《秋月》導演聲明
褪隱——關於《秋月》
文／羅卓瑤 譯／祝愷辰、方令正
導演的話
我疑惑現今的小孩長大後會成什麼樣子？未來的小孩又將如何？隨著我們的傳統文化日漸褪隱，他們會記得什麼？他們會否成為漂泊的現代主義者；無所依歸、無記憶、無夢；在大地遊蕩？
流徙與移民之詩——羅卓瑤
文／李典
譯／祝愷辰 校譯／方令正
羅卓瑤（Clara Law, 1957）是當代蓬勃發展的香港影業所培養出才華洋溢的導演，屬於80年代中葉逐漸成熟的第二代香港新浪潮，其中包括王家衛與關錦鵬，他們以其創新的美學與大膽實驗的電影語言令世人驚詫，他們在主題上有其共通性：他們都懷有關心社會的態度、對歷史的重視、和對香港和香港人身份認同的關注；這些都是1997年香港回歸前後日益受重視的議題。相對於王家衛對城市疏離和孤寂的抒情描述；關錦鵬對於性與認同的沉思獨白，羅卓瑤的電影則是一首流徙與移民之詩。透過耐人尋味的影像、發人省思的構圖，她引領我們進入流離失所者的內心世界，讓我們切身體會文化衝突的創傷與自由解放的喜悅。對羅卓瑤而言，大流徙（Diaspora）是現代人生命的終極悖論；是一種隱喻：透過他者的稜鏡觀看自我時所產生的一切曖昧與矛盾，其中痛苦與歡愉因失落而重生，因墮落而得救贖，一一都在異地與異文化的奇特生活中而彰顯鮮明。
羅卓瑤的跨文化電影旅程
羅卓瑤的跨文化電影旅程，始於其畢業作品《外國的月亮是否圓些？》（1985），講述一名中國女子在異國文化生活的故事。《我愛太空人》（1988）是一部輕喜劇，呈現兩對情侶因移民而被拆散的困境。該片的社會背景即所謂的「太空人症候群」──此媒體術語反映了1980年代末專業人士的大量出走。《愛在別鄉的季節》（1990）繼續探索移民的黑暗面，記述一對年輕夫婦從中國到美國的艱辛旅程，及其悲慘的結局。李紅（張曼玉飾）決心要去美國，不惜生下孩子，好讓自己在簽證官面前顯得「不漂亮」。當李紅突然與丈夫趙南生（梁家輝飾）斷絕音訊，南生重走了一趟華人經墨西哥非法移民的途徑，卻只發現李紅活在瘋狂的狀態中。羅卓瑤似乎暗示李紅的人格分裂肇因於無法在中國與美國文化間求取平衡，而喪失記憶則是她的致命傷，使她無法享受身為移民的福祉。這「非此即彼」的邏輯或許反映了美國華人移民的部分現實，卻未解釋電影試圖重建的、長久以來中國人對移民的執迷。
混搭的身份
在羅卓瑤下一部突破性作品《秋月》（1992）中，對混搭身份（hybrid identity）的頌揚取代了「非此即彼」的邏輯。面對不同文化傳統的差異時，羅卓瑤指出自我與他者是相互構成的，而且人的族群認同總是在變化中。電影以香港少女與日本男觀光客之間令人意想不到的友誼為敘事主軸。李珮蕙（李佩蕙飾）被移民加拿大的家人留在香港，她目前的生活只是在等待（妨礙全家移民的）祖母過世，好前往加拿大與父母會合。Tokio（永瀨正敏飾）來香港尋找美食、便宜貨與性愛。雖然兩人都不是一般意義上的移民，但遷徙主導了他們的生活。當軌道交會，他們很快建立了古怪的關係：透過結結巴巴的英語，經由挫折和誤會了解彼此。更重要的是，這段友誼成為他們的支撐，在充滿俗套與冷漠、令人疏離的跨國世界尋求自我認同。
遷徙和變動
和許多第二代新浪潮的電影一樣，《秋月》的敘事反映了香港的變遷，並展現對於此城市認同的普遍焦慮。然而，羅卓瑤在敘述遷徙和變動中的香港時，絲毫不讓觀眾感覺像是回到某個政治進程中斷之前的地方──那是香港能獨特地聲稱是它自己的民族空間的地方。對羅卓瑤而言，變動已經是恆常的事，遷徙則構成香港跨國生活的基底。電影的力量不是來自膚淺地追念失去的一切；而是無情地質問許多既定的價值觀──像是本土與外來、熟稔與異色、純正傳統與改良現代，它們庇護著人們對於國家民族的想法。藉由拆解這些二分範疇，羅卓瑤提供了一個跨國華人主體的想像版：她活在回憶與遺忘中，不停地重塑自我。《秋月》含括了羅卓瑤大部分的藝術世界，其主題內容、敘事結構、角色刻畫和視覺意象都將重複出現在她之後的許多電影作品中。
離散圖景
