Hit reinvigorates 'Tiger Mountain'(2)

The debate on the nature of the model operas has since flared intermittently. Some argue they were the products of the revolution and convey its excesses and its ideology. Others contend that they embody the collective memory of a whole generation. Besides, we should not give all the credit to Jiang Qing. Many top artists put their creativity into them.

Jiang would pick filmmakers, who were released from detention and were shown films made in Hollywood－in a time when only a few top leaders had such access. They were supposed to learn Hollywood's art and craft and use it in filming the operas. Those artists had flourishing careers either before or after the revolution.

One person was widely perceived to be responsible for fusing the musical styles of traditional Peking Opera and Western orchestral music. Yu Huiyong, a musical prodigy, created the new, richer and mellower sound for the model operas. But he was not one of those suffering artists plucked by Jiang. He was a political climber who curried her favor and later gained the position of culture minister. During the post-revolution investigation, he killed himself, but his contribution to the model operas was never in question.

I grew up with these works, so I can sense why people are so attached to them. For most of them, music heard during a certain phase of life would leave an indelible imprint, even bad music. The model operas are stridently ideological. The bad guy would not smile but grimace and the hero did not walk as much as strike heroic poses all the way. Modern audiences can enjoy them as red kitsch as every character seems to be a caricature of him or herself.

Artistically, the stories follow the rules of melodrama, with clashes between good and evil as defined by the establishment of the era. They are very easy to digest. There are occasional glimpses, such as the famous trio in Shajiabang with three characters scheming against one another, into the sophistication that went into the making of these works. Yes, much of the top talent of the country worked on them, but they were not given anything resembling a free rein. I believe art should be free, so art created in bondage, to me, does not represent the best from these artists.

I don't think people with fond memories of the operas are the same ones who want to revive or relive the revolution. The former are those in their 60s and 70s who failed to find resonance with later music, and the latter are mostly youngsters who were born after the revolution and want to vent their frustration over what they see today. The model operas are part of China's cultural legacy, an aberration that deserves to be studied rather than blindly idolized.

What Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark did was a third way out. He took the story of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, one of the more popular of the eight, or more accurately, adapted the novel the opera was based on, and made it into a Hollywood-style action movie. The parallels between the so-called genre film and the model opera are evident: Both portray characters in black and white, but the movie is more palatable to modern sensibilities mainly because the main character, Yang Zirong, is now a lone hero with incredible smarts and devil-may-care chutzpah.

Some detractors of the movie say the historical character who became the villain in the opera, and now in the feature version, was actually not that bad. He fought Japanese invaders and was not that reckless with innocent lives. For me, these criticisms are irrelevant. This is not a documentary and a fictional film is not supposed to uncover truth beneath layers of urban myth. Tsui has to make the guy morally reprehensible to justify the raid on him. The bandit chief is still cartoonish, but in a more delicious way than in the opera.

In a sense, Tsui has substituted the old way with the Hollywood method, taking what's useful from the story and enhancing narrative elements that appeal to the young generation. He is not the first Chinese filmmaker to come up with this strategy. But with his success, there will be more efforts to mine the old field of ideological stories for the purpose of pure entertainment.

The author is Raymond Zhou with China Daily.