On January 1, 1993, the ninth day of the lunar month, it was recorded in the almanac: Do not travel.
At the entrance of the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, a car drove up and crashed into Mr. Bao, who was carrying a suitcase, and the 300,000 yuan in cash in the box was scattered all over the ground.
Uncle said that in the future, the history of the Peace Hotel will be written, and this scene will be a strong stroke.
This scene is intertwined with fiction and reality.
Because, it is not true, but because of the episode in the drama "Flowers" directed by Wong Kar-wai. Mr. Bao (played by Hu Ge) and Uncle (played by You Benchang) are both characters in the play.
However, the Peace Hotel is indeed one of Shanghai's most iconic buildings. Formerly known as the "Huizhong Hotel" (South Building) and the "Chinachem Hotel" (North Building), it was built in 1903, exactly 120 years ago. In 1956, the North and South Buildings were integrated into the Peace Hotel, which has been in operation ever since.
The Peace Hotel witnessed Sun Yat-sen's speech that "the revolution has not yet succeeded, comrades still need to work hard", Chiang Kai-shek's engagement dinner for Soong Meiling, Premier Premier's meeting with foreign dignitaries, and Clinton's stay in ......It is the first modernist building in Shanghai, and was also known as the "first building in the Far East", which makes the century-old legend of the Huangpu River have the most similar display.
It is no wonder that in "Flowers", Wong Kar-wai uses the Peace Hotel as one of the main scenes.
Wong Kar-wai, who was born in Shanghai, has never set the scene in his birthplace, even though there are many Shanghainese elements in his past works, from "The True Story of A Fei", "In the Mood for Love", to "2046", which depict Shanghainese living in Hong Kong, using light and shadow to create a fantasy dream of old Shanghai. He has said before that it is difficult to make a movie about old Shanghai, because the prosperity and sophistication of that era are gone.
Now, he has directed "Flowers", which is the first time he has focused his camera on Shanghai, and it is also him-
The first time to make a drama.
When Mr. Bao was knocked off the beach in the same year, Wong Kar-wai was filming "East Evil and West Poison" in the northwest, and in the movie, there was also a "Peace Hotel" - Dadong Inn. "East Evil and West Poison" is a masterpiece of Wong Kar-wai's line style, and it is also commonly used in various online parodies.
If the language style of "Flowers" inherits "East Evil and West Poison", Hu Ge's lines should be like this:
Many years later, I have a nickname called Mr. Bao, anyone can become rich, as long as you know how to **...This year, there are stock market crashes everywhere, and where there are stock market crashes, there are troubles ......”
However, after watching the drama in advance, Wenyu Chunqiu found that the drama version of "Flowers" is not like the usual stream of consciousness of Wong Kar-wai's films, but has a very clear and dramatic main story, if you want to classify it, we will classify it as a "business war" theme. It intercepts the passage of the success of the male protagonist Po in the shopping mall in Jin Yucheng's original book of the same name** - this is a topic that we are interested in, so after watching the first few episodes, I can't get enough.
Obviously, the king of sunglasses knows what kind of content the audience in front of the screen wants to watch - to tell a complete story honestly.
This point, it can be said, is very "not Wong Kar-wai". But visually, it is indeed very Wong Kar-wai style.
Therefore, it is neither Wong Kar Wai nor Wong Kar Wai.
But we don't want to evaluate "Flowers" in depth at the moment, but try to ** the secret of Wong Kar-wai's filming of the first series-
Why did he "go down" to make a drama and insist on directing "Flowers"?