羅卓瑤在90年代初移居澳洲。她以澳洲／香港導演身分拍攝的首部電影《浮生》（1995），是以一种大膽及創新的方式探討中國移民問題。《浮生》令人想起她的早期電影，但敘事更靈活且完整，對移民心理的解析更微妙而複雜，對文化衝突的呈現更細緻而平衡，結果是對離散華人的未來呈現出有所保留的樂觀願景。羅卓瑤以香港、德國及澳洲的場景，讓觀眾一窺破裂的傳統中國家庭如何在跨國情境下掙扎尋「家」。陳家人對「浮動身分」（floating identities）的各種反應，構成一幅中國移民的多樣圖像，其中大部分接續著羅卓瑤對移民得失的悖論式思考。
《遇上1967年的女神》（2000）或許是羅卓瑤最具視野的電影。在結構與角色刻畫上，它與《秋月》明顯相似：日籍觀光客偶遇本地少女，一起踏上尋找自我救贖的旅程。這兩部作品大概是羅卓瑤電影美學的最佳範例：講究情調與氛圍更勝於因果敘事的詩意電影。所有的修辭手法，如取景、色彩、意象、質感與構圖等，都用來延伸本片穿透角色內心世界的力量。誠如俄羅斯形式主義美學所言，詩「使熟悉變得陌生」，以擦出昇華的火花。《遇上1967年的女神》的視覺世界──人物、澳洲內陸地景、雄踞在東京市區的鋼鐵與玻璃巨獸──被塗上扭曲的顏色，以高反差呈現，因而變得奇怪地熟悉。B.G.（蘿絲．拜恩飾）與J.M.（黑川力矢飾）的行動，很大程度上皆受其願望驅使：想要重新認識他們出身的世界。那是某種與地景的對話，透過這種對話，受傷的靈魂得以修復。對B.G.而言，那是直面被近親強暴的恐怖回憶；對J.M.來說，則是接受自己沉溺物欲的事實。兩人都為深切的失落感所苦──失去純真和方向的感受，更因B.G.母親和J.M.朋友過世而加重。耐人尋味的是，「1967年的女神」這台雪鐵龍汽車如何將兩個受苦的靈魂牽到一塊。這台羅蘭．巴特口中「從天而降」的法產雪鐵龍，是J.M.迷上的跨國物品。B.G.憑此「女神」與J.M.的引導，回到過去與往事和解，自己也同時被轉化為「女神」；而在過程中，J.M.得以將對車的迷戀轉化成對B.G.的愛。他們的救贖取決於兩人的互補，而且發生在文化交流的間隙，這反映出羅卓瑤對跨國性的鮮活觀照，那與她大多數影片中對離散主題的詮釋是一致的。
李典
李典是土桑市亞利桑那大學東亞研究副教授，對香港及中國影業有廣泛論著。
編按：本文原刊登於《遇上1967年的女神》影碟發行的說明小冊內，寫就時間約為2000至2001年間。文章中各段落標題為編輯所加。
羅卓瑤導演（Clara Law）電影作品
《外國的月亮是否圓些？》They Say the Moon is Fuller Here
（1985）
《我愛太空人》The Other Half & the Other Half
（1988）
《愛在別鄉的季節》Farewell China
（1990）
《秋月》Autumn Moon
（1992）
《雲吞湯》Wonton Soup（1994）
《浮生》Floating Life
（1995）
《遇上1967的女神》The Goddess of 1967（2000）【導演聲明原文】
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Lately, the word "fading" keeps coming back to me. Maybe because I found out Mid-Autumn lanterns are no longer made of bamboo and paper lit by candles but plastic and light bulbs. Or walking into huge housing complexes I can only see kids holding their video games, playing by themselves and no longer running wild playing hide-and-seek. Buildings keep on being pulled down. I keep on hurrying from place to place. And suddenly I woke up one morning and discovered lately I rarely have dreams.
