Casablanca

The day after Lidong, the Start of Winter. A classical Chinese almanac defines the season as the point when all things are gathered in and stored away. Today pairs two films that store a love that could not run its course inside a song. In Casablanca (1942), Rick forbids Sam ever to play 'As Time Goes By' again, sealing Paris inside a melody that must not sound; in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), every line about umbrellas, garages and petrol stations is sung. Twenty-two years apart, one monochrome and one candy-coloured, they keep the same thing by opposite means: prohibition, and total song. Behind each stands a war, the Second World War and the Algerian War. Both ask what a person can actually keep when life cannot continue as planned.

1941 年 12 月，法属摩洛哥的卡萨布兰卡。美国人 Rick Blaine 开着一间夜店，客人里有维希法国与德国官员、有想取道葡萄牙逃往美国的难民，也有靠通行证发财的人。他反复说自己不站队。一桩命案把两张能自由通行占领区的通行证留在他手里；紧接着，一个女人和她的丈夫走进店里，而她认得店里的钢琴师。影片到这里才刚刚开始，此后的选择不宜提前说破。

It premiered in New York on 26 November 1942 and went into general US release on 23 January 1943, adapted from an unproduced play, Everybody Comes to Rick's. Nobody expected it to last: Warner Bros. scheduled it as a routine A-list picture, the script was rewritten during shooting, and the ending was settled only at the last moment. It then won three Academy Awards - Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay - was among the first 25 films named to the US National Film Registry in 1989, and was voted the greatest screenplay of all time by the Writers Guild of America in 2006. Rotten Tomatoes records 99 percent from 136 reviews (9.5 average), Metacritic a perfect 100, and AFI ranked it second among the greatest American films. Its standing rests not on scale but on density: almost every line in 102 minutes can be quoted alone, while the whole film turns on a man refusing to admit that he cares.