Farewell - for the first time, I secretly congratulated the historical accident 60 years ago - Wong Kar-wai, the seed of Shanghai, was planted in the soil of Hong Kong. In the following decades, it grew into a tree that has been growing, and looked back at Shanghai over and over again, felt Shanghai, and recorded Shanghai. What kind of accident happened?Wong Kar-wai only spoke to his hand-picked interviewer, John Powers, who was also literary critic, in WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai (2016), the only book of personal growth interviews in English. The royal father, who was a seafarer, not only fluent in English, but also had a community background, decided to leave Shanghai in 1963 under the special atmosphere. But ** stipulates that only one child can be taken away, so the fourteen or fifteen-year-old brother Wang Jiaqing and sister Wang Jiazhu were temporarily left in Shanghai, and the only 5-year-old Wong Kar-wai moved to Hong Kong with his parents. You know I know the reason everyone knows, the door was suddenly closed, and my brothers and sisters were never taken to Hong Kong for reunion, so they stayed in Shanghai forever. Wong Kar-wai's memory, what is there in Shanghai?The clip before the age of 5 is stable and elegant, "My mother took me home from work, from my grandmother's house on Wukang Road to Huaihai Road, those trees and shadows, and the ** heard by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra training" and all the gardens of the French Concession designed by my grandfather, but it didn't stop there. In my memory, the year I arrived in Hong Kong was full of sunshine and the radio in the air was unforgettable. But in fact, in Hong Kong, he and his family have always lived in the atmosphere of Shanghai. At that time, Hong Kong's population surged to 3 million in just a few years, and the Shanghai immigrants, who accounted for a large proportion of them, reshaped an old Shanghai with the old habits of Shanghai. At home, they still communicate in Shanghainese, and their mother wears cheongsam every day, and her delicate and exquisite Shanghainese style is the same as the habit of playing mahjong, which has not changed. Hong Kong is just a temporary refuge in the southeast, and life is still stuck in Shanghai, thousands of miles away. Almost every day after that, he would follow his mother to the cinema to watch movies, and at his father's request, he read all the literary classics before college. They also maintain daily correspondence with their older siblings, and although each letter is a long wait, it is also a little emotional connection between the Hakka Bird and the family back home. In those years, Wong Kar-wai's elder brother, as the head of the family left, not only experienced going to the countryside to cut the queue, but also was eliminated by the college entrance examination after the restoration because of this overseas relationship in Hong Kong. In addition to the words and the unspeakable, what is backlogged is "what the two sides do not know and do not understand, coexisting in the reality of the two places that cannot be dredged". (Kim Woo Cheng).
Wong Kar-wai with his parents when he was a child.
-Looking back-Wong Kar-wai didn't know, and how could he be relieved. He has never left home, and since then he has begun to release his feelings for the homeland of this city of birth in his works. Cheongsam, jazz, Shanghainese, slab houses, staircase handrails of old bungalows, semiconductor radios, mottled roads with tree shadows, and narrow alleys are full of bits and pieces. The gears of fate may have begun to turn when Jin Yucheng wrote the first paragraph of "Flowers" in 2011. "Go to the attic alone, preferably at night. At the end of "The True Story of A Fei", Tony Leung rode a horse to find a horse, the hero was dark, counted the banknotes under the electric lamp, counted them, put them in the inner pocket of the suit, counted them again, took out a deck of playing cards, opened them to take a closer look, and then found a pair. Next, comb your hair, divide your hair into three or seven parts, comb it in the mirror, your whole body is straight, your bones are slow, and finally, turn off the lights. No, this half a minute is the taste of Shanghai. The beginning of the "Introduction" of "*Flowers" is the end of Wong Kar-wai's "The True Story of A Fei". Why does it start like this?In Jin Yucheng's eyes, "The True Story of A Fei" has a lot of "Shanghai flavor": "One is that everyone lives in a narrow space, and the other is the way people behave - the way Leslie Cheung combs his hair in the movie, it seems that he has seen a lot and is very familiar." It means that only in this kind of big city will there be more special private shots, and there will be people who go out in the middle of the night, and all kinds of people who don't return home at night. He further explained, "One Ah Fei went down, and another Ah Fei came up. ....Flowers are like small flowers with strong vitality, this one is bright and that one is dark, it is this (Shanghai) taste. Wong Kar-wai, a self-proclaimed "Made in Shanghai and processed in Hong Kong", has been imagining and looking back at his hometown in his works, and has also photographed many Shanghainese living in Hong Kong. When talking about the "Shanghai complex" in his works, he said, "I grew up in this environment, and today I feel that it has disappeared, so I want to restore such a form on the screen." The nostalgia of Shanghainese at that time was Shanghai in the 30s, when they came to Hong Kong and wanted to reshape the world of the old Shanghai there, which was the dream of many people for Shanghai. In "The True Story of A Fei", A Fei's adoptive mother (played by Pan Dihua) is a Shanghai woman who speaks an authentic "old-fashioned Shanghainese". "In the Mood for Love" seems to be filming the Shanghainese settlement in Hong Kong in the 60s, but it is actually a dream of old Shanghai in the 30s. Wong Kar-wai and art director Zhang Shuping jointly restored the warmth and warmth of people in the alleys of Shanghai in their childhood memories and the warmth of vegetables and meals. The streets after the rain, the authentic Western restaurants and the cramped offices all present an image of old Shanghai that is not typical of aesthetics. Su Lizhen (played by Maggie Cheung) also has the projection of Wong Kar-wai's mother. The Shanghai master in his 70s has created more than 20 cheongsams, all of which are exquisite, just like a Shanghai woman, more like his mother, always dignified in good times and bad, and the makeup and skirt are not messy. 
