If we want to divide the era of Hong Kong films, I think the 80s and 90s are a "golden age" of blossoming and vigorous development;
The "Pre-Infernal Affairs" era marked by the "Infernal Affairs Trilogy" after 2000;
With the end of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, it has entered a trough period in which both the works and the market have begun to gradually decline, that is, the "post-Infernal Affairs" era.
In the post-infernal era, although Hong Kong films such as Leung Chao-wai, Wong Qiu-sheng, Liu Qingyun, Andy Lau, Gu Tianle and other golden generation mesozoic film emperors are still trying to contribute their works, they always feel unsatisfactory.
The current Hong Kong films are no longer the glory of the last century, but some works, although they cannot be called classics, still carry the brilliance of the former Hong Kong films, such as "Cold War", and for example, I think it is a struggle in the decline period - the "Eavesdropping" trilogy.
The first two films scored 7.5 points on Douban and 6.3 points in the third, because after all, it was a movie 10 years ago, and it should have been higher when it was first released, but it has to be said that this is still an excellent work of Hong Kong films in recent years.
Although the third part has a low rating, it is the most ambitious, want to express the most, greedy and chewy, resulting in the overall plot dispersion and the subsequent release of the editing problems are also very influential, but it is still an underrated good film.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > character: Iron Triangle</h1>
The biggest feature of the "Eavesdropping" series is that it retains the characteristics of classic Hong Kong films with characters as the core, and Gu Tianle, Liu Qingyun and Wu Yanzu starred in the trilogy as the iron triangle.
Even if the actors do not change, even if they watch the trilogy in one breath, each role will not have a sense of ambiguity at all, and the character personalities of each eavesdropping iron triangle are completely distinguished.
The strength of Liu Qingyun and Gu Tianle Film Emperor is naturally needless to say, and the acting skills of Wu Yanzu in the next era are also particularly surprising, and it seems to be ignored that he is a representative of Hong Kong movies as a "face value".
In the first part, "Eavesdropping" has less ambitions, and seems to want to make a human story driven by the conflict and emotional line of three characters, which is of course the advantage of Hong Kong films.
Gu Tianle is an "old fritter" of the police force who is overwhelmed by family burdens and financially stretched. The financial criminals that the intelligence services come into contact with casually make tens of millions of dollars, which makes him extremely dissatisfied with the world, and in the early stages of the film, he completely drives the plot development with his character contradictions.
Liu Qingyun is more like our common big brother, doing things properly, with a stable personality, but he can't handle his emotional life well, and he has entanglements with the ex-wife of Fang Zhongxin, a friend and boss.
Wu Yanzu, on the other hand, is the most tense personality in this movie, and in the first half of the film, as a young talent who married a rich wife, he seems to be the luckiest of the three, in fact, he is also the most vague about his self-worth, and he is also the biggest contrast between before and after.
The personality expression of these three people is very similar to the "Buddha" thought conveyed in the infernal path, which is the ambiguity of good and evil, and the endless purgatory, while the eavesdropping is about the "greed and anger" in life, and everyone has obsessions.
In the second part, it should be because of the success of the first part, the director and screenwriter also began to show their fists, more characters were added, this one used the most old actors in the trilogy: Zeng Jiang, Hu Feng, Jiang Yi, Luo Yingjun and other members of the "Landlords' Association", each of which is an old drama bone who has acted for most of his life.
It can be said that the second part is completely a tribute to the passing generation of Hong Kong films, and even the shadow of the classic financial drama "Big Time" can be seen in many places.
Although the protagonist is still the Iron Triangle, due to the participation of many old drama bones, the three younger actors are a bit like "tool people".
Of course, this is a benign weakening of the protagonist, when the overall age, experience, and experience of a film actor are deep enough, the younger actors will serve and make way for these more experienced old actors, just like "The Name of the People".
In the last part, the role and number of old actors have decreased, becoming a stage for the golden generation to pick the beams, in addition to the iron triangle, there is also the later film emperor Lin Jiadong, the role of Lin Jiahua.
The most surprising thing is Fang Zhongxin, I believe that the first time people who read it did not want to find that this long-haired person wearing sunglasses was actually Fang Zhongxin.
