The success of the Hong Kong film "Abortionist" from the perspective of "abortion"

*The original text was originally published on Medium: Echoes of Water . "Abortionist" was nominated for Best Director and Best Actress at the 2020 Golden Horse Awards, and is currently only shown at the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan in the same year.

Last year, when the screening of "The Abortionist" ended at the Golden Horse Film Festival, when the audience lined up to leave, I heard the person next door say, "It's terrible, it seems like I've had an abortion after watching it."

Behind this sentiment is a regrettable understanding. I have to say, I thought it would be a reaction in this regard after reading it, but the truth is the opposite. I want to use the most emotional image, that is, the use of "abortion" in this film, to sort out the emotional empathy that I am watching, not only did I not bypass the emotional empathy, but it is precisely because there are more levels of empathy that I admire this film.

I was inspired by Mr. Gecko's article "The Abortionist: Seeing the Dark Sun" [1] . Next, I will go further and continue the discussion based on my understanding of the image of "abortion".

This is a Hong Kong movie. Creation is a process of awareness, so creators try to approach this bipolar city in different ways.

I have heard masked young people in Hong Kong struggling to clarify to Taiwanese how the Cantonese "Lanchao" had a positive and energetic meaning in the context of the activists who fought against extradition in the anti-extradition campaign. , he believes that Taiwanese should not only remember the spirit of resistance of Hong Kong people with images of radical resistance and repression, that is to say, even if it is tragic, it is not just a sense of despair shrouded in black, painful and costly.

To use Han Lizhu's statement of "Lanchao" in "Black Sun": "The only remaining hope for life after death, there is an aggressive action force. After all, "Lan" and "Fried" are both verbs."

It is from this experience that I want to talk about "The Abortionist" and its use and inspiration of "abortion" images, and how it can finally approach "Lan Chao".

Regarding abortion, we can first recall that in "Too Silent Hustle", the deaf girl explores and enjoys eroticism, only when she has a secret abortion, she screams in a hoarse voice. The practice of ripping the audience's guts feels familiar. All illegal, clandestine abortions bring people (especially female audiences) nothing more than an adrenaline effect, with those controversial but "grown-ups" are always happy to be the threatening sex guards of teens/years. Teaching images is no different.

In the past, I have seen the use of "abortion" in movies, even if it is not a condemnation of desire and the cost of sin, but a further meaning: For example, the protagonist of "Sex Addicted Woman" deliberately forgets those contraceptives that discipline the body medicine, and then he drank boldly, operated silver-lighting instruments, poked open the vagina again and again and pulled the embryo out, showing the direct and bright pain, which was like a face-to-face confrontation with the public consciousness; In "Portrait of a Burning Woman", lesbian couples try their best to assist in miscarriage for the maid's unplanned pregnancy, and finally record the maid's induced labor posture with a painting, which is like tamely stroking the tired and suffering female body and agreeing to recognize this rebirth ceremony; I do see images of abortion in a few films like this gently and delicately evolving in the collective consciousness, even if regardless of other, perhaps cruder, abortion tropes or progressive imagery that merely reflects growth, choice, and bodily autonomy. But even so, the use of "abortion" images still has an emotional effect on the audience.

In "The Abortionist" I saw a layered and wonderful appropriation.

"The Abortionist" has the already stated provocation of the definition of abortion. The protagonist, an abortionist played by Bai Ling, told the female students who were afraid of "abortion" from the very beginning, "In the mainland, we call it the "artificial abortion" world." The difference in meaning between these two terms can be clearly indicated by the competent laws of Taiwan: the legal one is called "induced abortion", which is a medical practice stipulated in the "Eugenic Health Law"; the illegal one is called "abortion". , is a crime set out in the criminal law.

In other words, at the beginning, the rigid indication of value judgment was quickly skipped, and then it penetrated the battle field of human sexual desire with "asexual pregnancy", and the mother who was an abortionist performed illegal operations on her daughter's behalf. The redundant settings required for this plot directly point to the main meaning after explaining the secondary metaphor of "abortion" in several scenes: I am about to borrow the word "Lanchao" to illustrate this main metaphor. .