I remembered as a kid I was taught to read Chinese poems and to write calligraphy by my grandfather. Then I was sent to an English school, where I was taught to think in English. In fact, in my English school, as in all high schools in Hong Kong, I was not taught any Chinese history after 1911. I never realized what that meant until I went to England to study. In those three years, I was stuck in the middle, neither too Chinese nor very English.
I wonder how kids of today will grow up to be. And what will become of the kids in the future? As our culture fades away, what will they remember? Will they be nomadic modernists that wander, with no attachments, no memories, no dreams?
-Clara Law
【評論原文】
Clara Law is a talented director coming out of the recent remarkable success of Hong Kong cinema. She belongs to the Second Wave that came of age in the mid-1980s. Members of the Second Wave such as Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kwan have caught the world by surprise with their novel aesthetics and bold experimentation in cinematic language. Thematically, the Second Wave directors are linked together by their socially engaging attitude, their commitment to history, and their interest in the identity of Hong Kong as a place and a people-all issues of increasing currency during the years around the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China. In contrast to Wong Kar-wai's lyrical depiction of urban alienation and loneliness and Stanley Kwan's meditative monologues on sexuality and identity, Clara Law's films are a poetry of displacement and transmigration. Through pregnant images and provocative framing, Law leads us to the inner world of displaced people in whom we vicariously experience the trauma of cultural clashes and the bliss of self-emancipation. Diaspora, for Law, is the ultimate paradox of modern life, a metaphor for all our ambiguities and contradictions in viewing the Self through the prism of the Other, in which pain and pleasure, rebirth by loss, redemption through fall are writ large in the singularity of living in different places and cultures.
Law's intercultural filmic journey began with her graduate film They Say the Moon is Fuller Here (1985), which tells the story of a Chinese woman living in a foreign culture. The Other Half & the Other Half (1988) is a light comedy about the plight of two couples separated by emigration. The social background of the film is the so-called "astronaut syndrome," a media term that reflected the massive exodus of professionals in the late 1980s. Farewell China (1990) continues to explore the dark side of immigration. It follows a young couple's arduous journey from China to their tragic ending in the United States. Hung (Maggie Cheung) is so determined to go to the U.S. that she gives birth to a child in order to appear "less pretty" in front of the visa officers. When she abruptly ends communication with her husband Nansan (Tony Leung), he retraces the Chinese illegal immigrant route via Mexico only to find Hung living in a state of madness. Law seems to suggest that Hung's split personality has resulted from her inability to negotiate between Chinese and American cultures and her loss of memory is fatal to her well-being as an immigrant. This either or logic, which may reflect a partial reality of Chinese immigrants in America, however, does not explain the age-old Chinese obsession with emigration that the film tries to reconstruct.
This either/or logic is replaced by a celebration of hybrid identity in her next breakthrough film, Autumn Moon (1992). In dealing with differences between cultural traditions, Law suggests that the Self and the Other are mutually constitutive and one's ethnic identity is always in the process of becoming. The narrative of the film centers on an unlikely friendship between a teenage Hong Kong girl and a male Japanese tourist. Li Pul-Wai (Li Pui-Wai) is left behind by her Canada-bound family. Her life is now to wait out her grandmother (who is an inconvenience to the family's goal of emigration) so that she can join her parents in Canada. Tokio (Masatoshi Nagase) comes to Hong Kong looking for food, bargains and sex. Although neither is a migrant in a conventional sense, migration dominates their lives. When their paths intersect, they quickly form an awkward relationship. In staggering English, they understand each other through frustration and misunderstanding. More importantly, their friendship becomes an anchor for both in their search for self-identity in an alienating transnational world inundated with clichés and indifference.
