Entertainment from Divorce

As the morning light pierced through the clouds on New Year's Day, the premiere of "Interstellar" began simultaneously in 37 countries around the world.

Outside the IMAX theater at the Guomao Cinema in Beijing, a sub-zero wind whipped snowflakes against people's faces, yet audience members wearing down jackets lined up in a long queue that snaked from the ticket booths on the third floor all the way to the lobby on the first floor.

Someone held up a sign that read "Hardcore Sci-Fi After Three Years of Waiting," the LED tubes glowing blue in the cold air, and the white breath exhaled condensed into a brief mist in front of the sign.

Students in school uniforms held hot milk tea cups, water droplets dripping from the cups through their fingers onto the snow, forming small puddles at their feet.

In front of the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, the sun was shining brightly, and a blonde girl held up a poster of Tan Yue's collected works, the edges of the poster slightly curled by the sea breeze.

When she shouted into the camera, "Finally, I can see the universe of Chinese directors on the big screen," the crowd queuing behind her cheered.

In a cinema on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, staff members in red uniforms dipped a brush in gold powder and wrote "Welcome to Interstellar" on a red velvet sign. The rounded strokes of the Chinese characters shimmered under the warm yellow lights. An elderly Chinese man passing by stopped and said in accented French, "This handwriting is better than my grandson's."

Domestic media reports flooded in.

The People's Daily app pushed out a commentary at 6 a.m., with the title "An Eastern Narrative Across the Stars" accompanied by a creative poster featuring a black hole and the Great Wall together.

The magazine "Film Art" updated its live commentary at 10 a.m., with the editor highlighting a key sentence in red: "When the outline of China's space station appeared at the edge of the black hole, we finally saw our own starry sky in a science fiction film."

On social media platforms, the hashtag #InterstellarPremiere# garnered over 10 billion views within two hours. In the popular comments section, replies saying "I've already bought tickets" piled up like a chain. Some people posted photos of movie ticket stubs covered in frost, while others shared photos of three generations of a family watching the movie together, saying, "Grandpa is an aerospace engineer, and I took him to see our own space story."

Overseas media also showered it with praise.

The Times devoted an entire page to comparing the film to 2001: A Space Odyssey, accompanied by a comparison of the two films' space scenes.

The text reads, "Tan Yue reinterprets the loneliness of the universe with Eastern philosophy; the black holes he photographs seem to weep."

The Hollywood Reporter noted the details: "The tea canisters in Cooper's spaceship are printed with 'West Lake Longjing,' and the ink painting in Murphy's room is inscribed with 'When Will the Moon Be Bright?' These Eastern symbols give hard science fiction a warmth, like a cup of hot wine on a cold night."

Even the notoriously critical Cahiers du Cinéma gave it a rare four-star rating, with the words next to the red star: "He proved that the ambition of science fiction films should not only be about special effects, but also about emotional depth—the real cosmic romance is when the audience can look up at the stars and think of their mother's dumplings."

At 3 p.m., Tan Yue, wearing a black baseball cap, followed Chen Ziyu into an ordinary cinema in the suburbs of Beijing.

The dark blue windbreaker was zipped up to the top, covering most of his face. Only his bright eyes stood out in the dimly lit corridor, and the smile lines at the corners of his eyes were faintly visible under the light.

"Are you sure we won't be recognized like this?" Chen Ziyu tugged at his hat brim, which brushed against his nose, and he instinctively shrank his neck.

She held the popcorn she had just bought in her hand; the aroma of caramel mixed with the scent of butter filled the air, and the rustling of the packaging bag was particularly clear in the quiet corridor.

She was wearing a beige sweater with frayed edges on the cuffs, her hair was casually pulled back, and there were still some snowflakes on her exposed neck, making her look like a college student who had just finished school.

"Don't worry, the audience here is more focused on the screen." Tan Yue's voice was low and deliberately hoarse. He gently touched the back of her hand with his fingertips, and the warm touch made them both pause.

"I watched the audience's reaction here during the last premiere of 'The Truman Show'."

He remembered that day an old man was looking at the subtitles with a magnifying glass, and when he saw Truman push open the door, his hands trembled like leaves in the autumn wind.

The two crouched down and squeezed into the corner of the last row, the plastic seats making a slight creaking sound.

The screening room was already full, and audience members in the back rows were still coming in one after another, their footsteps echoing in the darkness as they searched for seats.

The couple in the front row were discussing the black hole effects in the trailer. The boy was showing NASA's black hole photos on his phone, and the girl whispered, "The ones in the movie are better, like chocolates coated in icing."

The middle-aged man on the left is holding a thermos cup with the "China Aerospace" logo printed on it. The aerospace museum badge pinned to his clothes gleams with a metallic sheen. He glances at his watch from time to time, as if waiting for some important moment.