The two-level metaphor of "abortion" in "The Abortionist": the first level is to quickly dissolve the embryo (as imagined as life) and help Hong Kong girls to be free from the shackles of free love and fertility. , which briefly describes the positive tone of "abortion"; on the second floor, facing the female students in uniform, they are brave and straightforward, and they are not afraid of the sky. Transcripted and interviewed by reporters, while biting on a hamburger, he was shocked when he faced the abortion - the shock was not mainly physical pain, but the discharge of dark red fluid and lumps that could be clearly identified as embryonic bodies. Moral reflex like that - so the schoolgirl vomited after seeing the blood and clots, the traditional cost, trauma, and colic process of uterine contractions.

After explaining the unrestrainedness of the pregnant students, it can even be said that they face the embryo rudely, or that the students bravely endured the pain; it is still emphasized that the students need to experience pain after all, so we can only watch the abortion scene. To the "bloody" scene, but the suffering is presented in a light, efficient and humorous style of Hong Kong films, as playful and profound as the anti-extradition slogan "Back to the Water" - after the mother finally returned to the fall On the stage, facing the birth canal of the daughter who was parachuted and conceived like the Holy Spirit, a more profound, "scrambled"-style aggressive image was brought out.

Abortion penetrates the audience's imagination: ignore but not women, avoid life and death, look directly at the presence of this "chicken heart" [2] , without sadness, without "stained" blood, without feeling the pain of the epidermis.

Back on the rooftop, the most psychedelic and weeping "Tai Chi" scene is when we pick up the messy pieces and can slow down and look inward to find our own breathing and breathing in an oppressive collective.

Daughter rushed up and begged you angrily, you are an abortionist, but you have already abandoned the idol and the abortion device, you tried hard to believe and hoped that your restless heart could be placed, even if the daughter cried out that the pregnancy fell from the sky , has been in a life-threatening situation for many months.

The roof at the top of the building is what we are familiar with when looking up at the sky from the streets of Hong Kong. Electric wires or clothes lines are intertwined. It is the many points of people and the various possibilities between people. The connection has built up a large gray and black surface.

The manic-depressive city extracts your torso, the palms you push out gently, the heels you step out steadily, and the cries are deafening all around. You don't see your daughter, you see yourself.

So you smash the mirror. You finally agree and grab your daughter and say "I'll do it for you". You used to chase the Ding Ding car in confusion trying to find your daughter. It was an ordinary urban life scene with a mother-daughter bond at the beginning of the movie.

You've run across crowded people on flyovers, you've been cheated of your kindness and intimacy projections by young lame children who pretend to be rich - like a sex-addicted woman after many shapes and numbers of male bodies , once had sex with young gays and surrendered trust too completely - yet innocence brought you nothing, and you(s) were deceived and insulted after all. So you fall into the pool in the elevated lobby of a luxury hotel.

So you put the equipment back in your hands, and you said, "Don't be alarmed, don't move, you'll be fine for a while." Then we saw Hong Kong.

In "The Abortionist", we can learn the attributes of this city from the colloquialism of building sales and generational conflicts, or from the spiritual beliefs and absurdities of street vendors and alien immigrants; from the sex in taxis and the absurdities After asking the "prostitute", he still gave the passbook to learn about the capitalist tone of the city - the same price as the protesters who rushed into the Legislative Council to get their drinks and still didn't forget to put out the banknotes; even more The conflict is revealed from the loss of the protagonist's sincere confession to the church priest that the other party can only understand English, and the national tension and cultural capital gap between the local youth in Hong Kong and the mother who immigrated from China.

However, after penetrating the metaphor, what I felt most deeply was the Cantonese words that would be radically rewritten in the year after the tear gas permeated the street wars—

We are approaching "Litosite" in various ways, approaching "abortion", and approaching "spoiling".

[1] Included in the compilation of the February 2021 Weekly.

[2] Taken from Hu Shuwen's "Ai Yan is Childhood".