深锁春光一院愁

对于女孩子来说，用手机或者电脑看看美剧韩剧什么的，算是当下网络时代的一种消遣，但是同样是看电视剧，放到上世纪五十年代的美国，换个播放器——电视机，可能就有另外一种象征——孤独的家庭主妇消磨时光、打发日子的“跳蛋”，讲出来有点羞耻，但是实质上基本一样。

1955年的《深锁春光一院愁》便是把这种表象下的“禁锢”描述的跌宕起伏、委婉动人，虽然是好莱坞的一部制片厂电影，但是却被向来有高逼格之称的“CC标准”收录，光凭这一点，我们就不能把它当做“晚八点爱情狗血片”来看待，尽管电影在故事层面上，讲述的就是一个地地道道的烂俗爱情故事，但是因为那么一点点“不同”，就让它成为了一部“女权主义”电影。

故事讲述的是富裕的中产阶级寡妇凯瑞，和她年轻园丁荣恩之间的一段忘年恋爱，虽然和诸多爱情故事一样，他们经历过双方朋友的检验、邻居们的流言蜚语和家人的指责，但是最终还是有情人终成眷属，来了个完美大结局。然而这个故事是因为美国人在讲述，如果换了其他国家，可能就有不同的结局了，在韩国的话，有可能是《熔炉》般的无力，在丹麦的话，可能是《狩猎》般的忌惮。

之所以把一部爱情电影和两个根本和爱情无关的欧亚国家电影做比较，原因在于，他们都是有关“偏见”。《熔炉》中是众人对于校长一味的信任，而不相信处于劣势的聋哑孩子；《狩猎》正好相反，小镇居民都深信小女孩的所言非虚，而男老师则是邪恶的化身；《深锁春光一院愁》便是富裕的中产阶级对于下层工人的偏见。

将一个“偏见”讲述的到位并不容易，更何况导演道格拉斯·塞克并不希望直接开罪中产阶级，所以在剧情的处理上，颇为委婉，比如女儿的“悔过”，医生的奉劝以及朋友莎拉的好意和理解，但是这种侧笔反而更为讽刺。莎拉的行为更像是中产阶级主妇间的虚与委蛇，女儿的“悔过”更多显露的是一种“事后诸葛”的弥补，但是内心却依旧保守，如果我们联想到她之前动辄拿出弗洛伊德的理论显示自己的开明，后期女儿的“懂事”只会增添她的虚伪和表里不一；而医生，或许只是导演为了推动凯瑞的行为所做的无奈设计吧！

实际上，这群中产阶级的“偏见”只是对于男主角荣恩，对于凯瑞来说并不是“偏见”，而是限制、禁锢和道德捆绑。其实对于荣恩来说，“偏见”并 不算什么，由于人设的性格，荣恩并不在乎别人的看法，但是作为一个丧偶并有两个成年的儿女来说，这种“偏见”便是一种舆论禁锢了。表面上，它很开放，不仅允许，而且鼓励凯瑞找个夕阳伴侣，但是，这种允许是有选择性的，她必须在中产阶级的社交圈中寻找，而且必须年龄相仿，所谓的“爱情”并不是凯瑞这个寡妇的权利，找个合适的体面人组成适当的男女关系才是她可以做的事情。（从开头她和老年的夏飞约会受到儿女的鼓励和支持时就能够看出。）

凯瑞本身也不是那种周围的人一吓，她就放弃真爱的女人，然而当她面临儿女受到流言蜚语，并被儿女“警告”必须和荣恩分开时，她不得不做出让步。社会伦理对于女性的禁锢最可怕的不是来自于外部的恐吓，而是女性自身已经被驯化，她“必须”考虑儿女，她“必须”承担母亲的责任，换句话说，她必须“做一个母亲该做的”，这个“该”便是女性终极的“命运悲剧”。

有一个异常讽刺的场面，当初凯瑞因为还有儿女相伴，所以放弃了自己的真爱，也被儿子“命令”，祖屋必须留下，但是当她决定放弃真爱之后，女儿隔年就会出嫁，儿子即将远去巴黎上学，之后去伊朗工作，还被儿子“通知”：“祖屋太大了，你一个人住也是浪费，回头就卖了吧！”这种前后的荒唐状况可谓是鞭辟入里，更为可笑的是，在一开头凯瑞就异常讨厌“电视机”（因为它代表了中年女人的空虚），但是最后即将离去的儿女却攒钱给她买了一台电视机，从最后电视机屏幕中的凯瑞镜像，我们知道，儿女其实是在给凯瑞的后半生生活送葬。