Huang Lei's role, some people say that there is a sense of violation, but I don't think so, Huang Lei plays a capital spokesman from Wall Street, whether for Hong Kong or the New Territories in the movie, "foreign feeling" is normal, because this role represents foreign forces.
Many Hong Kong movies also have mainland actors as supporting roles, most of which will be reduced to playing soy sauce, but Huang Lei's role is not much but there is no sense of chicken ribs, and even the polite but hidden "power" that he represents capital has formed a strong contrast with the pure "evil" of the four New Street brothers.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > Finance and power</h1>
As the financial center of Asia, Hong Kong is also known as the "financial port". The stock market, which represents power and money, has too many stories in this land, and "Eavesdropping" chooses finance as the core theme of the story, and what it wants to tell is the story of human nature and money and power, and what to express is also unfolded step by step with the trilogy.
In the first part, the film revolves around the insider trading case of a single company, Fenghua International, and the cooperation between the intelligence department of the Iron Triangle and the Commercial Criminal Investigation Bureau opens the door for the protagonists to contact the financial world.
But in one film, the character contradictions in the Iron Triangle are the real core, and as for insider trading, it is the introduction and serves the protagonist.
The inside information that the Iron Triangle overheard inadvertently opened up their greed, Gu Tianle was for life, Wu Yanzu was for self-worth, and Liu Qingyun was for his brothers.
But once this Pandora's box is opened, it can no longer be closed, as we often say: "When you tell one lie, you have to tell a hundred lies to round it up." ”
This is the black hole of human greed, and it is also what the director wants to express in the first part.
In the second part, the film began to talk about the times and the environment. From 1845, the British opened the first bank in Hong Kong, and eight years later, Standard Chartered Bank obtained the right to issue Hong Kong currency, and a dispute between foreign and Chinese capital began.
Since Hong Kong is a financial free port, until now it is still a dichotomy between foreign capital and Chinese capital, these foreign investors are Morgan, Merrill Lynch and other giant consortiums, how can we defeat the consortium?
Only a consortium can resist a consortium, and the establishment of the "Landlords' Association" in the film was to resist foreign investment in the 1973 stock market crash.
Why do I say that the second part of "Eavesdropping" has a lot of shadows of "Big Time", in addition to using a lot of big time actors, in fact, it is the same for the birth of early Hong Kong stockists, and the father of the protagonist (Liu Qingyun) in "Big Time" is also set up in order to fight against the crazy foreign capital in the stock market.
Therefore, in the early days of the establishment of the Landlords' Association, the "landlords" were foreign capital, transnational consortia, and when they repelled foreign capital, they found that there was no opponent, and they themselves became extremely powerful.
This is the story of "the brave man who defeated the dragon and became the dragon himself".
It is worth mentioning that Azu (Wu Yanzu) is the well-deserved first protagonist in the second part, but it is still dazzling under the aura of a group of old drama bones.
It's a story of a mortal body defeating a giant consortium, and the line "bugging, high performance, military use" appears twice in the movie, respectively, when the main story is revealed and ended, throughout the film.
This line also tells what kind of power can defeat them in the face of powerful capital.
Bugging devices, tools, high performance is efficiency, military is strength, this is the role of Wu Yanzu, with coldness, full of vengeance, meticulous planning, the cost of life, will the "landlord society" collapse.
It can be said that the second part is the most suitable for the theme of "eavesdropping".
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > dispute over ding power</h1>
The third part is the lowest-rated one, but as I said above, it is also the most ambitious one, so I will take it out separately.
The film starts from the "Ding Quan", a word full of historical colors, in 1972 the Hong Kong government planned to develop the New Territories, we can understand as "new districts", because of geography and transportation and other reasons, in the past the New Territories has been Hong Kong's agricultural production area, that is, "the countryside", in the film Gu Tianle's line said: "It is difficult for us rural people to do it." ”
New Territories Big Hat Hill
In order to appease the new territories aborigines, the Hong Kong government at that time introduced the "Small House Policy", which stipulated that each male (D) could apply once in his lifetime to build a house with a maximum height of 3 floors (a ceiling of 27 feet / 8.22 meters) within the approved area, and the area of each floor did not exceed 700 square feet, without paying the land price (rights) to the government.
