克里斯汀·汤普森谈《黄金时代》

来源：大卫·波德维尔博客
                
                汤普森只是简单谈了点，不懂中文按说对本片影响很大，人家也不了中国历史和文学，但看的时候也没什么障碍。
其实手法有点特别，但也算不上新鲜，只是出现在院线，大家不习惯。
隔阂可能来自观影经验，也可能来自价值门槛。
很多普通观众懂了而且喜欢，很多影评人和迷影观众却隔着很远。
很多不了解萧红的人喜欢，很多萧红的粉丝却受不了。
接受是一个复杂的过程，文艺作品的接受中，本来就是充斥着傲慢与偏见的。
汤普森说本片展示许鞍华驾驭史诗的能力。也谈到了背景的问题。
Ann Hui’s quiet epic（许鞍华安静的史诗）
Ann Hui’s career is usually associated with intimate films, mostly studies of character. We saw her at Ebertfest earlier this year, where she presented A Simple Life, the epitome of such films.
Now she has surprised audiences with another character study, but one set in a tumultuous period of Chinese history, the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Golden Era (2014) tells the story of female writer Xiao Hong, who died young in 1942. Not all the facts of Xiao Hong’s life are known, and the narrative sketches scenes derived from the author’s own writings. Interspersed are “documentary” shots of interviews with people (played by actors) who knew and worked with Xiao Hong.
Much of the tale consists of small-scale scenes, conversations among a few people set indoors or in the streets. Yet as the Japanese invasion begins and spreads, occasional big scenes occur, and Hui proves herself perfectly capable of suggesting creating a sense of epic events.
                
                The war is only fleetingly present, however. We see it mainly from the viewpoint of the main characters, as when a quiet indoor conversation scenes are abruptly and startlingly cut short by bombs going off outside and shattering windows.
The film’s settings and costumes create a vivid sense of the era. There are street scenes in Hong Kong shortly before its fall to the Japanese that appear almost documentary in their realism. Throughout the images are beautiful, as the frame at the top of the entry demonstrates.
The film’s three-hour running length adds to the epic feel, tracing the heroine’s changing fortunes across momentous historical events. It makes a striking contrast with A Simple Life, and yet Hui’s concern with precision and detail in delineating characters remains constant. The pair might bring her back to the sort of prominence outside Hong Kong that she enjoyed in the 1980s and early 1990s.