Rebirth of Chinese Entertainment from the Oscars

June 16, 2000, BJ.

It was late at night when Su Chen returned to Beijing from Berlin. As the plane landed, he saw the sparse lights on both sides of the runway at the Capital Airport through the window, a blurry orange hue in the thin winter mist. Just over ten hours earlier, he had been surrounded by a group of European filmmakers toasting him at a celebratory banquet in Berlin. Now, he sat in a window seat in economy class, his Silver Bear trophy tucked into his carry-on bag, which rested on his lap, zipped tightly shut. The gray wool coat his mother had bought him was neatly folded and placed on the overhead compartment. When he reached for it as he disembarked, the coat slipped off, its scent of mothballs hitting his face.

The Beijing Film Studio compound was exactly the same as when he left. Rows of old Soviet-style buildings stood silently in the night, the bare branches of the plane trees casting crisscrossing shadows under the streetlights. It was past eleven when Su Chen pushed open the door, but the living room light was still on. His mother, Wu Qingfang, was leaning against the sofa, clutching the remote control, which was replaying a TV series whose name he had forgotten. Hearing the door open, the remote control fell from her hand and hit the floor, the battery cover flying off and bouncing next to the coffee table leg.

"You're back?" Wu Qingfang sprang up from the sofa, her knee hitting the corner of the coffee table. She winced in pain but didn't stop walking. "Have you eaten? There are dumplings in the pot, I'll heat them up for you—"

"Mom, I can do it myself." Su Chen put down his luggage, bent down to pick up the battery cover, and put it back on the remote control. When he entered the kitchen, the water in the pot was already boiling. There were two neatly arranged trays of dumplings on the stove, with gauze underneath, and each dumpling had the same pleats. Wu Qingfang followed him in and squeezed him aside. She deftly picked up a slotted spoon and tapped it twice on the side of the pot, as if tapping away the invisible passage of time.

"Is Berlin cold?" she asked with her back to him.

"A bit colder than BJ."

Is the coat warm enough?

"enough."

"I heard you won an award. It's all over the factory." Wu Qingfang paused for a moment as she scooped the cooked dumplings into a plate, then lowered her voice a little, "Your dad tells everyone he meets at the factory, and people are avoiding him now."

As Su Chen sat on a small stool in the kitchen eating dumplings, his mother stood opposite him, repeatedly wiping her hands with her apron, cleaning them at least ten times. He didn't say anything sentimental; he simply ate every last dumpling from the entire plate. When he reached the last one, he glanced up at the kitchen window—a thin layer of condensation covered the glass, and the streetlights in the yard outside were shimmering with a soft, fuzzy glow. He thought of the streetlights outside the Berlin Film Palace, and the night he stood under them, trophy in hand, talking to them. Then he lowered his head and ate the last dumpling.

When he returned to his room, he noticed something new on his desk. It was a brand-new notebook with a dark brown hardcover and matching cloth trim at the corners. Opening the first page, he saw a line written in pen by his father, Su Zhigao. The ink was uneven, and a few characters trembled slightly from the pressure applied—"For my son. Dad."

Su Chen placed the notebook on the table but didn't start writing immediately. He first took a shower, changed into his pajamas, and took the Silver Bear Trophy out of his bag, placing it on the top shelf of the bookshelf. Then he sat down at his desk, turned on the desk lamp, and wrote a new line on the blank title page.

  

"Love. February 16, 2000."

He didn't sleep that night. He sat at his desk, staring at the blank notebook for a long time. The sky outside the window changed from deep black to deep blue and then to grayish white. The frost on the windowsill began to melt from the edges, and drops of water slid down the glass, each watermark casting a tiny shadow on the table.

The story of *Amour*, before Su Chen's rebirth, was directed by Austrian director Michael Haneke in 2012. The French title, "Amour," is an extremely simple word. The story tells of Georges and Anne, an octogenarian retired music teacher couple in Paris. Anne suddenly suffers a stroke, and after a failed surgery, she is paralyzed on one side of her body. Georges cares for her alone. Day after day, he watches his wife transform from an independent and elegant old lady into a shell confined to a wheelchair—unable to care for herself, unable to express herself, and even no longer recognizing him. Finally, one afternoon without any warning, Georges covers Anne's face with a pillow. Then he scatters flower petals throughout the room, seals the doors and windows, lies down beside his wife, and awaits death.

When Su Chen first watched this movie, he practically covered his mouth the whole time. Not because he was scared, but because the raw, unadorned cruelty was so real. It wasn't a horror film, but it was more suffocating than any horror film. Haneke used his signature long takes to film every detail like a slice under a microscope—the sound of urine flowing down the wheelchair when Anne first lost control of her bladder, George's hesitation as he ran to his wife in the kitchen after hearing her scream, and the few seconds at the end when the pillow pressed against his face.

