Eighteen Springs
With Leon Lai, Wu Chien-lien, Anita Mui, Ge You, Annie Wu, and Huang Lei.
Many movie executives–producers and distributors–say they’re simply giving the public what it wants, but this is a half lie at best. If a man’s dying of thirst and you offer him a choice of liquid soap or shoe polish, would it be fair to say his choice is what he likes? When I recently went back to my hometown in Alabama, which has nine mall movie screens, I discovered that anyone who wanted to see Sling Blade had to drive an hour and a half–even though one of the actors is apparently from the town and a good many locals had called the distributor and asked for a booking. I’m sure every American community has similar stories to tell. Michael Moore’s The Big One shows the same corporate principles applied to jobs, plants, services, and government grants. And the media keep saying they too are only giving the public what it wants, and even though that public is on record saying, for example, that it couldn’t care less who might have given Clinton a blow job, you can find that brand of shoe polish for sale every night of the week. For that matter, most movie critics still blame the public rather than the corporations for the movies we wind up seeing.
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Eighteen Springs is the fifth film or video by Ann Hui that I’ve seen, all of which I’ve liked and none of which I consider a masterpiece. Offhand I’d say she’s comparable in her craft and in her work with actors to William Wyler, and I don’t regard anything I’ve seen by him as a masterpiece either. I could of course be wrong. What constitutes a masterpiece in terms of Chinese cinema might include a good many elements I can’t pretend to master, such as Chinese history and aesthetics and an understanding of the language. But why should a film have to be a masterpiece in order to be worth seeing? Masterpieces often place a heavy burden on viewers, whereas good, ordinary movies–which are rare enough these days–give you plenty of breathing space. (I haven’t yet caught up with The Full Monty, but the main thing that makes me want to is that I’ve never heard anyone call it a masterpiece.)
Another thrilling aspect of the film is the way it’s periodically narrated by Manjing and Shujun. Unlike the multiple offscreen narrators used by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, who tend to pass the story to one another in a series of relays, Manjing and Shujun divide the story between them as if they were playing a game of catch. Aware of both of their viewpoints, we experience the fluctuations in their relationship a lot more deeply and understand some of their problems better than either of them does. (The film’s Chinese title translates literally as “Half-life Fate,” which I suspect refers in part to this unusual narrative structure.)
During the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s people in this country and many other countries went to movies the way they watch television today–not looking for masterpieces or special events but looking for something to do. It was an everyday and unexceptional activity. I suspect that seeing Blonde Crazy, a James Cagney vehicle, when it came out in 1931 wasn’t anything special beyond the fact that Cagney himself was something special. There are actors today who offer something special as well–John Travolta, for instance, or Anita Mui (whose popularity in Hong Kong, at least until Titanic came to town, may have been comparable to Cagney’s in this country in the 30s). We might complain that Travolta isn’t as gifted as Cagney, but it seems far more relevant to complain that we have to work our way through half a mile of sludge–ad and infotainment material up to our necks–to reach the place where we can enjoy Travolta the way a 30s audience enjoyed Cagney (or the way an 80s Hong Kong audience enjoyed Mui). Contemplating going to a Travolta movie is a big deal nowadays; for starters, you have to worry about whether it’s a good Travolta movie before you can even think of going. Thirties audiences just went.
A few days ago a local film academic told me she felt “burned” because she’d gone to see The Newton Boys on my recommendation–but she’d read only my capsule review and was using me as a tipster. Knowing that she’s about as interested in film as art as I’m interested in movies as simple diversion, I admitted that my affection for the movie had little to do with its storytelling, which led her to conclude that I thought it was an avant-garde film. It’s these kinds of mutually exclusive categories–as predominant in academia as in the New Yorker–that prevent people nowadays from cherishing everyday pleasures in the movies that have nothing to do with either storytelling or the avant-garde, and sometimes wind up turning critics like me into hype machines. In effect, what I often want to write is “Hey, this is fun,” whether it’s The Big Lebowski or The Newton Boys, or even Eighteen Springs. But because I feel I’m competing with reviewers who like to call things the “best of all time”–writing off the indefinite future, the bottomless past, and the rest of the globe to rationalize their taste for shoe polish or liquid soap–I’m just as prone to wind up as shrill and over-the-top as the rest of them.
