重温王家卫：寻找浪漫与情感的可能性
In Need of a Film About Romantic Possibility? Try ‘In the Mood for Love’
BEN KENIGSBERG
2020年12月1日
Moments into “Days of Being Wild,” the second feature from the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, a smooth operator flirts with a woman working at a concession stand. He asks her to look at his watch for one minute — and when the 60 seconds are up, he tells her why: “April 16th, 1960, one minute before 3. We were here together. I’ll always remember that minute because of you. From now on, we’re one-minute friends.” Like it or not, she’ll remember that minute, too.
在香港导演王家卫的第二部长片《阿飞正传》中，一个圆滑的浪子与一个在小卖部工作的女人调情。他让她看他的表一分钟，当60秒快到的时候，他告诉她原因：“1960年4月16日下午3点前的一分钟，你跟我在一起。因为你，我会记得这一分钟。从现在开始，我们就是一分钟的朋友。”不管喜不喜欢，她也会记得这一分钟的。
As a pickup, the line is a bit cringey, but it’s a great scene because it distills Wong’s method: Here is a filmmaker who specializes in making the evanescent tangible, in capturing fleeting emotions in a style that is always poetic, often ravishing and, despite his films’ surface-level dreaminess, unerringly precise.
作为调情，这句台词有点令人尴尬，但这是精彩的一幕，因为它凝聚了王家卫的风格：这位导演擅长于让转瞬即逝的一刻化为有形，以充满诗意、往往令人陶醉的方式捕捉短暂的情感，尽管他的电影表面上如同梦幻，却极度精确。
Fairly or not, the influential Wong himself has a reputation for struggling to set things in stone; in 2004, his “2046” arrived so late to the Cannes Film Festival that, Wong told me in an interview a few years later, the movie started unspooling before the ending was in the projection booth. But his movies are now frozen in place in a virtual retrospective that started this week at Film at Lincoln Center, and will expand to benefit other theaters on Dec. 11. They can be streamed nationally, and seeing them in these new director-approved scans is as close as pandemic viewing gets to watching light stream through celluloid.
不管公平与否，颇具影响力的王家卫也有着优柔寡断的名声；2004年，他的《2046》到达戛纳电影节的时间太晚，几年后，他在一次采访中告诉我，这导致影片在展映期结束之前才开始放映。但他的电影现在被收入一个虚拟的回顾展中，于本周在林肯中心电影中心开始放映，并将于12月11日扩展到其他影院。这些电影将在全国通过流媒体播放。在这个最新的、经导演许可的展映中观看它们，就像疫情期间观影时通过电影胶片观看光的流动。
“In the Mood for Love”: Rent the remastered version on virtual.filmlinc.org; also available in an unrestored version on the Criterion Channel or HBO Max.
《花样年华》：在virtual.filmlinc.org上租借重制版；也可在Criterion频道或HBO Max上观看未修复版。
“Chungking Express”: Rent the remastered version on virtual.filmlinc.org beginning Dec. 4; also available unrestored on the Criterion Channel.
《重庆森林》：12月4日开始在virtual.filmlinc.org上租借重制版；也可在Criterion频道观看未修复版。
“In the Mood for Love,” from 2000, is the first film in the retrospective, and you could hardly ask for a better introduction: The story — which stands alone but involves characters and motifs also featured in “Days of Being Wild” and “2046” — is his most accessible. There’s scarcely a wasted shot.
2000年的《花样年华》是这次回顾展的第一部电影，很难找到比它更好的开场了：故事情节是他的影片中最容易理解的，它独立成章，却又包含了《阿飞正传》和《2046》中出现过的人物和主题。几乎没有一个镜头是无用的。
On the same day in 1962 in Hong Kong, a secretary named Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and a journalist named Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) move into rooms in adjacent apartments. They share these spaces with their busybody landlords, who are always a hovering presence. Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow are both married, but not to each other. Their spouses, while heard, are never clearly seen. And the acts of kindness between them — Mrs. Chan has her husband buy Mr. Chow a rice cooker when he’s on business in Japan — begin to escalate beyond mere neighborliness.
1962年的香港，秘书陈太太（张曼玉饰）和记者周先生（梁朝伟饰）在同一天搬进了相邻的公寓房间。他们与忙碌的、总在附近徘徊的房东共享楼里的空间。陈太太和周先生都结婚了。片中虽然能听到他们的配偶的声音，但观众从来无法清晰地看到他们的身影。陈太太让丈夫在去日本出差时给周先生买了一个电饭锅，两人之间的好感开始升温，超出了单纯的邻里关系。
Will Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan have an affair? They might — but equally they might not. Throughout the film, Wong repeats scenes with different variations: Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow encounter and just miss each other outside a noodle stall. When they discover their spouses are already cheating with each other — a revelation relayed in brilliant shorthand (Mr. Chow indicates that Mrs. Chan has a handbag like his wife’s; Mrs. Chan notices that he has a tie just like her husband’s) — they role-play, imagining and reimagining how the affair began.