The girl on the right, who looks like a high school student, is holding a notebook with an astronaut sticker on the pink cover. The open pages are filled with terms like "wormhole" and "five-dimensional space," and there are simple diagrams next to them, showing that she has done her homework.

The moment the lights dimmed, Tan Yue felt Chen Ziyu quietly take his hand.

Her fingertips were a little cool, and her nails were neatly trimmed.

As the universe slowly unfolded on the screen, the deep blue starry sky resembled spilled ink, and Cooper's spaceship broke through the atmosphere, the entire audience erupted in a unified gasp of amazement; even the sound of chewing popcorn stopped.

He suddenly remembered watching a sample film in this theater three years ago. Back then, the special effects were still flawed, with the light bands at the edge of the black hole resembling faded ribbons. The young men in the technical team, with red eyes, said, "We can do better." The snow that day, just like today, fell on the theater's glass and melted into winding watermarks.

Wang Letian sat in the middle row half an hour early.

He wore his signature grey trench coat, with a silver pen clipped to his collar—his lucky charm when writing film reviews. His tablet contained reviews of all of Tan Yue's works, from storyboard analysis of *The Shawshank Redemption* to symbol interpretation of *The Truman Show*, the folder named "Starry Night Notes."

The Weibo backend is already flooded with tens of thousands of messages urging for more updates, with the pinned one reading, "Teacher Wang, please give a quick review! After watching 'Interstellar,' I'm so excited I want to jump around on the spot."

As a film critic with millions of followers, his "Tan Yue Film Analysis" series always sparks phenomenal discussions.

Some even call him "Tan Yue's chief translator," saying that he can understand the subtext in the director's shots.

When the screen lit up, it reflected the anticipation in his eyes, like a child waiting to unwrap a gift.

When the scene of Cooper saying goodbye to his daughter appeared, Wang Letian's pen paused.

Deng Gaofei, playing the father, stands beside the truck. In the rearview mirror, his daughter, dressed in a yellow dress, looks like a stubborn sunflower. The veins on the back of his hand, which is gripping the steering wheel, are bulging, and his knuckles are white. He has no lines, but he instantly reminds Wang Letian of the back view of his father turning away at the airport when he went abroad to study for a master's degree.

Back then, my father's shoulders were also tense, and the folds on the back of his shirt hid unspoken worries.

"That's what makes Tan Yue so remarkable."

He quickly wrote in his notebook, his handwriting flowing like a dragon: "Use the grandeur of space to contrast with the minutiae of the human world, and let the stars light-years away become footnotes to homesickness."

The scene of the spaceship traversing the wormhole made him hold his breath.

Those flowing bands of light are not just simple gimmicks, but have a moist sheen, like silk soaked in tears, as if you can feel the weight of interstellar dust, and feel a cool touch when they fall on your skin.

He suddenly recalled what Tan Yue had said in an interview: "Good special effects should be like water, naturally enveloping the story, rather than drowning it." At this moment, the light strips on the screen were indeed like water, gently supporting the spaceship and also supporting the audience's heartbeat.

The scene depicting five-dimensional space brought tears to Wang Letian's eyes.

As Cooper roared through countless study illusions, his voice bounced off the walls of time, turning into fragmented sobs.

When his daughter Murphy looked up decades later and said, "It's Daddy," his reading glasses slipped down to the tip of his nose, but the light in his eyes was as bright as when he was young, and the sound of sobbing rose and fell around him.

The mother in the back row was wiping her child's tears. Amid the rustling of the tissues, she whispered, "This is Dad telling you a story from far away, just like when Dad is on a business trip and making a video call to you."

The child nodded as if he understood, his little hands tightly gripping his mother's clothes.

As the film progressed into its second half, Tan Yue quietly observed the audience's reactions.

The man in the space badge was taking notes quickly in his notebook. The sound of his pen gliding across the pages was particularly clear in the quiet screening room. Occasionally, when he looked up, his eyes would light up, as if he were seeing himself from many years ago.

The high school girl's makeup was ruined by crying, and her mascara had smudged into black specks under her eyes, but she was still diligently taking notes, the handwriting blurred by her tears.

The couple in the front row held each other's hands tightly. The girl's nails dug into the boy's hand, but the boy was oblivious, staring at the screen with his Adam's apple bobbing.

When Cooper emerged from the black hole and saw his 100-year-old daughter in his hospital bed, the entire room fell into an almost frozen silence.

Even the sound of breathing seemed to be sucked into the screen; only the image of Murphy's wrinkled hand stroking Cooper's cheek flowed in the darkness.

Tan Yue could hear Chen Ziyu sniffing beside him; her hand trembled slightly in his palm, and fine sweat seeped between her fingers.