-As it is-Ten years ago, the coldest end of the year. On December 8, 2013, writer Jin Yucheng's 61st birthday, in the hotel next to Zhang Ailing's former residence, Wong Kar-wai and Jin Yucheng met for the first time. Far away, Wong Kar-wai took off his sunglasses, which made Jin Yucheng feel that this was a stranger in front of him. A year ago, in December, Kim Woo Cheng finalized a book of posts posted on the Internet. When I handed over the magazine "Harvest", I couldn't think of the name well, and when I saw the cover of a fashion magazine Christmas ** at hand with the words "Flowers", I felt that there could be no more suitable than "Flowers". In March of the following year, a single book was published for the first time, and in June, the traditional Taiwanese version was published. At this meeting in December, Wong Kar-wai's first question to Jin Yucheng was, "I have seen the vertical typesetting, why is there no vertical typesetting in Shanghai?""Of course, there is no vertical typography in the mainland, but it is only a matter of culture. But Wong Kar-wai's other sentence, in front of the original author, was sharp: "I went to Shanghai and introduced it to several people, and many people in the film industry didn't know that (this **) was indeed the case." At that time, "Flowers" had just won some awards in the circle such as the first Lu Xun Cultural Award of the Year, and it was just a carnival in the literary world. However, Wong Kar-wai "hit it off at first sight" for "Flowers". It's not love at first sight, love at first sight will be exhausted. At first sight, it is like old wine, the older it is, the more fragrant it is. When they met and separated, Wong Kar-wai's assistant brought in a cake, and Wong Kar-wai said to Kim Yucheng, "Happy birthday." Jin Yucheng, who has never been a birthday, remembered a scene he wrote in "Flowers"**, "Xiaomao never has a birthday, but Husheng prepared it for him." Wong Kar-wai's familiarity with "Flowers" is like looking at a mirror that has been waiting for 50 years, "It can be said that I read this ** in one go, which complements my life in Shanghai after I came to Hong Kong in the 60s." This ** book is written about the lives of my brothers and sisters. The lives of Wong Kar-wai's brothers and sisters and his own growth story, Jin Yucheng didn't know anything before, he just recorded the story of the experience of a generation of Shanghainese in that era in "Flowers". Wong Kar-wai only mentioned this sentence, and Jin Yucheng understood. The second time they met, Wong Kar-wai took Kim Yucheng's short story ** collection "Lost Night" published in 1992 to ask Kim for an autograph. He also shared his feelings after reading: "I don't know if it's influenced by Zhang Ailing, Shanghai's literature is very female. But Mr. Jin's ** is full of male hormones, this ** is not rough, nor decadent, it is the character of a Shanghai man. Kim Woo-chung, who is 6 years old when Wong Kar-wai is the elder brother, happens to be the same age of Wong Kar-wai's brother. "Lost Night" tells the story of that period of history, the fate of that generation is similar to that generation, cruelty and loneliness. There is also a short story in "Lost Night", in 1961, the rations of the ** team were very small, and they were placed on the square table of the wheat field ** every day, and the prisoners began to cut the wheat one thousand meters away, which was equivalent to a race, and the first person to cut to the table could eat as much as he wanted. The characters in ** are not starved to death because they are Cantonese and swallow young rats in the wheat field every day. Probably, Wong Kar-wai saw the shadow of his brother in the countryside here. Even at the end of the 70s, Wong Kar-wai returned to Shanghai to visit his brother and sister, and found a mirror image in ** "Flowers": Bao's brother came to Shanghai from Hong Kong at the same time. Such a similar relationship between the two places did not only exist in Po, Jin Yucheng, or Wong Kar-wai, but also had too much resonance between Shanghai and Hong Kong at that time. At the Hong Kong Book Fair in July 2014, Wong Kar-wai said that he wanted to put "Flowers" on the big screen, and he praised "Flowers": "Flowers is Shanghai's 'Qingming Riverside Map', which hides the city's spirit and historical and cultural code. He understands, "Flowers, a dictionary in Shanghai, is not only a face, but also a lining. "What do you mean?""We must start from the sentence written by Jin Yucheng before the preface, 'God does not sound, as if everything is determined by me'. The word 'silent' appears more than a thousand times in the book, which is the powerlessness and helplessness of