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In search of an actress both pretty and pure
By Wang Yong |
August 17, 2010, Tuesday
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A FAMOUS film director lamented recently that it's difficult to discover an actress of pure looks and spirit today - the kind of purity that defined fair Chinese ladies of the 1970s and earlier.
"If you look at pictures taken in the 1960s or 1970s, you will see an aura of purity around every man or woman in those pictures," said Zhang Yimou last week. "That's a bygone quality you hardly see in any young face today."
He said most of the 10,000-some tryouts for his new film "Love of the Hawthorn Tree" were worldly students from the nation's top film schools who hardly met his standard of purity.
He joked: "Kids today are uglier and uglier, as pretty women are all married to coal mine bosses, old guys, and rich guys."
Of course, not every pretty woman is married to ugly men and not every girl born in the 1990s is as ugly as Zhang joked. But this joke contains some grain of truth about the spiritual differences between ladies today and those of 30 or 40 years ago.
The new film, due to premier on September 16, is adapted from a namesake novel about passionate love in the 1970s, when material life was hard and romance was more about spiritual attachment than sexual relationship. That love story brought tears to my eyes when I first read it a few months ago. I expect Zhang's to let me down, although Zhang finally found an actress born in the 1990s who at least looked innocent.
Ours is fundamentally an age of material abundance and sexual liberation. However pure Zhang's final casting choice may look, she cannot help but be part of a culture largely contaminated by consumerism.
As Zhang Yimou reckons, many Chinese actresses today struggle to express the chastity of their forerunners who sought love for love's sake, not for the sake of sexual pleasure, money and material possessions. That pure love lives only in books today, but unfortunately reading is a dying habit.
Zhang's dilemma in finding a perfect actress reflects a larger problem in China today: the younger generations cannot seem to understand there was once a kind of love that was so passionate because it transcended physical and material pleasures. Sexy coeds and mistresses get the college boot
IT appears to be futile for schools to maintain some standards of decorum and try to expel coeds for having sex before marriage or becoming mistresses to married men.
Last month, South China Normal University in Guangdong Province found itself in the eye of a national media storm for its decision to expel any student, male or female, found to have had sex before marriage, or become a partner of a married man or woman. Chongqing Normal University recently made a similar decision, further stirring debates about college stuents' "sexual rights."
Xinhua reported yesterday that, contrary to the educators' thinking, many students at South China Normal University and other colleges support pre-marital sex and girls' decision to become mistresses of married men.
Is this progress or regression? Xinhua asked as it discovered what it called a "mistress culture" spreading among college girls.
South China Normal University's decision, harsh as it sounds, may well fall flat on its face given the popularity of such a "mistress culture." After all, how can you crack down on something that is cloaked in the name of freedom?
It's a dilemma for Chinese educators: you violate "human rights" if you deprive students of their "sexual rights"; you violate traditional Chinese values of chastity and loyalty if you wink at this "mistress culture."
It is not a dilemma in a Western college, where no one would be expelled for pre-marital or any other sexual relationships, and it was not a dilemma in a Chinese college in the 1970s and earlier, where everyone would be expelled for doing the same.
"If you look at pictures taken in the 1960s or 1970s, you will see an aura of purity around every man or woman in those pictures," said Zhang Yimou last week. "That's a bygone quality you hardly see in any young face today."
He said most of the 10,000-some tryouts for his new film "Love of the Hawthorn Tree" were worldly students from the nation's top film schools who hardly met his standard of purity.
He joked: "Kids today are uglier and uglier, as pretty women are all married to coal mine bosses, old guys, and rich guys."
Of course, not every pretty woman is married to ugly men and not every girl born in the 1990s is as ugly as Zhang joked. But this joke contains some grain of truth about the spiritual differences between ladies today and those of 30 or 40 years ago.
The new film, due to premier on September 16, is adapted from a namesake novel about passionate love in the 1970s, when material life was hard and romance was more about spiritual attachment than sexual relationship. That love story brought tears to my eyes when I first read it a few months ago. I expect Zhang's to let me down, although Zhang finally found an actress born in the 1990s who at least looked innocent.
Ours is fundamentally an age of material abundance and sexual liberation. However pure Zhang's final casting choice may look, she cannot help but be part of a culture largely contaminated by consumerism.
As Zhang Yimou reckons, many Chinese actresses today struggle to express the chastity of their forerunners who sought love for love's sake, not for the sake of sexual pleasure, money and material possessions. That pure love lives only in books today, but unfortunately reading is a dying habit.
Zhang's dilemma in finding a perfect actress reflects a larger problem in China today: the younger generations cannot seem to understand there was once a kind of love that was so passionate because it transcended physical and material pleasures. Sexy coeds and mistresses get the college boot
IT appears to be futile for schools to maintain some standards of decorum and try to expel coeds for having sex before marriage or becoming mistresses to married men.
Last month, South China Normal University in Guangdong Province found itself in the eye of a national media storm for its decision to expel any student, male or female, found to have had sex before marriage, or become a partner of a married man or woman. Chongqing Normal University recently made a similar decision, further stirring debates about college stuents' "sexual rights."
Xinhua reported yesterday that, contrary to the educators' thinking, many students at South China Normal University and other colleges support pre-marital sex and girls' decision to become mistresses of married men.
Is this progress or regression? Xinhua asked as it discovered what it called a "mistress culture" spreading among college girls.
South China Normal University's decision, harsh as it sounds, may well fall flat on its face given the popularity of such a "mistress culture." After all, how can you crack down on something that is cloaked in the name of freedom?
It's a dilemma for Chinese educators: you violate "human rights" if you deprive students of their "sexual rights"; you violate traditional Chinese values of chastity and loyalty if you wink at this "mistress culture."
It is not a dilemma in a Western college, where no one would be expelled for pre-marital or any other sexual relationships, and it was not a dilemma in a Chinese college in the 1970s and earlier, where everyone would be expelled for doing the same.
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