The Japanese director who made his name internationally with "The Thief" is Hirokazu Kore-eda, and if we take a closer look at the director's film chronicle, "The Thief" is just one of its episodes on a specific theme. From "Walking Nonstop", "Like Father Like Son" to "Deeper than the Sea" and "Sea Street Diary", the theme that Hirokazu Kore-eda has been shooting repeatedly is kinship. Different from the "grand narrative" of Chinese culture that we are accustomed to, the feeling of Japanese art to me is the repeated rubbing of the palm of my hand. This group of films shoots the kinship repeatedly and changes the angle as usual, forming the various facets of the crystal, which must be viewed as a whole in order to capture the brilliance.
1. Hiroshi Abe
He appeared in two of these films, "Walking On" and "Deeper Than the Sea," playing a down-and-out middle-aged man. Abe Hiroshi has a face that is not very Japanese. I specially checked the ethnic system of Japan, and checked the Jomon people. The appearance of Hiroshi Abe's family is too different from the Yayoi people who are more scattered in Japan. His exotic face makes his character seem to be always outside the story, and allows the audience to gain a perspective with this character as an observation point. . This must be some kind of deliberate choice. From this perspective, whether it is Yukali, the wife who met halfway in "Never Stop" or the resentful ex-wife Hiroko Shiraishi in "Deeper than the Sea", they have all become supporting roles in the narrative. As a result, the relationship between husband and wife, love relationship and romantic relationship is weakened, and the viewer can be mobilized to focus on other relationships in the film, namely the two characters to be discussed below - mother, and child.
It was Hirokazu-eda that made so many idle, simple, French-inspired family scenes, and Abe's down-and-out man was always returning and always absent. Each time his emotions were consumed in the endless chatting, cooking, eating, walking. This kind of careless handling is just like the posters of this group of movies (including the poster of "The Thief Family") - always a group photo, the individual disappears into the deep sea of kinship, is "walking" this kind of tree-like The power of nature bursting out like a deep forest wears away fragile human feelings, and more important than feelings are bonds and relationships. The mother who lost her eldest son in "Walking On" still needs to live warmly and peacefully; in "Deeper than the Sea", the former couple met because of their children and were forced to spend the night at grandma's house because of the typhoon. "Human Desires", I think it is difficult for Western audiences to agree, because there is no love to live together, but Eastern audiences seem to be very stubborn. It was Hirokazu-eda that was recognized in China, essentially because of this common value system of resignation to kinship.
2. Trees Shirin
In 2018, the death of a Japanese actress, the tree Xilin, was widely mourned by Chinese audiences on the Internet. Although many people actually knew her after hearing the obituary, they were shocked: "So she is the queen supporting actress of Hirokazu Kore-eda." I often think that such a supporting actor is old and almost non-existent. The actor, why arouse so much attention?
—because she died not as a veiled, pessimistic Japan, but as a splendid, modern version of Japan, as a Japanese actress freed from pain, comfortable and free, full of achievements. What an exhilarating movie version of that in and of itself. Actresses like Shu Xilin have never appeared in China. Because we don't have an old actress yet, in an era like the Showa era, we have spent the years of acting richly, enthusiastically and arbitrarily. We can only look back greedily at the great prosperity through the tree, Shilin, through her aging bones. Japan's cognition of modern times began in the Southern Song Dynasty of China, while our imagination of modern times began in a neighboring country with a strip of water, and from that modern, educated and culturally literate country was surprised to discover Tang poetry and Song poetry, and found that With the lost shadow of classical China, our feelings for Japan are so complicated. And when the tree Shirin appears in Hirokazu Shiekeda's camera as an elderly woman who has lived her life gracefully, solemnly, and freely, our highest vision for a woman's life is no more than that. In "Walking On", she tried to cover up the pain of losing her son with her girlish feeling, and she won the 2009 Blue Ribbon Best Supporting Actress; in "Like Father Like Son" her still figure gave the story timelessness In "Deeper Than the Sea", her choice of "love or affection" reveals the theme of the film, the devotion to family and blood hidden in the bones of Japanese and East Asians; and "The Sea" In Street Diary, her seemingly casual lament about the difficulty of raising children for women is the underlying force that drives all of this: people, destiny, society forward. She is the backdrop for all of these films, but also the subject of all of them, and she represents a tradition that has always been washed away countless times in the modernization process, but stubbornly retained in Japanese society, and her idle performance seems to indicate that : Tradition does not change at will. Tradition never wavers.
3. Children
Compared with the elderly, the image of children is more like a supporting role in many movies, but this is not the case here. I'm not saying that the image of the child is the protagonist of its film - of course not. But rather than being fond of showing children's innocence, Hirokazu Kore-eda is photographing children because he is more interested in Japan's future than nostalgia. When he pointed the camera at the child, he was looking at a future Japan.
This Japan is fully expressed in "Like Father Like Son". He prefers to photograph little boys, young but "experienced" boys. These two boys were "wrongly held" when they were born. It's a script that is almost bloody (sentimental), but there is absolutely no direction of the blood. As mentioned earlier, Shi Zhi deliberately concealed the images of the young mothers in the film. This is a technique to make everyone pay more attention to the facts outside the marriage relationship. This is very different from the Western film system. In most Western films, even if depicting peripheral relationships, men and women (or men and women), love, and marriage are the backbone. Instead, the branches are aimed at those scattered, less eye-catching side branches, broken leaves, and fallen flowers. I especially like the shot of the father played by Masaharu Fukuyama, who follows his adopted son as he walks back and forth along the river bank. Two men: an adult and a child, not related by blood, to what extent are they "father and son"? It's an oriental relationship, a silent relationship, a unique relationship between man and man. Eastern fathers and sons focus on inheritance, in terms of mission, emotion and even character, and the way is to "live this life". In contrast, fathers and sons in the West focus on revelation, the revelation of the truth, the truth, the way of life and the meaning of what it should be, and its method is "awakening". So when we see a father taking his son to a brothel in A Beautiful Sicily, and through the sexual enlightenment of a prostitute, he begins to understand the world, and we will admit that our fathers would never have done that.
It is rare that these boys present a thinking mood under the director's camera. As if they were old, representing a future Japan, looking back at us. Life itself makes them grow up. It is the silence of the father, not the preaching of the father, that makes us grow up - from the image of the father who is born in the Chinese character silently clinging to the thorns, to the "micro-fat" first appeared in the vernacular. , embarrassed” father, perhaps it is the homologous culture that reminds me of these things and makes me understand that, unlike the immortal father who exists because of the truth in the Western context, our father is necessarily in our eyes. We are in decline, so we experience sadness at a very young age. Is sadness more important than truth? This is a debate between Eastern and Western themes, and it is also the difference in the temperament of life. In recent years, it has been the works of Japanese and Korean directors, which have touched the deepest part of my oriental heart.
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