《牯岭街少年杀人事件》出高清修复版
As the memory of high school may cast a lingering shadow on later lives, so “A Brighter Summer Day,” Edward Yang’s magisterial four-hour drama of Taipei teenagers, looms over the landscape of Taiwanese cinema. American recognition has been slower. Completed in 1991 but released in the United States 20 years later, the film is now out on disc from Criterion.
杨德昌长达四小时的巨作《牯岭街少年杀人事件》描绘了台北青少年的生活，它在台湾电影世界中像一座恒久耸立的高峰，正如中学时代的记忆会给一个人以后的人生投下长久的阴影。美国对这部片子的认可来得有些缓慢——它于1991年摄制完成，直到20年后才在美国上映。如今这部片子将出光碟版，由美国公司标准收藏(Criterion)发行。
A universal tale of wayward adolescence is woven into complex context. Taiwan, a liberated Japanese colony with a large native Chinese population, was ruled from 1949 on by newly arrived Chinese nationalists backed by the American military. “A Brighter Summer Day” depicts but does not directly explicate the political situation. “Rather than working its way through a neatly predigested story line, it plunges the audience into a vast social fresco,” the British critic Tony Rayns, one of the movie’s first Western admirers, wrote in 1993.
这是一个讲述叛逆的青春期的普遍故事，被放在错综复杂的背景之中。台湾是被解放的日本殖民地，有不少原住中国居民，1949年后，新来的中国国民党在美军支持下统治了台湾。《牯岭街少年杀人事件》描绘了当时的政治环境，但又并不给出直接的解读。1993年，该片在西方最早的仰慕者之一，英国评论家托尼·雷恩(Tony Rayns)写道：“影片没有按照一条清晰简化的故事线发展，而是带领观众跳入一幅巨大的社会风情图卷之中。”
Along with his contemporary Hou Hsiao-hsien, Mr. Yang (1947-2007) helped usher Taiwanese cinema onto the world stage. Mr. Yang was also the new cinema movement’s most cosmopolitan member — born in Shanghai, raised in Taipei and trained as an engineer at the University of Florida. Early films like “Taipei Story” (1985) and “The Terrorizer” (1986) are laconic depictions of Taiwan’s disaffected urban elite. “A Brighter Summer Day,” on which Mr. Yang worked for three years — one of which he said was devoted to rehearsing his cast’s 60 young members — is more ambitious and personal.
杨德昌(1947-2007)与其同代导演侯孝贤一道，令台湾电影跻身世界影坛。生于上海，在台北长大，在佛罗里达大学读工程学的杨德昌，也是新电影运动中最国际化的一位。他的早期电影如《青梅竹马》(1985)和《恐怖分子》(1986)是对台湾愤懑叛逆的都市精英的简练描写。《牯岭街少年杀人事件》则更有野心，也更加个人化，它花费了杨德昌三年的时间。他说，其中一年是用来训练60名年轻演员的。
“A City of Sadness” (1989), Mr. Hou’s intimate yet panoramic treatment of Taiwan’s turbulent Cold War history, provided a template for Mr. Yang. While not strictly autobiographical, “A Brighter Summer Day” drew on his own experiences; set in 1960, it is based on a juvenile homicide that occurred at Mr. Yang’s school when he was 13. In an interview published in 2005, Mr. Yang called making the movie “a kind of responsibility that I had to take on.”
侯孝贤的《悲情城市》(1989)为台湾在冷战时期的历史描绘了一幅全面而又细致入微的图画，也为杨德昌提供了模板。《牯岭街少年杀人事件》并不是严格的自传，却也取材于他自身的经历；故事发生在1960年，根据杨德昌所在学校里的一宗少年杀人案改编，当时他只有13岁。在2005年的一次访谈中，杨德昌说，拍摄这部电影“是我必须承担的一种责任”。
“A Brighter Summer Day” is largely focused on high school turf wars and imported Elvis worship. (The title refers to a misheard lyric from the Elvis Presley hit “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”) But it is also a family drama that evokes Taiwan’s prolonged period of martial law. The protagonist Si’r, a bright, impulsive 14-year-old, is enrolled in a secondary school where the uniforms and regimentation provide an unforced parallel to military rule.
