深锁春光一院愁

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

真没想到我也有要写长评的一天，虽然单纯是因为短评字数放不下......

电影用极具戏剧性的剧情为底，而如梦中童话一般的色调与分镜，随时压抑的你至死的派对，穿插的瓦尔登湖与社会学都使这部“肥皂剧”看起来不止止只是一部单纯的披着姐弟恋还有寡妇文学tag的cult文学。它对爱情与女性的解放写的要更深入一些。又或者像是后来的剪刀手爱德华与廊桥遗梦的结合，不被允许的，而又汹涌的爱。

它是只供男女主爱情的童话，Cary第一次去到Ron为她改造的那个小木屋时，蓝色幽静灯光下、巨大落地窗前的吻美的让人想要把时间全部暂停在这一刻。超越年龄与阶级的爱情是多么的多不可思议。坠入是不可避免，沉溺是春天该做的事情，可是此时此刻什么样的背景勾勒都不重要，因为爱情便是这样早有预谋的被温柔的用一个吻来揭露开。

（此处Cary突然清醒过来，强装镇定的收拾东西匆忙离开时把那个茶壶打碎的时候我感觉我心也碎一地了......）

此处应有bgm：Can't Help Falling in Love - Haley Reinhart

它同时又是一场真实的现实场景。Cary带Ron参加聚会的那段剧情太好了，大家都看到她，下意识认为Cary就是一个贪图肉体的荡妇，而Ron是那个不知羞耻的贪图Cary钱财的穷鬼。所有人都要求Cary做那个传统的人，这样他们的生活才会延续下去，但却没有一个人在乎Cary的内心。ps：人物台词方面设置的太好了，那个长舌妇可真懂说话艺术啊.....

无论是钢琴上还是电视机投射出来的cary的倒影都让人觉得太孤独太压抑了www

好在结局还是he，女儿的爱情点醒了Cary：分离与争吵之后才意识到你是多么的离不开对方。

Ron：You've come home? Cary: Yes, I've.......I've come home.

结局的Ron一醒来就说这句话真是浪漫死我了.......

总之满分的电影，值得一看。不知道为什么豆瓣评分这么低，是因为我比较坚定的爱情沉沦主义吗？

还有一些关于cary女性解放的就不说了，虽然很想说来着。。。。。。