"Miss Shen, I’ve long admired your name."

"Hello, Director An, I’m Shen You’an."

The girl was dressed in a white shirt and black pants, her slightly long hair tied back in a neat ponytail. She looked simple and clean, her skin so delicate it seemed you could squeeze water from it, and the gold-rimmed glasses on the bridge of her nose lent that youthful face a touch of scholarly elegance.

Her speech and manner were steady and composed, nothing like a girl her age; there wasn’t the slightest trace of impetuousness about her, which was truly rare in the entertainment industry.

"Let’s chat a bit. You’ve read the script, right?"

"I have."

"What are your thoughts on these three roles?"

Shen You’an thought for a moment, then answered seriously, "In my understanding, these three roles aren’t simply three independent individuals, but three key facets shattered from the same ’mirror of the times’ under different historical circumstances."

Director An Kui was stunned for a second and adjusted his sitting posture. "Go on."

"The first thing that came to my mind after reading the script was Simone de Beauvoir’s core argument in The Second Sex: ’One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ The greatness of this film lies in how it concretizes that process of becoming through the fate of three generations of women—what shapes them is the historical unconscious particular to each of their eras."

An Kui’s breath caught for a moment.

Shen You’an spoke at ease, words flowing: "The grandmother is a prisoner of the system, a poetic ghost. She reminds me of the ’disciplined body’ Foucault discussed—her love and pain must be silent, must conform to the template of collectivism. But what I want to present is not only repression... The mother, by contrast, is the generation that bears the load, and also the generation of awakening. She stands on the fault line between tradition and modernity, struggling fiercely to break free from her mother’s fate, yet may fall into new predicaments. She has the courage of Ibsen’s Nora to walk out, but after she leaves, then what? She has to face not only society, but also her own inner self. Her tragedy doesn’t lie in failure, but in her lucid awareness of the existence of shackles, and her struggle against them—this struggle itself is her greatest dignity."

"The daughter, meanwhile, possesses an unprecedented freedom, yet is caught in the vertigo of that freedom. The difficulty of her performance lies in simultaneously showing a light, free-spirited ease and a heavy sense of nihilism. I’d like to borrow from Virginia Woolf’s way of capturing interior instants—letting seemingly mundane moments leak the character’s cosmic confusion and quest at the depths of her heart."

An Kui noticed that when the girl in front of him spoke of the grandmother, her eyes were deep and distant; when she spoke of the mother, they burned scorching and sharp; and when she spoke of the daughter, they were filled with confusion and exploration.

It was as if three souls were living in this one person before him.

"Therefore, in performing these three generations of women, technical resemblance is only the foundation. The crux is to present three fundamentally different structures of consciousness. The grandmother’s rhythm is a stagnant surface with undercurrents beneath, drawing on the stillness-based movement of traditional opera; the mother’s rhythm is fractured and eruptive; the daughter’s rhythm seems casual, yet every relaxed moment is actually a taut, sensitive radar."

"Lastly, allow me to share a personal reflection. When talking about modern Chinese women’s writing, Professor Wang Dewei once proposed the concept of ’fictional lyricism’—using the most personal form of emotion to bear the heaviest density of history. This film is precisely a cinematic ’fictional lyricism.’ I long to be that lyrical subject, not only with my acting, but with all my cultural understanding and existential perception, so that these three broken shards of a mirror can be reassembled on the screen, reflecting the road we have all traveled, and the futures still possible."

After the girl’s clear and composed voice fell silent, the room remained quiet for a long time.

An Kui gazed at Shen You’an, and could only answer with a long silence.

After a long while, he finally exhaled a sentence: "Now I seriously doubt whether I’m actually the one who wrote this script...."

Shen You’an gave an abashed little smile. "When I meet a role I like, I tend to talk too much. Please forgive me, Director."

An Kui’s gaze burned. "No, you are precisely the truly thoughtful actor I’ve been searching for. This role has to be yours."

Shen You’an cleared her throat lightly. "Why don’t I try a scene on the spot?"

An Kui shook his head. "Genius is genius, far beyond what those mediocrities can compare to. Let’s just sign the contract right now."

The very next second, An Kui pulled out the contract, as if afraid that if he were a second late, Shen You’an would run away.

Shen You’an was taken aback for a moment, then happily signed.

After signing, she asked a question: "Director An, had you seen any of my work before this?"

An Kui shook his head.

"Then why...?"

The script had been sent directly to the agency where Shen You’an was signed. When Zhao Heng was screening scripts for her, he had placed this script and another big-heroine palace-intrigue script into Shen You’an’s hands.