death of Concubine Yang:
The Sixth Army He has no choice but to die in front of his horse.
The flowers are left to the ground but no one can collect them, and the green buds and jade are scratching their heads.
The king hid his face and could not be saved. Looking back, blood and tears flowed.
The profile depicts the flower hairpin falling to the ground, the king covering his face and crying. Isn’t that very subtle? So how did the imperial concubine die? Gao Lishi strangled him, what else is there to discuss?
But the Japanese will be confused, how did the imperial concubine die? What is the scene like when you die? What was the king's state of mind at that moment? Is there any room for him to struggle? In this blank moment that Chinese history books cannot pay attention to, a huge space of imagination extends.
So the Dream Pillow Tapir weaved an illusion that made Emperor Tang Ming agree to the "Corpse Dissection Method" in the hope of preserving both the country and the beauty. Chen Kaige, on the other hand, was even more decisive. Tang Minghuang conspired with everyone to deceive the imperial concubine and let her die with her love and hope for him. Not only killing people, but also killing people. In the movie, the emperor held the concubine's hand and said: "At this moment, I want to hand over my head on the plate, but this violates our vow to grow old together." How disgusting! Abe's narration on the side expressed the audience's thoughts: "It turns out that the emperor is the greatest illusionist."
In the movie, the imperial concubine's end was already tragic: she was deceived into drinking poisonous wine and fell asleep. , woke up in the coffin again, scratched and suffocated to death. In the original work "Kukai Samana", the plot is even more terrifying:
Huang He, Bai Long, and Dan Long slowly moved the coffin lid away.
The scene in the coffin was slowly revealed.
The Supreme Emperor seemed a little timid. He was about to close his eyes, but then he leaned out and looked at the situation inside the coffin through the slowly moving gap.
We looked at the sarcophagus almost at the same time.
"Oh——" Emperor Xuanzong swallowed his cry.
Inside the sarcophagus——
The imperial concubine was lying in the sarcophagus.
The imperial concubine is indeed lying in the sarcophagus.
However, how to describe her changes.
The green silk hair has turned into a head of white hair, and the originally fair and plump skin has turned into a dark brown color, shriveled and dry, like dry paper.
Moreover, his body shape is indescribably thin.
Her head - her cheeks are so sunken that the shape of the skull can be clearly seen, and the skin is shriveled, like a piece of tissue paper stuck to the skull.
His eyes were wide open, looking up at everyone, not knowing whether he was alive or dead——
No matter what, it was an indescribably miserable face—— < /p>
The entire face was skewed and twisted in terror, with the lips turned up and teeth exposed.
I don’t know if it was produced by the imperial concubine, but the sarcophagus was even filled with the stench of dried feces and urine.
Everyone’s eyes seemed to be frozen, and they could not look away from the imperial concubine’s appearance for a while.
"Oh..."
Emperor Xuanzong called out in a hoarse voice.
"My concubine, your concubine, how could you--"
After finishing speaking, Emperor Xuanzong turned away.
"What on earth is this-"
Huang He also looked down at the imperial concubine with an expression of disbelief.
The imperial concubine’s hands were placed on her chest.
When I saw the fingers of the imperial concubine, I almost vomited on the spot.
Because none of the imperial concubine’s fingertips had a complete nail.
The fingertips were stained with blood.
In the original work, this stunning beauty was buried alive underground for two years. When she was dug up, she was still alive, but she had become a crazy old woman. Beauty turns into withered bones in a blink of an eye, how cruel this is! Thinking about her life again, her parents died when she was a child and she was living under someone else's roof. She married a prince when she was young and was taken away by her father-in-law. Finally, she died tragically as a victim of political struggle. It can be said that everything is fate and no one can control it at all.
Japanese literary works seem to be very fond of using Tang Xuanzong and Yang Guifei as the background of the story. For example, "Brain Hell", known as "the first of Japan's four great mystery books", the story is also set in this period. It tells the story of the Xuanzong era when the Yang family's relatives came to power. There was darkness inside and outside the court, and the young painter passionately served the country and hoped to let his beauty rot. Trying to awaken the emperor's dissolute and immoral heart. Why is this?
This may have something to do with Japanese aesthetics.
A few years ago, Fuji Camera released an advertisement that impressed me deeply. It was called "Beauty and Death".
It says: Life is a futile snow with only illusory beauty.
The cello whispered as a beautifully described geisha rode a train into the cave.
Think about our domestic camera advertisements, is it possible to shoot them like this? Which one is not a sunny lawn wedding, wah ha ha ha ha ha ha, handsome men and beauties smiling happily?
I had the feeling of this picture when I read "Kukai Samana". When I read Kawabata Yasunari's "Snow Country" decades ago, and when I read Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" even earlier, I felt the same as when I saw the Fuji advertisement above. There is endless desolation and desolation between the lines, and the pursuit of beauty. What’s going on with this consistent temperament about the memory of death?
This is about Japan’s unique aesthetics of mourning.
In Japanese, "sorrow" is originally a modal particle, similar to "ah yo", which refers to the emotions arising from facing people and nature, and even life, from contact to understanding to being moved. Later, it included sadness, compassion, praise, love, cries and other interests.
In the collection of ancient Japanese poems "Man'yoshu", most of them talk about a bird flying away and a flower dying. As for love, they mostly talk about the distress rather than the joy in it. In the Japanese classic "The Tale of Genji", the word "sorrow" alone is used more than 1,000 times, but the author has not even the slightest trace of the unfaithful love affair between Genji Hikari and a group of noble women and the tragic ending it led to. Not critical, but with sympathy and pity for everyone.
Some scholars say: Among all human emotions, only unsatisfactory things move people the most. In love affairs, it is easier for unethical love to express the beauty of this material sorrow: burning with no future until the fire of fate is extinguished, and finally decaying into ashes in silence. It is easier for Japanese literary works to write about extremely sharp and even hysterical people and objects, while the imagery in Chinese literature is generally thicker. There is no difference between the two, but they have different temperaments.
Think about it carefully, isn’t this the life of Concubine Yang? Extreme beauty, extreme luxury, shocking and unethical love, and the sudden end of tragic fate have all created her legend. This scene was also shown in the movie: at the end of the banquet of bliss, Concubine Yang turned her head and left, with a trace of sadness in her eyes, as if she had a premonition that misfortune was approaching. Good things in the world are not strong, and colorful clouds are fragile and glass is brittle. What could be more heartbreaking than watching a beautiful, innocent and lovely person break in front of your eyes?
This is why Bai Long has been guarding her body for decades and refused to leave, and his obsession has turned into a demon.
The detailed description of how the beauty of life disappears constitutes the entire context of "The Legend of the Demon Cat".
Some people feel that the plot of "The Legend of the Demon Cat" is indescribably strange. That is because the demon cats, illusionists, and aesthetic images are all Japanese-style.
As for "The Legend of the Demon Cat", how did you get rid of Bailong's obsession? Let’s talk about it next time.