The film A City Called Macau was recently released in theaters in mainland China. Yan Geling, the author of the novel that inspired the movie, explains the challenges of adapting her work and the role of the director, Li Shaohong, in building the psychological portrait of the central character, the “unforgettable” junket dealer Mei Xiao’ou.
Three female figures are placed in the triangle that links the novel, the film and the central character of A City Called Macau: the writer and screenwriter of the film, Yan Geling, the director Li Shaohong, and the protagonist, Mei Xiao’ou, a casino junket employee who survives in a male-dominated environment.
The screenplay, “written by six hands”, resulted from the cooperation between the novel’s author and two other writers, Yan Geling explains: “I’m just one of three screenwriters in this movie. I did the first draft review. After that, it was completed by two screenwriters, both men, very experienced and talented. I thought that in a collaboration between me and a female director, it would be better to have the assistance of male writers to prevent the argument from becoming too feminized,” she says.
The context of this novel “is broad, the novel itself is quite long and the characters are numerous. Relationships between the main female character and the three main male characters are easy to describe in a novel. However, it becomes a bit more difficult in a 120-minute film,” Yan Geling notes. “A novel can draw heavily on a psychological portrait to describe how the protagonist deals with the three different male-female relationships she maintains and these various characters, but a film script depends entirely on dialogue and action. So, in the end, we only have to put all hope in the ability of the director and the actors”.
In the novel, Yan Geling focuses on the feelings and emotions of Mei Xiao’ou, “a woman with her dilemmas, her pursuits, her luminous and dark side. A little like Macau, which, in very much an Asian way, also has a positive and a negative side, a yin and a yang: opposites that complement each other, a duality that includes the whole universe,” writes Portuguese author José Luís Peixoto in the preface of the Portuguese edition of her work, released earlier this year in Macau.
A fascination with Macau
“From our home in Berlin, she follows the many aspects of contemporary Chinese society, such as college entrance exams, emigration, today’s family life, the situation of disabled war veterans; and among these issues was the phenomenon of gambling by high-rollers in Macau,” Yan Geling’s husband, Lawrence Walker explains. “She studied the subject and got involved with the help of rich friends, who sometimes join up to gamble in casino private VIP rooms.”
In her search for a romance set in Asia’s Las Vegas, the writer visited Macau several times. Short visits during stopovers between cities, she settled for a night or two, and walked around. She entered the casinos, made bets herself, and even won the first time she played at a baccarat table; beginner’s luck you might say.
According to Walker, Geling has always had a fascination with Macau, this “small and picturesque Portuguese colonial city in the middle of the Far East,” which has developed “an even more interesting contrast now that this community lives side by side with one of the largest, most sophisticated and modern gaming operations in the world,” he says.
The writer and screenwriter, born in Shanghai, enrolled in the People’s Liberation Army when she was just 12 years-old, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. She published her first novel in 1986 and has had more than 20 titles translated into several languages, some of which were also adapted for cinema.
Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou directed The Flowers of War in 2011, a big budget film that has the 1937 massacre and rape in Nanjing by Japanese Imperial troops as its backdrop. The film was adapted from the novel The 13 Women of Nanjing by Yan Geling. Another film directed by Zhang Yimou is Coming Home, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, and is based on another of Gelin’s novels, The Criminal Lu Yanshi.
Li Shaohong, master of the feminine
The director of A City Called Macau, Li Shaohong, was born in Qingdao in 1955, and is one of the female members of the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, the first to be formed at the Beijing Film Academy after the Cultural Revolution, which had been shut down for over a decade since 1966, until reopening in 1976 after Mao Zedong’s death.
Yan Geling says that she first met Li Shaohong when she was directing a television series based on Dream of the Red Chamber, a masterpiece of Chinese literature and one of the Four Great Classical Romances of China, written and published in the mid-18th century.
“Television talk show hostess Yang Lan brought me to the set and suggested that I give Shaohong a few copies of my novels. Later, when Shaohong found out that the film and TV rights of these novels had all been sold off, and all to male directors, she jokingly said to me: ‘You’re letting male directors film all your novels. When are you going to let me, a female director, film one?’” the author recalls.
In January 2014, at the Beijing International Book Fair, when Yan Geling presented her novel about Macau at a press conference, the writer and the director met again. It was at this point that Shaohong decided to make the film.
According to Yan Geling, Li Shaohong is “remarkable” in her “exquisite portraits of female characters”, so she never had any doubts about the director’s “genius” to give life to the complex character of Mei Xiao’ou, a moneylender and casino junket dealer.
“I think she should be considered the best director in China in this respect. Audiences recall her TV series The Mandarins are Ripe and her film Rouge and Powder, in which the female characters are portrayed beautifully and accurately. I had absolutely no apprehension about how she would handle the principal female character in A City Called Macau. So, the greatest benefit of working with her was this: the heroine Mei Xiao’ou would become an unforgettable character in the gallery of cinema. I was especially reassured when Shaohong hired an actress of the caliber of Bai Baihe to portray her,” Yan Gelin concludes.
Like the filmmaker Shaohong, Bai Baihe was also born in Qingdao. The 35-year-old is currently one of the highest-paid actresses in China. In A City Called Macau, Bai shares the screen with fellow Chinese stars Huang Jue and Wu Gang, both with well-established careers in mainland China, and Hong Kong actors Eric Tsang and Carina Lau Kar-ling.
A City Called A-Ma, the novel that inspired the movie
Yan Geling’s book A City Called A-Ma was originally published in Chinese in 2012. When two years later the author was invited to present the novel at the 3rd Macau Literary Festival – The Script Road, she described writing as “a supplement and an extension of psychology. It is a medium that uses words to describe what humans think about themselves”. Last March, during the 8th Macau Literary Festival 8th, a Portuguese version (and the first foreign-language translation of the novel) was released by local publisher PraiaGrande Edições. Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto, who signed the preface to the Portuguese edition, classified the work as “an opportunity to go beyond the invisible boundaries that separate the individuals” who live and travel through this city. “This novel”, he added, “is what in its deepest nature a book must always be: a bridge, a line between us and the other. There are still many bridges like this that link East and West. Macau is undoubtedly one of the places that can contribute most to this special bond”.