After Pandora’s Box — Are films that take romantic love as their subject clichéd, and how might their bad effects arise?

Let me begin by putting forward three propositions:

• Compared with a work centered on romantic attachments and one centered on the proper path of obtaining scriptures or inheriting a will, does the former fall into cliché or begin with an inferior intention?
• Are small domestic concerns and feelings for the nation inherently opposed?
• How should we position them, and what is “scope”? What kinds of works cannot be forgiven, and what kinds can be accepted?

The person writing this is not a professional. If you expect a dialectic full of professional terms, I cannot provide it.

To solve the first question, we must first answer: can people avoid being ordinary?

Can People Avoid Being Ordinary?

As far as I know, most people cannot.

What mainly kept me watching Pandora’s Box was Spider Woman’s looks =-= and the adorable Karen Mok. The liveliness of the role she plays exceeds Chingmy Yau’s; every smile and glance moves the heart. Then there is that they are both demons, the transformation jokes, and the contrast that makes the contrast cute rather than tiring. When viewers may be approaching comedy fatigue and their threshold for laughter has risen, the director also lets the characters settle and deepen. Suddenly there is depth—for example, when Spider Woman calls out “Nanny,” and the way Uncle Tat looks at her in that moment.

As for depth, I put all my attention on Uncle Tat. Earlier, during the Spider Woman’s fight, she asks Uncle Tat, controlled by the Bewitching Mind spell:

“Are you all right? [nei mou si ma]”

Uncle Tat’s response is, “Even in a crisis like this, she still remembers to care about me. There is no way around it: I must love her for ten thousand years.”

Some of that may not be the original line, but “love her for ten thousand years” certainly is.

I admire the nonsensical humor and comic rhythm of most Stephen Chow films, such as Fight Back to School. A single step too far becomes excessive. It is as though only Stephen Chow can make nonsense comedy feel natural to me; other actors always seem awkward. The director knows when to joke and when to become serious. That rhythm cannot be learned; there is no rule for it, only a complete grasp of the audience’s heart.

So is not every nonsensical film that fits your heart also the director’s heartbeat synchronizing with yours—a confession of sorts?

I have wandered off topic.

I cannot avoid being ordinary. As I said above, those things are what keep me watching. I have not severed a single one of the seven emotions and six desires; I am so ordinary that I also have a fondness for films that appropriately cater to that ordinariness.

This look back reminds me of someone: Cheng Ying.

The expression on the one at the far left is very cute. Especially after watching The King of Comedy, the contrast is even cuter.

I may put more at the end, so I will not add too many here.

I am an ordinary person, so I do not think it is a problem for a work to catch my attention through romantic love and advance the plot through it. On the contrary, I welcome it.

And A Chinese Odyssey is not deliberate about it. It never makes me feel that love is the most important thing, that everything is discussing it, that nothing can work without it. I have seen films that do that—White Snake, for example, which writes love too forcefully. Once love is removed, what is left? Overemphasizing romantic love and having nothing but romantic attachments are what make people feel a work is too clichéd.

Of course, not everyone will find it clichéd. Everyone has their own range of cliché they can bear. At least to me, White Snake feels somewhat narrow and extreme.

This approach also often falls into a trap. The later films in the White Snake series cannot break out of the frame they set for themselves. At that point, romantic attachment truly becomes a limitation.

Oh—I seem to have reached the answer by accident. I did not know it from the beginning; I was only trying to discuss it, and arrived at my own answer that way.

Conclusion:

• Probably no one can avoid being ordinary. I certainly cannot.
• Everyone has their own range of cliché they can bear.
• When romantic love is written too forcefully and treated as the only important thing, it easily becomes narrow and extreme, and easily falls into cliché.
• In Pandora’s Box, romantic love is more like bait that catches someone like me and makes me watch to the end. It is not the most important thing, and the film does not need it absolutely. I cannot say what is most important, though perhaps Uncle Tat’s performance contains the answer.

In terms of intention, are small domestic concerns inferior to feelings for the nation?

The Answer to the Third Question

At this point, the answer to the third point above can also be reached:

• “Scope” is only a high hat. When we call a work broad or narrow in scope, we are usually implying whether its director is narrow.
• Narrowness generally shares a feature: when one thing is valued too heavily and forced too hard, it becomes easy to grow narrow.
• A narrow work may itself communicate a somewhat extreme intention, which can make viewers uncomfortable when their views differ. Such works are usually unacceptable to me.

Finally, some screenshots from an LSP:

Does this not have the feeling of Li Xiaoyao holding Zhao Linger?

I could not resist posting this one more time. Other people may find it hard to understand and think both look ordinary, but the one at the far right somehow strikes my aesthetic exactly.

Zixia should originally have gone in After A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella, but I had already captured so many shots for the ending. It was love at first sight; the LSP verdict is confirmed.