《深锁春光一院愁》并不想让这种对于女性的压榨见针见血，而是试图用“曲笔”，讽刺性地表达了这一社会现状，可能在导演塞克看来，迎合地讲述痛苦比暴露地表达愤怒更有效吧！

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Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was released by Universal Pictures in 1955, it was just another critically unnoticed Hollywood genre product, designed to appeal to the trashy “women’s weepie” audience. Now, in retrospect, it is considered to be closer to the art side of Sirk’s dialectic, and one of his key films. But this is part of a wider process of critical reevaluation in which his entire body of work has been rediscovered and reappraised by successive generations of filmmakers and historians.

No one seeing the film at the time of its release would have imagined its director to be an elegant, extremely erudite European whose career started in the theater of Weimar Germany and who was an early director of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. After a short but successful career at UFA studios in the vacuum left by the massive emigration of Jewish talent after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Sirk made his way to Hollywood, directing his first film there in 1942. Following an unsuccessful attempt to return to Germany in 1949–50, he signed a contract with Universal. His movie career then culminated with his highest-profile films, the melodramas of 1952–58. By 1959, he was Universal’s most successful director. At that very moment, he left moviemaking and America. Until his death in 1987, he and his wife, Hilde, lived in Lugano, Switzerland.

All That Heaven Allows marks the final turning point in Sirk’s strange and varied career. On the back of Magnificent Obsession’s success the previous year, Universal gave him a budget and freedom that enabled his mature style to blossom. All That Heaven Allows contains all the elements of characteristically Sirkian composition: light, shade, color, and camera angles combine with his trademark use of mirrors to break up the surface of the screen. Here are all the components of the “melodramatic” style on which Sirk’s critical reputation is based and that has made him the favorite of later generations of filmmakers, from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Quentin Tarantino, from John Waters to Pedro Almodóvar.

But at the time, Universal was just anxious to repeat its successful pairing of Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in a romance between an older woman and an extremely handsome younger man. Wyman was still a big star but, by then, past her prime. Recently divorced from Ronald Reagan, and aware that her future lay with the soap-opera audience, she was pleased to be teamed with Hudson again. At the time, he was the new Hollywood heartthrob, who, although “out of the closet” in his personal life, had to be continually shut back in publicly and professionally by an anxious studio.

The All That Heaven Allows version of the May-September romance formula has Wyman playing Cary Scott, a well-to-do widow with two college-age children and a dull social life at the country club. The emptiness at the heart of her existence is filled when she meets Ron Kirby, the young gardener–turned–tree farmer who prunes the trees that line her all-American suburban yard—and then comes back to court her. This simple love story is disrupted by the vicious snobbery of her children and high-society acquaintances. Early in the film, Cary is at her dressing table, preparing for an evening with the Stoningham “elite.” To one side stands a vase containing the branches Ron cut for her earlier, so that Cary’s awakening interest in him carries over from the previous sequence. In a beautifully composed shot, the children first appear reflected in the mirror, coming between Cary and the vase, and then, as the camera pulls away, she is taken back into the room and toward the children. This one shot tells the story of the dilemma that Cary will face for the rest of the film and is typical of Sirk’s emblematic, economical use of cinema. His stars’ performances mesh well with this style. He gives them the screen space appropriate for their status, but the sexual charge between Cary and Ron is articulated through looks and gestures, and the roller-coaster highs and lows of their love are displaced onto the things that surround them.

Objects play their own significant part in expressing the emotions blocked by convention in small-town, middle-class 1950s America. Sirk creates a cinema in which the screen itself speaks more articulately than the protagonists, tongue-tied as they are by the codes of their fictional setting, the powers of censorship in Hollywood at the time, and the norms of the family melodrama genre. Out of these constraints, Sirk builds his film, while also using a typically melodramatic score to punctuate points and to accompany the tones and textures of the actors’ voices.