周先生和陈太太会发生婚外情吗？可能会——但同样也可能不会。在整部影片中，王家卫以不同的方式重复着一些场景：陈先生和周太太在一个面馆外偶遇，然后又错过对方。他们发现自己的配偶已经在和对方的配偶搞婚外情——这个秘密用精彩的简洁方式表达出来（周先生说陈太太有一个和他太太一样的手提包；陈太太注意到周先生有一条和她丈夫一样的领带）——他们做角色扮演，想象和重现这段婚外情是如何开始的。
Wong is less interested in settled incident than in keeping possibilities open. Nothing Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan do is ever definitive, and their relationship, like Wong’s filmmaking, is based on steadily established rituals. (Nat King Cole continually croons on the soundtrack.)
比起既定的事件，王家卫更感兴趣的是保持可能性。周先生和陈太太做的任何事情都不是确定无疑的，而且他们的关系就像王家卫的电影风格一样，建立在固定仪式的基础之上。（背景音乐中不断有纳特·金·科尔[Nat King Cole]的低声吟唱。）
Wong’s use of space is crucial to establishing their bond. In the most touching interlude, Mrs. Chan gets stuck overnight in Mr. Chow’s room as others in the apartment play mahjong. (Even though the couple is innocent, they can’t be seen together, and so she cannot leave.) Mr. Chow, who wants to write martial-arts serials, eventually rents another room that may or may not become the site of their liaison. (The room happens to be numbered 2046, a year that has political significance for Hong Kong’s relationship with China. It’s not just the would-be lovers headed toward an uncertain future.)
王家卫对空间的运用对于两人之间建立联系至关重要。在最感人的一场戏中，陈太太整夜被困在周先生的房间里，公寓里的其他人都在打麻将。（虽然两人是无辜的，但不能被人看到他们在一起，所以她不能离开。）周先生想写武侠小说，后来他另租了一个房间，这个房间可能会成为两人联系的场所，也可能不会。（这个房间的编号正好是2046，这是对香港与中国大陆的关系具有政治意义的一年。面临不确定未来的不仅仅是这对准恋人。）
The two characters perform actions simultaneously but separately, working late at night alone. At another point, the camera tracks across a wall to show them in parallel. Wong traces their missed connections, showing how they are always in each other’s thoughts, even as a life together eludes them. The photography, by Wong’s regular collaborator Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing, is simply among the most stunning uses of color in movies, and the ’60s Hong Kong atmosphere is alive with fluttering curtains, swirling cigarette smoke and atmospheric downpours.
这两个角色同时但又分别活动，独自工作直至深夜。在另一个场景中，镜头穿透一面墙，以平行的方式显示他们。王家卫追溯了他们错失的联系，展示了他们总在对方的脑海，即使无法在一起生活。本片摄影由王家卫的常年合作伙伴杜可风和李屏宾担任，堪称电影中对色彩运用最杰出的作品之一，飘动的窗帘、袅袅的香烟雾气和倾盆大雨，生动地再现了60年代的香港气息。
In Wong’s oeuvre, this sense of thrilling instability extends even to the narratives themselves. Starting Dec. 4, you can catch the remastered version of “Chungking Express,” one of Wong’s breakout films, first shown in 1994. It begins as the noirish story of one recently dumped police officer, He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), and continues as the far sunnier story of another, Cop 663 (Tony Leung). The two strands are connected by a takeout restaurant that teases the possibility of new love for each of them.
在王家卫的作品中，这种刺激的不稳定感甚至延伸到叙事本身。从12月4日开始，你可以观看《重庆森林》的重制版，这是王家卫的成名作之一，于1994年首次上映。故事以刚被抛弃的警察何其武（金城武饰）的黑色故事开始，接着是另一个更开朗的警察663（梁朝伟饰）的故事。一家外卖餐厅将这两条线连在一起，让他们俩都有了发展新恋情的可能。
Again, repetition is key. The movie is famous (at least among cinephiles) for its mantralike uses of pop music, particularly the recurring plays of the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and a cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” sung by the actress Faye Wong. The characters have elaborate routines: He Qiwu searches for cans of pineapple with an expiration date of May 1, because his ex, May, loved pineapple, and the date is also his birthday. Faye Wong’s character, who works at the restaurant, begins sneaking into Cop 663’s apartment. As in “In the Mood for Love,” Wong Kar-wai tiptoes around the possibility of romance. His characters navigate time, space and an electric visual palette in search of a fleeting, shared instant.
同样，重复是关键。这部电影因其对流行音乐如咒语般的运用而闻名（至少在影迷中是这样），尤其是一再使用妈妈和爸爸乐队(The Mamas and the Papas)的《加州梦》(California Dreamin’)，以及演员王菲翻唱“小红莓”乐队(Cranberries)的《梦》(Dreams)。片中的角色们都有精心设计的套路：何其武寻找5月1日过期的菠萝罐头，因为他的前女友梅喜欢菠萝，而那天是他的生日。王菲饰演的角色在餐厅工作，她开始偷偷溜进警察663的公寓。就像在《花样年华》中一样，王家卫小心翼翼地处理恋情的可能性。他片中的人物穿梭于时间、空间和令人兴奋的色彩搭配之间，寻找短暂的共享瞬间。