As with many films by Second Wave directors, Autumn Moon reflects the changeover of Hong Kong in its narrative and displays a familiar anxiety regarding the identity of the city. In narrating Hong Kong in displacement and transition, Law, however, does not offer even a fleeting sense of a return to a place before the disruption of a political process that Hong Kong can uniquely claim as its own national space. For Law, transition is already a permanent happening, and migration is the fabric of Hong Kong's transnational life. The power of the film lies not in a skin-deep nostalgia for what has been lost but rather in a ruthless interrogation of the many established values that shelter one's sense of the nation, values such as the native and the foreign, the familiar and the exotic, authentic tradition and adaptive modernity. By dismantling these dichotomous categories, Law offers an imaginative version of a transnational Chinese subject who functions between memory and forgetting and who is always in the process of remaking herself. Autumn Moon encompasses so much of Law's artistic world that its thematic matter, narrative structure, characterization, and visual imagery will return to many of her ensuing films.
Wonton Soup, for example, challenges the notion of a fixed Chinese identity. Adrian (Tim Lounibos) is a Chinese Australian visiting his Hong Kong girlfriend Ann (Hayly Man). The relationship is already shaky because both are suffering from an identity crisis. As his uncle tells it, Adrian is "yellow on the outside but white in the middle." The solution is a crash course for Adrian by his uncle on lovemaking techniques using a 1,000-year-old Chinese sex manual, but Adrian's newly acquired skills do not work with Ann and the relationship meets its doom. The young couple's real problem, Law seems to imply, is that they live in an eclectic and transnational cultural environment, yet they are not aware of its implication for their mosaic identities.
In the early 1990s, Law moved to Australia and her first film as an Australian/Hong Kong director is Floating Life (1995), which is a new and ambitious treatment of Chinese immigration. It reminds one of her earlier films, yet the narrative is more versatile and accomplished, the study of the psychology of migration more nuanced and complex, and the presentation of cultural clashes more subtle and balanced, which result in a reservedly optimistic outlook for the future of the Chinese Diaspora. With vignettes from Hong Kong, Germany and Australia. Law offers a glimpse of a fractured traditional Chinese family struggling to find "home" in a transnational context. The Chan family members' various responses to their "floating identities constitute a diverse picture of Chinese immigrants. much of which continues Law's paradoxical thinking about the benefits and the costs of immigration.
The Goddess of 1967 may be the most ambitious of all Law films. In terms of structure and characterization, it bears a remarkable similarity to Autumn Moon: the chance encounter of a Japanese tourist with a local girl and their joint journey in search of self-salvation. These two films are probably the best examples of Law's cinematic aesthetics: poetic films that emphasize tonality and atmospherics over cause-effect narratives. All rhetorical devices such as framing, color, image, texture and composition serve to extend the film's penetrating power to the inner world of its characters. Poetry as the Russian Formalist aesthetics would put it. "defamiliarizes the familiar" to produce sparks of the sublime. The visual world of The Goddess of 1967-the characters, the landscape of the Outback and the steel and glass mammoths of Tokyo-is painted with corrupt colors on high contrast and thus becomes strangely familiar. To a great extent, the actions of B.G. (Rose Byrne) and J.M. (Rikiya Kurokawa) are driven by their desire to get reacquainted with the worlds from which they come. It is a sort of dialogue with the landscape," through which damaged souls can be repaired. For B.G., that is to confront her horrible memory of incest; for J.M., that is to come to terms with his indulgence in materialism. Both suffer from a profound sense of loss—the loss of innocence and direction accentuated by the deaths of B.G's mother and J.M's friend. It is interesting to note how "the Goddess of 1967”—the Citroën-brings these two suffering souls together. The Citroën, a French car that "has fallen from the sky" in Roland Barthes' words, is a transnational object that has become a fetish for J.M. B.G. relies on "the Goddess" and J.M.'s guidance to travel back in time to reconcile with the past while being transformed into “The Goddess" herself, and in the process J.M. is able to transfer his fetish with the car to love for B.G. That their redemption is contingent upon their supplementality and that it happens in the interstitial space of cultural exchange reflect Law's vibrant version of transnationalism, a version that is consistent with Law's interpretation of the theme of diaspora in most of her films.
-Dian Li
Dian Li is an associate professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He has written widely about Hong Kong and Chinese cinemas.
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