手机2003

        Cell Phone (2003) marks the culmination of the popular cultural preoccupation with infidelity. A famous TV talk show host Yan Shouyi, tries without success to maintain the delicate network of lies and concealments that allow him to have two different mistresses in addition to his estranged wife.
        The story starts in a small town where the town’s first telephone, which signifies the modernization in China, has just been installed. In a small village nearby, a young man Yan Shouyi takes a peasant woman to the town to make a phone call to her husband. About twenty years later, the middle-aged Yan Shouyi has already become a popular TV talk show host in a big city, owning a wife, a nice job, a BMW, and a mistress. His life and work would not have taken this path if he had not been equipped with a cell phone, the latest wireless communication technology. But the Cell Phone also causes the end of his marriage: his wife accidentally answers a phone call from his mistress complaining about his absence from a date.
        After getting a divorce, Yan starts a new relationship with a college teacher, Shen Xue, while still occasionally dating his old mistress, Wu Yue. On the several occasions when his double life is about to be discovered by Shen, Yan deftly covers the truth with lies. His close friend Fei Muo, a university professor and producer for his television show, is also involved in a similar love affair with a graduate student, which is soon discovered by his wife. Eventually, Yan’s infidelity is discovered by Shen who sees a digital picture of Yan and Wu making love, a picture taken by the digital camera built into Wu’s new cell phone. Not only is Yan’s relationship destroyed, his career also ends as Wu threatens to expose their relationship and takes over his position as the talk show host. At the end of the film, throwing his cell phone into fire, Yan swears that he will never again own one. Then after a dip-to-black, the film welcomes a second ending, Yan’s niece, who is also from the same village, becomes a cell phone saleswoman and comes to demonstrate the latest product to his uncle Yan. (Zhang, 135)
        Given the obvious Marxist bent of Cell Phone’s rhetoric and its fable-like narrative of the dangers of commodity fetishism, one might easily conclude the film as criticism of the effects of rapid economic transformation in urban China, and denial of male dominance. However, underneath this reading which is merely based on the resolution provided by the film, we can find both the cultural underpinning and ideological impacts of the film, whether they are conscious directorial decisions or not, are the other way around.
        The film is based on patriarchal and post-socialist assumptions in the first place. The leading character, wealthy, successful TV host Yan Shouyi, is representing the controlling patriarchal order and the ruling class. The young and charming mistress Wu Yue, on the other hand, is a sexual object and an oppressed worker reinforcing and perpetuating an exploitative capitalistic scheme. Yu Wenjuan, the pregnant wife and later the mother of Yan’s only child, is a cheap labor whose family value in undertaking housework and fostering children is totally underestimated and neglected by both the character Yan and the filmmaker Feng. Shen Xue, the successor of Yu and Wu, is a wonderful replacement of the two women, since she functions as both mistress and wife and has the highest total value. Therefore, marriage and divorce follow the rules of product exchange. The values of women as sexual commodities are estimated by their male owner, based on evaluation and grading of their sexual attractiveness and productivity among others.
        In the second place, the narration neglects and degrades women’s family values.
While there are scenes of Yan Shouyi working at the TV station and attending meeting with his colleagues, which confirms his value in production, there is hardly any scene of the women working. In addition, among the values of women, the four structures proposed by Mitchell, sexuality is emphasized against reproduction, and socialization. While there are a lot of scenes of Yan Shouyi flirting and having fun with her young and passionate mistress Wu Yue, there is hardly any scene of him and the older and less attractive wife spending time together. The cinematic representation of the reproduction process of Yan’s first wife is almost absent in the film. Having been pregnant for months, Yu Wenjuan did not inform her husband at all, and Yan is only informed several months after divorce by his ex-brother-in-law that his first wife had already given birth to their baby and needs money from him.
        Hiding behind socialization of children and the new motherhood are deeper oppressions of women. Spending a lot of time and energy nurturing the kid, the woman Yu did not get the compensation in improving her own social status; instead she lost her job in the big city after she went back to her hometown. As the value of socialization of children is often neglected by the society, this part of the plot is also omitted in the film, and is only told through Yan’s narration, serving as an obstacle that hinders and adds drama to Yan’s women pursuing career. As her value looks invisible, Yan replaces his first wife not with his mistress whose value only lies in sexuality, but with a beautiful college professor Shen Xue who seems to be a more serious and proper wife candidate, but also has the sexual disposition of a mistress.