He revised this segment seventeen times, from the initial sentimental background music to the final silence, deleting all the lines, just so that the audience could hear the sound of their own heartbeats.

That was the most moving soundtrack, closer to the frequency of the universe than any symphony.

The lights were not turned on immediately when the end credits rolled.

In the darkness, the first applause rang out from the back row, like a pebble thrown into a lake. Then the applause spread like a tide, mixed with comments such as "It's so shocking" and "The last part made me cry." Someone shone their phone flashlight on the screen, the beam of light swaying in the darkness, as if guiding the stars.

When the man wearing the aerospace badge stood up, Tan Yue noticed that his uniform was printed with the words "China Aerospace" and his name tag read "Zhang Wei." He was saying to the young man next to him, "This is the Chinese science fiction we want the world to see—it has hardcore technology, but also a soft soul."

As the event ended, Tan Yue pulled Chen Ziyu along with the flow of people, pulling his hat brim even lower, almost touching his chest.

In the corridor, the audience's discussions were as lively and energetic as boiling water.
"That black hole looks so real! It's even more impressive than NASA's simulation video! Look at the layers of light bands, it's like layers of sugar coating. My grandfather said that this is consistent with the gravitational lensing effect of general relativity."

The boy in school uniform grabbed his friend's arm, waving his arms excitedly.

"Deng Gaofei acted really well. During the scene where he saw his daughter at the end, my dad secretly wiped away tears, but he insisted that it was because his glasses were fogged up."

The girl with her ponytail was flipping through photos on her phone; the screen showed the profile of a middle-aged man with red eyes.

“I never knew sci-fi movies could be so touching. I need to call my mom when I get home.” The boy with headphones was dialing as he walked, his voice choked with emotion. “I just saw Cooper’s message to his daughter, and it suddenly reminded me of my mom always saying, ‘Don’t be stingy when you’re away from home.’”

Wang Letian stood in front of the poster, his fingers unconsciously tapping the edge of the tablet computer, the metal frame making a slight sound.

His brain felt like it had been reformatted, with countless thoughts colliding—from the circular design of the narrative structure to the metaphorical use of Eastern symbols, from the restraint in the scale of special effects to the precision in the expression of emotions.

This film is like a complex universe, where every detail is worth dissecting and every shot contains a code.

"Teacher Wang?" A tentative voice came from behind. It was a young man holding a camera, the lens still covered with snowflakes. "How many points would you give 'Interstellar'?"

Wang Letian turned around, his eyes still brimming with excitement, his pupils shining brightly under the lights: "Perfect score."

He paused, then added, "Not because it's perfect, but because it shows us the possibilities of domestic science fiction."

Tan Yue used a black hole to absorb all prejudice, leaving behind our own starry sky—where our space station, our tea canisters, and our nostalgia reside.

He walked to a secluded corner, leaned against the cold wall, immediately opened a document, and his fingers flew across the keyboard, the typing so rapid it was like a sudden downpour: "When Cooper said, 'Love is the only force that can transcend time and space,' we suddenly understood that in Tan Yue's universe, technology is always the wings, and emotion is the direction. He allowed Chinese audiences to find their own coordinates in science fiction films, like seeing a lighthouse of home in a vast sea of ​​stars..."

The light from the screen reflected on his face, like scattered starlight, and even the white hair at his temples shimmered with a gentle light.

As the evening glow painted the sky red, Tan Yue and Chen Ziyu sat in a coffee shop across from the cinema.

The shop's glass window was adorned with a poster of "Interstellar," its edges gilded by the setting sun. People kept stopping to take pictures, the light from their phone screens shimmering on the glass like scattered stars.

"Did you hear what the audience said?" Chen Ziyu stirred the latte in her cup, the milk foam drawing swirling patterns as she stirred, her eyes unable to hide the smile, like a sugar cube soaking in water, slowly dissolving.

"heard it."

Tan Yue gazed out the window, his baseball cap resting on the table, his forehead still cool from the cinema's air conditioning, and fine beads of sweat glistening on his skin.

"Hearing someone say 'This is our science fiction' is more reassuring than any award."

He recalled that when he first entered the industry, some people said, "You can't make your own films," but now those voices were drowned out by the applause of the audience.

My phone vibrated; it was a message from Mr. Wu, along with a discussion from netizens around the world.

Tan Yue didn't reply to the message; he simply handed the phone to Chen Ziyu.

He smiled and looked toward the distant starry sky.

The city's light pollution couldn't obscure the stars; the brightest star, Sirius, was twinkling, as if it were blinking.

The night for *Interstellar* has just begun, while the journey of Chinese science fiction, eagerly anticipated by countless viewers, has already set sail towards a wider universe. (End of Chapter)