New York City
“SIAO YU” and “An Inspector Calls” Play
Sylvia Chang is earnest. Bright, intense, pretty. She’s been in ninety movies! An assistant told me. She directed nine films.
The building where the production offices are located is a confident classic. It’s in the New York Registry, I was happy to hear. Sylvia and I talked about the relationship of the characters. I said that the basic difference is too often between what American film makers choose and what attracts certain foreign artists is that we tend to want a gimmick, an idea that can be pitched at a meeting—where there isn’t time to explain depth of a character or the surprises that come in emotional shifts, instead of in tricky shifts in plot. Whereas, Bergman and Fellini and Kurosawa and now as I see, Chinese directors, are inspired by complex characters in surprising relationships; by their weaknesses, desires and the force of their passions, which sometimes cause them to surprise themselves as well, with their decisions. Complex characters in complex situations.
This script has that: character. The special effects are of the spirit, the mind and the heart. Sylvia has the confidence that human beings in an unusual situation and seemingly different from each other in every way, can discover that they are engaged irresistibly through a mutual need. This surprises them. It surprises us, but we believe it because such connections are inevitable, and yet we cannot anticipate them. When we see them, we recognize similar longings in ourselves and then we are taken with the protagonists, even if they do not look like us or live the way we do. It is a kind of betrothal or engagement by accident.
Such an accident underscores the happiness that just the existence of possibilities for change, for improvement can bring. They’re out there. Sometimes they happen.
If the characters we’re watching are fetching, vulnerable and flawed and earnest, possessing a sense of humor and patience in persistence; if they entertain us with their questions and their doubts, we will care for them, root for them and need to know their fate. It’s our fate. It’s our ballad for an hour and a half.
I saw “An Inspector Calls” this afternoon. It’s a strained concept.
It’s a morality play. It’s realistic but intended to rise to a low surreal perch, raised just off the stage of reality about as high as the shrunken house is in this set at the Royale Theatre. It’s described as a psychological drama, meaning that what we see until near the end has not actually happened in the flesh, but it might and after the final phone call, we realize, will. Or it already did. Or, it could. Or, it may at any time for any one of us. So, watch out! And care more about your fellow creatures.
The set is in a slum, though it takes a while to realize that. At first, you wonder why the outside mess with its fragments of pavement and suggestions of an urban dump doesn’t match the interior of the bright cheerful rich interior. I read that the play was first presented in 1945. Maybe the original states that Wartime rubble is in evidence. The shrunken house is symbolic, I take it. Of the lives within. Of their views of the world, of humanity. They are elevated but squeezed; pinched brains, squinting eyes that don’t see past their desires. The house ends up toppled.