        From Yan’s perspective, all the three women can be valued on a materialistic basis. Women become commodities, and their sexual attractiveness, job, education status are all counted in their exchange value while man is the buyer who has the right of choice because of his economic power and dominance in a patriarchal society.
        Extramarital relationship is a fatal violation of Chinese social norms and a tradition that often punishes the woman for such “immoral transgression” (Cui 181). In Cell Phone, the mistress Wu Yue, became the conflict's cause and the incarnation of immorality instead of the Male character Yan Shouyi. As an advanced prostitute, she would love to sell her body in exchange for money and power. And, ultimately, she threatens to replace Yan Shouyi as a television talk show host by using the photo she took in her cell phone. Thus, Yan Shouyi becomes the victimized character pitied by the audiences instead of the evil woman.
        The resolution of the film, Yan Shouyi’s abandoning of the cell phone, which may seem like a self-criticism, is actually a displacement and denial of the guilt and regret by reprimanding the modern technology and communication device. Cell phone becomes the scapegoat for Yan Shouyi, the hypocritical and immoral character, and therefore the patriarchal and capitalist order behind the story, which was supposedly to be criticized, is actually being extended sympathy.
        Depicted as the direct cause of all the conflicts between the protagonist and the three female characters, cell phone, the symbol of post-socialist modernity seems to be criticized. Rui concludes that Cell Phone addresses the subject through the director’s satirical take on consumerism and his exposure of the moral crises and ethical issues brought by expansion of high technology into our everyday lives (Zhang, 136). However, in the first 90 minutes of the film, a fantasy of the patriarchal and post-socialist (capitalist) utopia was already created for the male audiences: mistress as a symbol and accessory of urban success. Female audiences were also given a utilitarian fantasy integrated with the narcissistic and masochistic visual pleasure: being someone’s mistress is the shortcut to wealth and success. Thus, the film belittles the value of women, and denies women's independent existential meaning.
        In addition to the narrative constructed to propagate the attractive image of the “successful personage” that has represented the “new ideology” of contemporary China, an image that endorses a reality of growing class differences and income disparities, Feng Xiaogang adopts a lot of meta-cinematic elements in Cell Phone to offset the seriousness of his own criticism, a technique abundantly used in his early films. There are ample shots within the TV station, such as the staff operating camera, and outtakes of the TV host Yan who says his lines wrong, that remind the audiences to question the authenticity of their own movie watching experience. There is also a lot of inserting advertisements for cell phones that deconstructs the movie’s final critical stance towards post-socialist modernity. As the audiences identify and follow the male protagonist throughout the film, they highly enjoy and celebrate his material wealth and “romantic affairs” brought about by his professional success in the patriarchal and post-socialist order. In the meantime, they also accept a message that all women, whether they are educated or not, college professor or press editor, wife or mistress, are all annexed to the life of men.
        As McGrath noticed, the basic narrative structure of Cell Phone already had become so common by the end of the 1990s as to constitute a cinematic genre in itself, a genre that offers fable-like narratives of the moral dilemmas confronted by protagonists facing dramatic changes in personal economics as well as libidinal possibilities in the reform era. In such films, a man takes on one or more extramarital lovers after achieving some sort of economic success and social elevation (McGrath, 98). In many cases, a man’s ability to defy his wife is supported by both his male role and some sort of economic success. Even though these films reveal the social issues of the oppression of women, they neither provide a solution nor hold a feministic point of view that attempt to liberate women. Instead, they stand in line with the successful male protagonists, and celebrate the current patriarchal and post-socialist status quo. In a word, these films are women-concerned, but not at all feminist films.
        Supposedly a subgenre of family melodrama that aims to criticize the social immorality and educate the audiences, the actual impact of the “cinema of infidelity” is rather doubtful. An example is the sex diary scandal of Han Feng, the former senior tobacco official, which culminates the “mistress fashion” in 2010. Even more dramatic than Feng’s films, the purported diary, written in graphic detail, includes boasts that Han was enjoying sex romps with many different women while taking bribes and attending banquets. Populated by Internet users, Han’s case is just one in a million of the government officials and the privileged stratum in Mainland China.