the little people in the face of the torrent of the times. The sound is drowned in the tide of history, and the only way to go with the flow is to silently 'not make a sound'. Wong Kar-wai said. No sound, does not mean silence, but a kind of blank space. These two words are the writing password of ** "Flowers", and they are also the adaptation password of Wong Kar-wai. In the summer of 2015, Wong Kar-wai's brother, who was never married all his life, passed away. It's another "no sound". In August of this year, "Flowers" won the 9th Mao Dun Literature Award. After his brother's death, Wong Kar-wai was asked if he would film this heavy history, and immediately said no, on the grounds that it would embarrass his family. The wounds of history will never be heard. Perhaps he prefers to express his passionate and warm feelings for his family in his works. At the first meeting, Jin Yucheng always had a sentence that he didn't say to Wong Kar-wai at that time, "When I wrote "Flowers", the deepest idea in my heart was: to let my readers, those who 'have names and surnames' like them - I hope that the people who read "Flowers" are the people I like, for example, there are Wong Kar-wai, Shanghai's Bao Ye (Xiaobao), Shen Hongfei, etc., not to make this book like literary critics, but to have more experience and life personality. Men like it, and this is the so-called scope of the author's 'ideal reader'. I thought about it at the time, but I didn't expect the director to really find it. It's too late to see each other. This year, Wong Kar-wai confirmed that he would shoot "Flowers". Because, he wants to know what happened to his older siblings. 
Dream Fulfillment - The poetry in the movie is mysterious and intense, everything is "like Shanghai", but in fact it is just Wong Kar-wai's imaginary Shanghai, but it is just nostalgic nostalgia. And this time, Wong Kar-wai, who stood on Huaihai Road with "Flowers", is no longer limited to returning to his hometown in Shanghai, he is really back, after 60 years. He said, "I have filmed a lot of Hong Kong themes, I am a Shanghainese, but I have never filmed the theme of old Shanghai, this "Flowers" is the third part after "In the Mood for Love" and "2046". There are always people who ask Jin Yucheng, Wong Kar-wai shoots, are you at ease?What's more, Lou Yefang, who also understands Shanghai, even promised a clear time for the completion of the film in order to grab the adaptation rights. But Wong Kar-wai has always been the initial choice that Kim Yucheng insisted on. Jin Yucheng is very sober about the adaptation, he said, a copy of ** to the director, it is a new life, it is impossible to copy the original work. Although when they met for the first time, Wong Kar-wai said, "Your ** has no film and television tendencies." Jin Yucheng took this as a compliment. Maybe the second half of what Wong Kar-wai didn't say was, "But it doesn't prevent it from being filmed." Wong Kar-wai was also distressed that "Flowers" "has no coherent story", and when he first started the adaptation, he couldn't help but sigh: "A thousand things!."But for Wong Kar-wai's creations, which have never needed scripts for filmmaking, it doesn't matter whether the text is filmed or not. Wong Kar-wai's last "down to earth" was the "Ferryman" directed by Zhang Jiajia, which he supervised, and the word-of-mouth Waterloo. You must know that Zhang Jiajia's ** is not too camera-sensitive, and I can't wait to sub-shoot one by one. In an interview in 2015, Wong Kar-wai expressed full confidence in the adaptation of the movie "Flowers", believing that "it is not as difficult as imagined", and plans to complete the filming of "Flowers" in five to six years, and the film will be completed in 2020, and the TV series version will be filmed at the same time. Who would dare to believe this?The speed of the rocket is not Wang's speed. Wong Kar-wai is not in a hurry, the audience is in a hurry, and Jin Yucheng is not in a hurry. When the two of them met for the first time and talked about "In the Mood for Love", Wong Kar-wai once asked Jin Yucheng, "What impressed you the most at the beginning?"Jin Yucheng couldn't remember. Wong Kar-wai prompted: "The rice cooker in the opening kitchen. Only then did Jin Yucheng understand the director's intentions: it took a lot of effort to find out why this rice cooker from the 70s was. With a rice cooker, Hong Kong women have time in the afternoon, can go out to play, and are liberated, which is an important object of the times. From this, Jin Yucheng also learned Wong Kar-wai's dedication to "things" as a director, "You have to have these specific things to put in order to be settled, and you don't care if others can see