But what Su Chen wants to do now is not to remake a film. He wants to write a "Love" that belongs to China and to this era.

Dawn breaks late in Beijing. Su Chen sat at his desk for hours, the first page of his notebook containing only two words: "Furnace Fire".

For the next week, Su Chen spent almost all his time in Beijing. He visited the geriatric wards of three hospitals, squatting in the corridors to observe the elderly people in wheelchairs. He saw an old woman being pushed by her daughter to go for a checkup; the old woman's hand was trembling, and her daughter placed her hand on the back of her mother's hand to stop the trembling. He saw an old man stand in front of a mirror at the end of the corridor for a long time, then reach out to touch his face in the mirror, as if to confirm that he was still alive.

He wrote all these details down in that dark brown notebook. Not just the movements and expressions, but also the smells—the smell of disinfectant mixed with the smell of urinals in the hospital corridor, the fumes of cooking oil mixed with the bitter smell of traditional Chinese medicine in the old apartment building's stairwell. And the light—the strip of light that slanted in through the ward window at 8:30 in the morning, making the elderly person's skin appear translucent, like a layer of rice paper that had been crumpled many times.

The biggest challenge in adapting a story is not the story itself, but where the story should be rooted.

In the original film, George and Anne are Parisian middle-class intellectuals—music teachers, classical music enthusiasts, and living in a Parisian apartment. These identities don't have direct counterparts in China. But the core of the story—about aging, dignity, and the state of love after it has reached its end—is entirely cross-cultural. The question is, what identities, what spaces, and what details should be used to carry this core message?

Su Chen considered no fewer than ten options: retired university professors, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, retired workers, and old bookstore owners. He even made a table in his notebook, listing the options on the left and their advantages and disadvantages on the right.

He wrote the most notes on the university professor theme. A retired literature professor, living in a university staff dormitory, his study piled high with books, old photos hanging on the walls, eloquent and literate, able to express his helplessness in the face of his wife's aging. But Su Chen crossed out this theme after writing three pages of notes. It was too easy. Intellectuals have language skills; they can express emotions through dialogue and monologue, which is inherently a shortcut. But he didn't want to take shortcuts. Zhang Zili, the character in his previous film, was a man of few words; Su Chen excelled at filming those unspoken words.

Retired workers. He considered this option for even longer. These were older workers who entered the factory in the 1950s and 60s, experiencing the glory days of the planned economy and the layoffs of the 1990s, living in public housing allocated to them in the old factory area. This setting was more fitting than the intellectual option in terms of region, era, and social context—he had just filmed in Harbin's industrial area, and he was familiar with that environment. But the problem was that he wanted to express more than just the aging plight of the lower classes; he wanted to express the universal human experience of aging. The social issues brought about by the worker's identity were too strong, which would dilute the "universality" he wanted.

A retired bookstore owner. After standing in front of a used bookstore near Qianmen for an entire afternoon, he rejected the proposal as well. The bookstore's ambiance was too artsy; it would make one feel that the director was deliberately pursuing cultural symbols.

Ultimately, he chose an identity that was neither wealthy nor impoverished, one that could embody culture without relying on it—a retired high school music teacher. Not a university, but a high school. More unpretentious than a university, more culturally rich than a primary school. They lived in old-style residential buildings, not the kind of courtyard houses with strong regional symbols, but the kind of six-story slab buildings built in the late 1980s and early 1990s—cement stairs, iron railings, and cluttered hallways with each family's belongings. Such houses can be found in any city in China. He wanted the audience to feel, after watching, that this could be anyone's parent, or even anyone's future.

The male protagonist's surname is Liu, Liu Jianguo; the female protagonist's surname is Wang, Wang Xiulan. Su Chen deliberately chose the most common names—the kind of names you could find in any household registration book. Born in the late 1920s, they married in the 1940s and lived through war, the founding of the People's Republic of China, various political movements, and the Reform and Opening Up. They moved from a single-story house to a tenement building and then to an apartment, raising three children who all went to other places, living their own lives, and occasionally returning home on holidays.

In their kitchen, there was an enamel basin, the peony pattern on the bottom almost worn away; in the bedroom wardrobe drawer, pressed a black-and-white wedding photo, the two standing close together, shoulders a fist's distance apart—not out of awkwardness, but the distance people in that era habitually maintained when taking photos. In the living room, there was an old-fashioned tube radio, covered with a white lace cover. Next to the TV cabinet were piles of their grandson's toys, left over from last year's Spring Festival.