Julian Lee: A note on my film Night Corridor
When I look back., during the post-production, I fight very hard to restrain my sound and music to turn it into a ghost film or horror film. Get rid of the eerie soundscape, I said. Please look at it as a tragedy of my character, my Hamlet, who lives through his torture, which he tries to escape but finally he has to face his ultimate confrontation. You have to come to terms with yourself, man.
This particular day, a Hong Kong famous actor I know well, jumped to death, and it resonances in my mind ---this character.
He is "un homme blessé", a wounded soul, who looks down on his world, licking his wound on his unrequited love, faking a hatred on the negligence of his mother towards him and trapped into a game of self-victimisation in order to survive. He creates a world too perfect to hide but suddenly it's broken to pieces.
Such exploitative relationship that withheld him together, mother with
son, priest with his student, brother against brother and the illusion
that art and perfection is his salvation. Such demon, also lives in me
too, as an artist, in search of the alter-ego. I always want to explore
the dark human psyche, that labels us men. We create the demon and we live
in it. I share the same fallacy as an emotional being, through rendering
the complexity of main character, Sam into the film , Daniel Wu, my actor
helps to exorcise some of my unvoiceable past of passion and desire and to
kill such unrequited love. Being the director is more immune than the
actor, as you watch "him" fall, you better sober up.
Maybe the gay love story , suspense thriller, cannibalism and gothic vampire look are all the innovative re-mix that just labels, and puts together a Faustian tale --- our life is borrowed. Time's up. Such nobility is we should end our life is in our own hand, than the other's decision.
To make a remark, the ending of the film wanders away from the novel out of its timely necessity.
Trapped in Hong Kong, smelling a source of deadly virus from a hotel window or a residential block, my film is released in such an accidental climate that accumulated to a mood of denounciation. We are suddenly thrown into an abyss of darkness and I do not want to drive straight to hell . Let's just promenade into a night corridor that resonance all the faded nostalgic glory of my memorable memory during a colonial past which echos the sun has set and the morning is still far ahead. In Chinese , the film title is more self explanatory, "a circular night corridor" that goes round and round and you are "trapped". However, in our own Chinese literary tradition, we believe in regenerating ourselves into another life and the torture could begin again. We look at life as a maze, a floating cycle, and ,sometime while we are weary, stopping on your way to death, to take to rest along the night corridor. And I prefer such an ending, generating a breath of relief. As if we all hope that it could just be a nightmare. When we wake up, the daily torture starts all over again.
reproduced with the kind permission of Julian Lee.