it." Another time, Wong Kar-wai took out 100 shikumen** and asked Jin Yucheng if he could pick out the five best-looking onesJin Yucheng realized that the author of the text lacked this kind of figurative visual sensitivity at all, and he definitely couldn't pick it out. Wong Kar-wai said conclusively, "I can pick it out". Jin Yucheng understands that the sensitivity of the image can be handed over to the director, and he will definitely be able to shoot the "Shanghai taste" in his childhood memory. What is Shanghai Taste?The most superficial is the Shanghai dialect of you and me. Wong Kar-wai believes that if the dialogue in the book is changed to Mandarin, it will be as unimaginable as Lao She's "Teahouse" removing Jingbai, so the adapted film and television drama will still retain the charm of the dialect in the book. For this reason, the first criterion for the casting of "Flowers" is to be able to speak Shanghainese, so that the rose gold watches, Palis fragrant gray trousers, "Night Tokyo" crab roe xiaolong, "Zhizhenyuan" hibiscus crab bucket, as well as those pies, gimmicks, sprouts, human faces, feelings, grievances and hatreds in the scene ......can use authentic and crisp Shanghainese dialect to express the original flavor. When it was broadcast on December 27, there was a Shanghainese version available online, and the Mandarin version of CCTV TV Drama Channel. A book that runs in dialect logic but does not write in dialects** will verify the charm of the original language in the two channels of the lines, which is strange and wonderful. In addition to language, Shanghai's mark of the times is extremely obvious. Wang Jin and Jin often talk about Shanghai in the 90s of the last century, and Jin Yucheng has a very clear impression, "For example, the Yellow River Road in Shanghai in the 90s, now I think about it, there was really that kind of so-called glory, if it is not recorded, it is really gone." For example, the Yellow River Road, Zhapu Road, the fifth day of the Lunar New Year to receive the God of Wealth, the owners of each restaurant on both sides of the road have a large number of firecrackers and fireworks, just like the competition, there are shops to carry out the fireworks as big as a single bed, now it is difficult to imagine this kind of scene, this night put down, the next day the whole road piles up a hill, sweeping the busiest work of the morning ......So the crew restored the Yellow River Road and Sinan Road 30 years ago in a 1:1 real scene, as a modern show of the fate of the people in the play. Restore not only the scene, but also the details. Wong Kar-wai hopes that Jin Yucheng can provide suggestions on the actor's style, "All the people in the book are known by Mr. Kim, so I hope he will find the prototypes of all the characters in the ** of that era, and then think about the actors from this starting point." So Jin Yucheng provided ** on themes such as "Shanghainese in Old Houses" taken by Shanghai photographer Lu Yuanmin, which met Wong Kar-wai's idea of referring to old photos of the times and portraits. Wong Kar-wai originally conceived three group photos, people eating around the table, ** moving, the camera opens;Later, the story developed into a solidified **, and then began to tell the story of "Flowers" from a **. Later, Wong Kar-wai found that the map illustrations in the original "Flowers" were very specific, and the story could be told from the map, and the camera kept entering from the map, and a street and a house ......The crew of "Flowers" solicited objects related to the 90s from the whole society.
Jin Yucheng shared the red cardigan jacket worn by the bride when she got married in 1984, Hu Ge took out the trapeze brand sewing machine when her mother got married, and Wong Kar-wai turned out a bottle of unopened Shaoxing old wine "Heavenly Maiden Scattered Flowers". It was in 1990 when Wong Kar-wai returned to Shanghai to visit relatives after filming "The True Story of A Fei", and he bought three bottles of wine in one go but was not willing to take a sip. Many viewers saw Shanghai around 1992 in the trailer, saying that it was not like the 90s, but Shanghai in the documentary at that time was indeed so illusory and prosperous. I don't know the prosperity of Shanghai in the 90s, let alone one or two audiences?So do we. Perhaps, there is also a problem with the shooting style, we always mistakenly substitute "Flowers" in Shanghai in the 1990s into the world of "In the Mood for Love". Whenever I see Ah Bao played by Hu Ge walking on the Yellow River Road, wearing a suit and the shadow of Tony Leung, the words that Zhou Muyun said to Su Lizhen will appear: If I had one more ticket, would you go with me?