《牯岭街少年杀人事件》主要聚焦一个中学里的帮派战争，还引入了“猫王”(Elvis Presley)崇拜。该片的英文名“A Brighter Summer Day”（更明亮的夏日）就是来自“猫王”的金曲《今晚你可孤独吗》(Are You Lonesome Tonight?)里面一句听错了的歌词。但是它也是一部家庭剧，令人想起台湾实行戒严法令的漫长时期。主角四儿是个聪明、爱冲动的14岁少年，在他就读的中学里，制服与严厉的管控自然而然与大环境中的军事统治形成对照。
Originally on the fringes of a local gang, Si’r is drawn into its power struggles, including an emotional vortex around the murdered gang leader’s girlfriend, Ming. The title notwithstanding, much of the film’s action takes place at night, or is otherwise obscured, reinforcing the sense of a clandestine youth culture coursing beneath the frozen surface of a mobilized society.
四儿原本只是处在一个本地帮派的边缘，却被卷入种种权力斗争，包括与帮派遇害头领的女友小明的感情纠葛。和电影的英文名称相反，影片大部分情节发生在夜晚，要么就是在非常昏暗的情境下，勾勒出这个全民动员的社会冰封表面之下肆意发展的秘密青少年文化的氛围。
Seeing “A Brighter Summer Day” in the early 1990s as part of a touring package of Taiwanese films, I was impressed by Mr. Yang’s synthesis of detached European art cinema and florid Hollywood youth films; familiar yet exotic, his movie seemed a Michelangelo Antonioni version of “West Side Story” or a Wim Wenders remake of “Rebel Without a Cause,” with the added frisson of pop ballads by Frankie Avalon and Ricky Nelson performed by Taiwanese singers in phonetic English.
20世纪90年代初，我在一次台湾电影巡展中看到了《牯岭街少年杀人事件》 ，最打动我的是杨德昌把欧洲艺术电影的超然与好莱坞青年电影的华丽融为一体；他的电影既令人感觉熟悉，又富于异国情调，犹如让米开朗琪罗·安东尼奥尼(Michelangelo Antonioni)来拍摄《西区故事》(West Side Story)，或是让维姆·文德斯(Wim Wenders)来翻拍《无因的反叛》(Rebel Without a Cause)，再加上台湾歌手用注音的英语演唱弗兰基·阿瓦隆(Frankie Avalon)与里奇·尼尔逊(Ricky Nelson)流行歌的那么一点激情。
To revisit the movie is to appreciate the precision of Mr. Yang’s period details and novelistic touches. An outsize flashlight stolen by Si’r and his friends from a night watchman in one of the movie’s first scenes reappears throughout to illuminate (or not) the tangled conflicts. The school’s proximity to a movie studio allows Mr. Yang to comment both on his film and his characters as historical actors, not least when the duplicitous Ming is given a screen test.
重新观看这部影片，可以欣赏到杨德昌的小说式语言和他对时代细节的精确处理。电影开始不久的一场戏里，四儿和朋友们从一个守夜人那里偷来一个大号手电筒，这个手电筒后来多次出现，照亮纷乱的帮派斗争（或者说什么也没有照亮）。学校距离一个电影棚不远，让杨德昌可以借历史角色之口去评论他的电影和他的人物，尤其是两面派的小明去片场试镜的那场戏。
Dialogue from “Rio Bravo” is heard as well, but Mr. Yang’s lofty aspiration may be gauged by several references to “War and Peace,” a book seen by the movie’s most romantic character as the Western equivalent of the Chinese martial arts novels in which he imagines he lives. That may have been Mr. Yang’s feeling as well. Interviewed by Mr. Rayns, he remarked, “If someone asked me to make a 300-episode TV series about these people, I’d have had the material to do it.”