Years after their initial dismissal (and sometimes derision) by reviewers, Sirk’s successful string of big-budget soapers (and the director himself) have acquired a rich and complex critical afterlife, as different aspects and facets of the films have been reclaimed by successive phases of film criticism. For the auteurists and structuralists of the 1960s, Sirk’s mastery of cinematic language transcended the working conditions of the Hollywood studio system; feminists reclaimed him as a director of melodrama, with his women protagonists and dramas of interiority, domestic space, and sexual desire; gay critics today see a camp subtext in his films with Hudson, in which ambiguous situations can be read as double entendre.

The gap between the contemporary perception of All That Heaven Allows and that of the later critics is closed by Sirk himself, who once explained the conditions of work at the studio: “At least I was allowed to work on the material—so that I restructured to some extent some of the rather impossible scripts of the films I had to direct. Of course, I had to go by the rules, avoid experiments, stick to family fare, have ‘happy endings,’ and so on. Universal didn’t interfere with either my camera work or my cutting—which meant a lot to me.” Although All That Heaven Allows does, on the face of it, have a happy ending, its “happiness” is twisted with more than a touch of Sirkian irony. This piece originally appeared in the Criterion Collection’s 2001 DVD edition of All That Heaven Allows.

Jun 10, 2014

摘自CC官网：//www.criterion.com/current/posts/96-all-that-heaven-allows-an-articulate-screen

An auteur maudit of his time, German émigré Douglas Sirk's renown has been considerably reappraised with much admiration for his trademark disposition of light and color, the swelling watchability sublimated from its saccharine source material, aka. the often derogated melodrama, and affecting emotional flux elicited from his sharply tricked-out players (Rock Hudson is among the staple).

Sirk's second Wyman-Hudson vehicle, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, is a lean, Technicolor-fueled, frippery-free, love-overcoming-moral-prejudice romantic drama, a middle-class suburban widow Cary Scott (Wyman) gallantly accepts the marriage proposal from her much younger boyfriend Ron Kirby (Hudson), who is hailed from a different class bracket and has no ambition in pursuing affluence. What transpires in the wake of her decision trenchantly discloses the selfishness, snobbery, myopia and hypocrisy inherently pertaining to the objectionable mindset of small-town bourgeoisie. On paper, the story sounds platitudinous, but Sirk’s wow factor is, as always, his divine composition of the palette and setting, everything is undergone through a minutely preparatory process, from the impeccable cosmetic furnishing and elegant garbs of its dramatis personae, to its almost storybook environs, however, to counterpoise the richness on one’s eyes, Sirk is quite self-aware of not overreaching himself, ergo, the plot pans out in a reductive but expressively accurate manner, sansdevious routes, to sustain a vigorous lifeline that magically keeps a spectator rapt.

It goes without saying this approach often lives and dies with the performers, and in this case, it totally hits the bull-eye. Jane Wyman is a screen paragon who can yoke unperturbed grace with understated determination in a pinch, and step by step, Cary’s liberation from those fetters chained to a lonesome widow is limned through her pitch-perfect, layered felicity that it hits every right spot to accompany a viewer’s mirrored, visceral journey. Rock Hudson, a quintessential specimen of American masculinity and good looks, aptly elicits Ron’s larger-than-life symbol of perfection but at the same time, conveys his vulnerability and misery with pinpricks of impatience and disappointment, which injects a more personal note to the character.

As regards the peripheral roles,Gloria Talbott andWilliam Reynolds, who play Cary’s college-age children, both stoutly take it to themselves as the cardinal negative force impeding their mother’s new romance, with the former’s talk-the-talk, walk-the-walk turnabout and the latter’s sheer self-seeking callousness, god bless our offspring. But one’s heart easily goes with a solicitous Agnes Moorehead, who is always a pleasant sight as Cary’s matter-of-fact confidant and an effulgent Virginia Grey, radiating warmth even if she is not necessarily needed to do so.

Lastly, the purportedly compromised ending, stank with the inimical Catholic precept that one must suffer (both physically and mentally) plenty before finally gaining the reward, comes off as a fly in the ointment to wring a quasi-tearjerking effect, nonetheless, as vouched by Liszt’s timelessly enchanting Consolation No. 3 in the beginning, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS oozes a vintage vitality in its most luscious taste, isn’t that a delight?

referential films: Sirk’s MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (1954, 7.1/10), WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956, 8.0/10); Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974, 8.7/10); Todd Haynes FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002, 9.2/10).