"A Feifei" has begun to gradually weaken the storyline, focusing the film on the portrayal of characters and the relationship between people. "Dong Xie Xi Du" inherits this and goes further in terms of form innovation. As can be seen from the title, the film mainly revolves around a few protagonists, but the environment has changed from the city to the desert, and the time has returned from modern times to the past, but what remains the same is the emotional entanglement between people.
Compared with "A Fei Zhengzhuan", the plot is further weakened. The audience knows very little of the plot, and can only guess the relationship between each other by relying on a few dialogues of the movie characters. But as the plot weakens, how does the film hold up the entire structure? First of all, wkw adopts a chapter-fragment structure, strung together with the solar terms of the Chinese calendar. For example, Ouyang Feng, as a bystander & narrator, has successively brought out the characters of Huang Yaoshi, the blind warrior, Hong Qi, Mrs. Ouyang Feng... "The True Story of Ah Fei" The relationship narrative structure is network-like, with Xu Zai as the center and extended to surrounding characters; while the character relationship narrative structure of "Dong Xie Xi Du" is similar to the time line, introducing the characters who appeared successively in fragment chapters, and then through these characters Personality and relationships continue to enrich the narrator Ouyang Feng's image. Therefore, "The True Story of A Fei" can be said that everyone can be the protagonist alone (Xu Zai's protagonist has a slightly stronger halo), so Tony Leung will not appear abrupt when he finally comes out to make soy sauce; and the protagonist of "Dong Xie Xi Du" strictly speaking is always There is only one Ouyang Feng, and many other characters are only used as tools to describe Ouyang Feng's character. As the narrator, Ouyang Feng feeds back his own emotions to all the characters and twists the clues of the film into a whole.
Another thing worth mentioning is that the appearance of the characters is not in a strict chronological order. For example, the appearance time of Huang Yaoshi is relatively vague. The dialogue between Huang Yaoshi and Mrs. Ouyang Feng occurs at the end of the film, but the real time is the beginning of the movie ( The source of drunken life and dream of death). This temporal dislocation brings the necessary freedom to the film's linear structure to complement details that may have been missed, further enriching the layering of the film's narrative.
Secondly, the weakening and subtlety of the plot led to a large number of non-plot scenes in the film, which gave full play to the visual aesthetics of wkw and further constructed the sense of alienation between people in the desert. But the existence of a large number of non-plot scenes also makes the film extremely dependent on lines. Therefore, the lines of "Evil and Poison in the West" have been carefully polished, and many lines have also become classics in the hearts of fans. It's just a group of heroes talking about these delicate dialogues and obsessing over various love disputes. Compared with the atmospheric and rough scenes, the subject matter is too stingy. But in any case, "Evil in the East" is a classic, because it is an important attempt of wkw to move towards formalism, and it is also an important attempt of Hong Kong film visualization.
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