片中可以听到《赤胆屠龙》(Rio Bravo)的对白，但是最能体现杨德昌远大抱负的，可能还要算是几次对《战争与和平》(War and Peace)的提及。片中最浪漫的一个角色把这本书当做西方的武侠小说来读，他也幻想自己就生活在武侠的世界里面。杨德昌自己可能也有同感。雷恩采访他时，他说，“如果有人让我为这些人物拍一部300集的电视剧，我也有足够的素材。”
American television hasn’t lacked for high school drama, but few series are as treasured as “Freaks and Geeks,” created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow. Broadcast in 1999 and 2000 but set outside Detroit at the dawn of the Reagan era, the series was canceled by NBC at midseason but revived on cable, complete with un-telecast episodes, and has enjoyed a long afterlife as a critical and fan favorite. “Freaks and Geeks: The Complete Series,” a new Blu-ray box out from Shout! Factory, provides all 18 episodes both in the original broadcast aspect ratio and a superfluous wide-screen format.
美国电视中一直不缺少关于中学生活的剧集，但很少有像《怪胎与书呆》(Freaks and Geeks)那样被人称道的。该剧由保罗·费格(Paul Feig)编剧，贾德·阿帕图(Judd Apatow)导演，于1999年至2000年上映，不过背景设定在里根时代初期的底特律郊外。该剧被NBC在季中取消，但又在有线台复活，补完了未播出的几集，此后长期受到评论家与剧迷的青睐。Shout! Factory公司最近发行了《怪胎与书呆全集》(Freaks and Geeks: The Complete Series)蓝光版，收入该剧全部18集，并有原始播出的比例和特别宽屏版两种格式。
Mr. Feig (“Bridesmaids,” the coming “Ghostbusters” reboot) and Mr. Apatow (“Trainwreck,” “Knocked Up”) are now kingpins of Hollywood comedy. A number of the show’s stars, including the three main “freaks” — James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel — also enjoy great box-office visibility, but the series’s real star is Linda Cardellini. In her mid-20s when the show was shot, she was a more convincing teenager than her co-stars, some of whom, like Mr. Rogen, were still in their teens. (More recently, Ms. Cardellini has appeared in AMC’s “Mad Men” and the series “Bloodline” on Netflix.)
费格曾执导电影《伴娘》(Bridesmaids)，及即将上映的《超能敢死队》(Ghostbusters)，阿帕图曾执导《生活残骸》(Trainwreck)和《一夜大肚》(Knocked Up)，两人目前都是好莱坞喜剧界的中流砥柱。《怪胎与书呆》中群星荟萃，三位主要的“怪胎”由詹姆斯·弗兰科(James Franco)、塞斯·罗根(Seth Rogen)和杰森·席格尔(Jason Segel)饰演，他们都颇具票房成就。但剧中真正的明星还要算是琳达·卡德里尼(Linda Cardellini)。出演该剧时她已经20多岁了，演起十几岁的青少年来，却比其他几位演员更令人信服。其中几位，比如罗根，还是真的十几岁的少年。最近，卡德里尼还出演了AMC台的《广告狂人》(Mad Men)和Netflix的电视剧《至亲血统》(Bloodline)。
If not free of sentimental moralizing, “Freaks and Geeks” is generally unflinching in its identification with high school outcasts. The show’s period and something of its attitude is established by the use of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” as a theme; a geekier alternate might have been the Ramones’ bratty satire of in-group exclusivity, “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You.”
就算没有完全摆脱多愁善感的道德说教，《怪胎与书呆》总体而言还是毫不动摇地站在高中生里的弃儿们这边。剧集主题曲是琼·杰特(Joan Jett)的《坏名声》(Bad Reputation)，正好可以反映剧中的时代以及本剧的态度； 如果要显得更“书呆”一点，“雷蒙斯”那首大胆讽刺小圈子排外的《我不愿意和你一块儿走》(I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You)也很合适。
