——Comment on "My Father and Mother"
At the Berlin Film Festival in 1999, the Silver Bear Award-winning film "My Father and Mother" did not have the flamboyance and emptiness of the flashy world, and did not have a complicated and circuitous plot. The content of the story was constructed in the plain, and the emotions were expressed in the simple life. Director Zhang Yimou uses black and white to collide with color; reality and memory are intertwined; aesthetic and romantic artistic expression brings "movie poetry" that praises love.
The English translation of the film is called the road home. The scene design at the beginning and end of the film is the road leading to the home. This road is the beginning and the end of parental love. The confrontation before and after is handled, so that the film has a poetic meaning under the simple emotion. "Road" witnessed the process of father and mother getting acquainted and falling in love, although it was just an ordinary mountain road from their village to the county seat. Even if the song ends, the road also leaves her beautiful memories intertwined with bitterness and bitterness. This road shows her mother's adherence and dedication to the indelible best and most precious emotions in life.
The narrative of the film, like the poem, seeks to express the most sincere emotions in a simple storyline. There is no strong dramatic conflict, no meeting and whispering beside the well and the classroom, and there is no eachother in some idol dramas, and even the double scenes of mother and father are very few. Instead, it uses the artistic technique of "poetry film" to compress the story of mother and father into a few scenes, a few props, and a few lines of dialogue. It makes people feel the strong affection between the father and mother, "the love is separated by mountains and seas, and the mountains and seas are not flat". Their mutual support in ordinary life interprets the connotation of true love: "hold the hand of the son, grow old with the son." As Zhang Yimou said: "A simple love story is the most unforgettable love."
Color master Zhang Yimou has adhered to his consistent film aesthetics and applied color to the film structure. In recollection, color is the most beautiful and pure love of "my" father and mother in that era, while in reality, black and white tones are used to highlight mother's love paintings. Emotional state after the last period. When "I" sat at the table and recalled the encounter between my parents, it was their youth. Everything about my mother was pure and sincere red: red cotton jacket, red scarf, red clip... Just like her desire for sincere love, As strong and gorgeous as the red color, at first sight only the color of love remains. Returning to reality is heavy black, white and gray, single and stubborn, just like my mother's obsession with her father's funeral. Walking silently in the vast snow, a line divides the sky and the earth, just as death separates the father and mother forever, marking the end of love. When the sound of reading aloud sounded again, my mother saw "I" reading a book at the place where my father once stood, and the memory began to come alive again. The color is injected again, the warm autumn day, the soft sunlight, the first time the two met, the scene is reproduced, telling us that the people are gone, only love is eternal!
"My Father and Mother" is not Du Fu's style of depression, nor Li Bai's style of boldness and unrestrainedness; it has the beauty of "Book of Songs" and the romantic condensedness of "Chu Songs". We relive a long-lost pure and poetic love. In the current impetuous society, perhaps we can only see such love poems in movies that are born warm, hidden and common, love with age, and love for a long time.
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