婚外情:《小城之春》偶遇《相见恨晚》

EXTRA-MARITAL AFFAIRS:Spring in a Small Town's encounter with Brief Encounter

费穆导演于1948年创作的《小城之春》新时期以来一直被认为是中国20世纪40年代电影的经典之作。经过严格考证与比较,该片明显受到英国1945年名片《相见恨晚》的影响,这又一次印证了中国早期电影对西方影片的大量借鉴与学习。两片都以中产阶级家庭女性自身的视角表述了被中断的婚外恋情,运用女主角的“心声自白”对恋情中的男女心理做出了细致的描绘。而因中西方文化的差异,《小城之春》在影像风格和内涵寓意上则更有深意,较之《相见恨晚》更胜一筹。

David Lean’s classic film Brief Encounter(1 945) was first screened in Shanghai in 1 947,and it clearly inspired Fei Mu’s masterpiece Spring in a Small Town(1948).Both films are about a middle-class suburban woman’s extra-marital liaison with a handsome doctor who passes through a railway station.Both women have been married for ten years.The British husband is healthy,but much more interested in crossword puzzles than in his wife.The Chinese husband is a "Sick Man of the East" who feels perpetually guilty about his marriage to an attractive woman.Both wives spend their time sewing or going out to shop.The British doctor is married with children,but his chance encounter with the woman at the railway station inspires a dogged devotion-although he knows that she,too,is married.The Chinese doctor had been a classmate of the sick husband and was actually the wife’s first love,although their relationship had been thwarted by Japan’s invasion of China ten years earlier.The liaisons in both films fail to become consummated affairs because guilty consciences,social pressures and moral senses of family obligations intervene.More crucially,neither doctor has the courage to risk everything for the woman he claims to love so deeply.And both women,when they realise these impasses,succumb to Freudian slips and express a death-wish.There are significant parallels between the two films-similar shots and scenes,similar dialogue and narration-although Brief Encounter takes place during the uneasy peace before World War Ⅱ and Spring in a Small Town takes place after nearly a century of constant threats to Chinese civilisation from Western and Japanese powers.