In essence, it was a mutually compromised "Huai rou policy", through certain privileges in exchange for the smooth progress of development, and after the return of the house in 1997, the Ding Wu policy was still not abolished, and was written into the Basic Law.
Ding Quan is different from the general appeasement policy, and there is a reason why the film opens around this theme.
First of all, in the 1980s, as long as a man proved that he was a New Territories aboriginal on the tree, he had the right to ding, and his sons and grandchildren also had it, which was a hereditary right.
Secondly, this power accompanies lifelong, will not disappear because of the move away from the New Territories, corresponding to many of the Ding houses that have been built, if they need to be redeveloped, they must obtain their Ding rights, which leads to two results, first, in Hong Kong, where the land is not rich, a large amount of land is wasted, and secondly, although Ding Quan is not counted before, but once it encounters development, it is worth a hundred times.
Finally, "Ding" refers to men, which involves the issue of female discrimination, and the conflict between Ye Xuan and her father in the movie also echoes this point, women cannot inherit Ding power, and Ye Xuan cannot inherit her father's influence.
The four brothers in the movie are in the gray area derived from the sale of Ding Quan, Ding Quan will only be valuable when he encounters the development of the open dealer, the normal trade in the movie is hundreds of thousands, and one or two Ding Quan can not form a climate at all.
So the four brothers bought a large number of Ding rights on the one hand, and at the same time used their influence in the villages of the New Territories to continuously seek benefits between developers and villagers.
Of course, at the beginning, they were not the boss, the real master was Uncle Tao, the highest generation in the New Territories, and this character also had an archetype in real life, that is, the chairman of the New Territories Township Council known as the "King of the New Territories" - Liu Huangfa.
Among them are four main forces, the New Territories real speaker Uncle Tao, the four brothers of the Lu family, Uncle Tao's daughter and son-in-law of the Lu Guo Group, and the New Territories Real Estate Chamber of Commerce represented by Situ Guang (Wu Mengda).
Among them, there are also the contradictions of the four brothers letting Luo Yong (Gu Tianle) crash into Lu Yongyong for drunk driving, the contradiction between Uncle Tao's daughter and the patriarchal power, Luo Yong's identity as a foreigner, the emotional entanglement with Uncle Tao's daughter, the emotional line between Wu Yanzu and Zhou Xun, and so on.
So the problem with this movie is here, a 2-hour work, to talk about the characters, forces, contradictions, involving real estate, rural development, stock market and other industries, and the film's expression methods are suspense, grudges, homeland feelings, and even funny, to express the things is really too much.
Considering that the recent work "The Irishman" that has to express so many ideas is close to four hours long, in my opinion, "Eavesdropping 3" is more suitable for making a TV series.
So what kind of film is this, the director is not wrong, wants to express, wants to pay tribute to the classic, which is a good thing;
There is nothing wrong with the actors, none of the actors' acting skills are not above the excellent line, from the protagonist to the supporting role, each character is very distinctive;
The screenwriter is naturally not wrong, so many character contradictions, emotional lines and main lines, the whole story is also taken into account.
The problem is that "Eavesdropping 3" can't fight the market to make a four-hour feature film when Hong Kong movies are on the decline.
Stitching up all the good things is not necessarily good, and trying to explore the dawn is the current situation of Hong Kong films.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
The opening of the "post-infernal affairs" era makes us, like Hong Kong filmmakers, miss that glorious era incomparably, and traces of nostalgia and adherence to tradition can be seen in many recent works.
But the sluggishness of the market, the scarcity of excellent scripts, and the disconnection of actors have plagued the light of what was once Asian cinema. The urgent marketization and box office requirements seem to make the big directors also start to be helpless.
In the "Eavesdropping" trilogy, although there are some minor flaws, they are still flawed. Enough to be called the best series of works in the past decade, we seem to have asserted in the era of Infernal Affairs that the pinnacle of infernal works cannot be copied.
However, we also have to worry now that we may not even be able to reproduce "Eavesdropping", which is the struggle and regret of all filmmakers and fans, but still hold out hope and hope that this long night will soon pass.
As the third Golden Age actors sang the lyrics of the song "Together You Are Obsessed with Love":
"Who made Qingshan change and change his tacky face, and who made Bihai change and become vulgar and monstrous?"