费墨的谎言拆穿了，费墨的老婆歇斯底里地哭叫，扔东西，夺门而去。费墨呆呆地坐着，这是个误会，他说。开了房，思想斗争了老半天，最终还是没上去。起了贼心，没贼胆儿。还偏就让老婆拆穿了，冤，羊肉没吃惹了一身骚，跳进黄河都洗不清，估计这会儿肠子都悔青了在那里。我在屏幕下替他配画外音：真真是白担了虚名。
    《手机》里严守一是惯犯，费墨是未遂犯。惯犯判的刑是离婚，未遂判的是发配边疆。
    真可怜。照说未遂判的刑该轻些才是，毕竟没造成什么实际后果。不过从另一个角度来说，既然跨出了这道坎儿，成事实跟不成事实就没什么大区别了。从费墨老婆的角度来理解，费墨到底进没进这房，一是解释不清没有令人信服的证据，二是费墨心理上出了墙，罪名就已成立。

   《手机》里的经典台词，除了葛优语重心长的做人要厚道；我印象最深的就是费墨的审美疲劳。“那么多年的夫妻，患难与共的，我不是。。。。。。”费墨顿一顿，“我就是，有点审美疲劳。”
    堪比当年《一声叹息》的那句：我摸着你的手，就好像摸着自己的手一样没感觉，可是砍了你的手，我会痛。更简练更一语中的。
    不是不爱你。只是审美疲劳。太长久了，久的看见你好像看见我自己，每分每寸都熟悉的不能再熟悉，接吻好像刷牙，做爱好像吃饭，十年如一日的例行公事。
    如何面对，激情退去后的那一点点倦。愿意和你一起慢慢变老，满头白发的时候一同携手看夕阳无限好，可是怎么办呢，现在他的心还挣扎着不肯老。
    他不想离开你。你是他的原配，一把锁最初的那把钥匙，合的丝丝入扣的。
    可是他想偶尔出去走走。

    世上大抵是没有这样的好事的。鬼马狂想曲的三个愿望许到最后，魔法师说财富要拿健康去换。要一样就得付出另一样，一点商量余地都没有。
    一个人的自由和寂寞。两个人的安稳和责任。森林中你只能选择一棵树，然后刻上你的名字，硬要剜去的时候，树会痛，你的名字会流泪，痕迹永生不灭。
    可是怎么办呢，贪是人的本性。
    要现世安稳岁月静好，也要新鲜热辣欢期暗忆。
    是谁的贪是谁的怨，谁是谁的错生缘。

    费墨老婆是聪明的，知道虚虚实实地套严守一的话揪出真相。不过，若是没有那一问一答，费墨和她还是恩爱夫妻吧？费墨与她，应该还是相爱的吧，那么多年的感情。有点可惜。
    有的时候，肯说谎，就还是看重这份感情。到真的绝情，是不屑，也不耐烦说谎的。
    宁为玉碎不为瓦全是刚烈，然世上哪有完美，都不过是碎片拼缀的完整幻象。

    叶倾城的《原配》，问九信和叶青自少年起就开始的爱情，挡的过所有的艰辛挡不过婚姻的疲倦。问九信的声音低沉恍惚：十七年的感情，可是我渐渐懒得回家，想起天长地久的那几样菜式，都觉得烦腻。。。。。。

    爱仿佛永远是支离破碎千疮百孔。
    到底是该相濡以沫，还是相忘于江湖？

    《古惑仔》里小结巴死了，有人说真可惜。也许死了也好。死了就是永远了，爱在那一刻停格，陈浩南可以想念她一生一世，在爱还来不及疲倦的时候。
    人们总是这样，仿佛能够永远的，只有怀念。

    童话故事总是说到王子和公主的盛大婚礼为止，喜气洋洋的，有情人终成眷属，故事圆满了。
    这一场盛宴，到底是序曲还是完结篇？

說穿了，馮小剛執導的《手機》不過是一部有關外遇和謊言的電影。


筆者本來設想這是一部批判新世代通訊科技－手機的故事，但只要剝下表層的營銷包裝和認清於電影裡刻意營造的有關手機的片面判詞，我們不難發覺本片就探討手機之害這一預設母題完全不夠深度而單純是一個晃子。


本片的主戲在於電視節目名嘴嚴守一如何糾纏於有了自己孩子的前妻文娟、激情外遇武月和理想妻子沈雪三個女人之間的故事。


上面的澄清旨在讓觀眾莫要錯誤對號，而並非把電影判成掛羊頭賣狗肉之流。整個故事其實都繫於手機之上，只是手機的角色並非主題卻是促進劇情的工具。電影的每個轉折，比如是嚴守一與前妻離婚、他與沈雪的最後分別以至奶奶最後過身的姍姍來遲，均得算到手機的頭上；甚至談及電影的另一原素－謊言也是緊密的連袂到手機之上，事關嚴守一於電影裡撒的每一個謊言均是有關手機的，故此，就編劇的完整統一性而言，本片確是一絕。


從上面可見，本片的故事絕不新穎甚至說成過份簡單也未嘗不可，但只要小心留意細部劇情，筆者又發現當中不乏佳句。


比如是嚴守一作為電視節目名嘴本身就是個絕妙設置，隨著劇情的發展，嚴守一主持的節目【有一說一】便正好有對應的清談主題。說謊、心裡有病這兩場便恰到好處地對嚴守一當下的處境作了輕鬆幽默的自嘲。這種以對白闡明母題的手法本來流於單純直接屬低手之作，唯配合起主角職業的預設，又反過來為這種淺白的手法提供了非常合理的解釋，故這種借力打力的編劇技巧就確是值得一讚的地方了。


其他有關嚴守一如何「處心積慮」撒謊的設計也同時是表現馮小剛幽默本色的佳句。另外相加起筆者最欣賞的中國演員－葛優精湛的演出，《手機》絕對是一部國內罕有的具通俗娛樂性的佳作。