Good realism movies are almost extinct in China.
Count them. In the past few years, how many domestically produced films really understand what realism is all about?
Of course, you can say, "I'm not the God of Medicine", "Operation Red Sea", "Captain China" and other domestically produced movies that are quite popular, are not all realistic movies?
The quality of "Captain China" is relatively average, so I won't say more about it. "Medicine God" and "Red Sea" are indeed very good and mature genre films, but it is not necessarily how "realistic" they are.
I like "The God of Medicine", but I must also say that it does have a lot of problems.
In order to create a stronger drama conflict for the film, "The God of Medicine" draws the police to the opposite of the protagonist, designing foreign drug dealers as hidden villains, and uses many narrative techniques to elevate the image of the protagonist, replacing it with emotions. Thoughts.
After watching the movie, we are easily moved, but we also have many questions: Is this thing in the movie really the case? Is this the medicine god in reality? Behind this matter, what are the hidden problems?
The problem with the film is not that it only captures the tip of the iceberg of reality, but that its artistic creation is somewhat deviated from reality.
The advantage of deviating from reality is that the story is better and the mood is fuller, but the disadvantage is that after thinking about it carefully, I feel that the film is not so "real".
"Operation Red Sea" is also not bad. The action scenes in the film are indeed hard enough, and as real as they are, but when comparing the literary and martial arts, we will find that Director Lin Chaoxian is a bit biased. Of course he is hitting high, but "why "Fighting" is a little unclear about the matter, or for the domestic films at this stage, there are some things that can't be said too clearly. If you can't understand it too much, of course it won't be "true".
In short, whether it is impossible to make the "true" or the "true" cannot be made, Chinese films are gradually lacking this "truth".
Speaking of which, Chinese films many years ago have this "reality". The fourth and fifth generations of directors all have excellent realist films, such as Yang Yanjin's "84·85 Years of T Province", Huang Jianxin's "Black Cannon Incident", "Back to Back, Face to Face" and other works, which are all worthy of a show. Look. In the sixth generation, Jia Zhangke's early films, such as "Xiao Wu" and "Platform", were excellent. Director Li Yang also made films such as "Blind Well" and "Blind Mountain".
But later, Huang Jianxin was concerned about his great cause, and all his authorship was lost; Section Chief Jia got closer and closer to the universe, and farther and farther from reality; Li Yang did not change his original intention, and even filmed "Blind Road", but the film’s The quality is really not flattering. Whoever sees it is blind, saying that it is a realist movie, but it is embarrassing like a nonsense comedy.
Forget it, if you want to watch a great realist movie, you still have to look outside.
Someone might say that our life is bitter enough. It's like watching a bit of sweetness, not wanting to watch realist movies to get guilty. This seems to make sense, so there is a movie I wanted to recommend to everyone, but I kept pressing and did not say, I was afraid that such remarks would appear.
But in fact, if you watch a movie, you can only see the most superficial things like "bitter" or "sweet", which is a pity. The value of a good movie does not lie in the emotions it conveys to you, but in what it brings to you in addition to emotions. It may be a kind of thinking or a power.
After going around so many twists and turns, the movie I want to talk about is called "Sorry, We Missed You", and it's a real realism movie.
One sentence to evaluate this film is that it produced a naked reality.
The story in the film revolves around an ordinary family in the UK. Husband Ricky delivers the courier, wife Abby does part-time job as a babysitter, his son Seba does not study well, he is a problem teenager, and his daughter Lisa is very young, but she is well-behaved and sensible.
The whole movie is about this family having encountered one problem after another, big or small, which forced the family into a difficult situation, and made the head of the family Ricky in the film collapse step by step.
The core dilemma that Ricky encountered was his inability to find a balance between work and life.
In other words, his work squeezed him almost all of his time.
After all, this is a movie about "996".
There is a scene in the film that I am deeply impressed. Ricky’s son Seba was arrested for theft and was caught at the police station. The police called Ricky to pick him up, but he was working and was about to get out of the car. If he left, he had to bear the company’s losses. To make money, you have to lose a lot of money.
After taking the son home, there was a quarrel, father and son quarreling, husband and wife also quarreled.
The wife complained that the husband had neglected to discipline his son, and the husband said that he was too busy to even eat.
The wife became even more angry because she sold her car in order to buy a delivery car for her husband. She had to do odd jobs to squeeze the bus. In order to be punctual, she often skipped dinner.
Contradictions are caused by the accumulation of a series of small things.
The root cause is the so-called "996".
The good thing about this movie is that it does not clearly tell the audience that it is wrong for employees to be squeezed in their working hours. Instead, it tells us that for many people, they have to accept this.
The problem Ricky faces is that he knows that he can no longer bear such a high load of work, but he cannot stop. If he stops, the whole family will face more problems and his pressure will become even greater.
In other words, tiredness is a small problem, and poverty is a big problem.
The people who are really poisoned by the "996" are actually not the group of people who often complain about the "996".
In the film, Ricky is exhausted after a big quarrel with his son and wants to take a week’s leave. The boss tells him that you can take leave of course, but you have to lose a lot of money, and don’t think this job is very difficult. Tired, there are many people who want to do this job.
This is reality, this is reality.
In the most bitter reality, there are not so many active choices, and some are just helpless and passive.
At the end of the film, Ricky was robbed, beaten, and injured, but the next day, he drove away from home to deliver the courier. The whole family stopped him and couldn't stop him.
The son said that you can’t see even one eye, and he said, I have to go to work, there is no choice.
At that moment, the movie should have enough energy.
Watching "Sorry, We Missed You", some people will complain. In this movie, both sons and daughters use Apple mobile phones. It's bitter, but it doesn't seem to be the real bitterness. From the perspective of our proletariat, their complaints are like groaning without illness.
I felt this way at the beginning.
But thinking about it carefully, the director actually wants to shoot a more general state.
What he wants to shoot is not the most bitter, not the worst, but very normal, very ordinary, but also facing many problems.
Ricky went to the police station to pick up his son, and the police said to his son, "You are good, cherish it. There are not many people who have no father to pick him up." At this moment, people have mixed feelings.
This is the most real.
You can say that the plight of the Ricky family is not a desperate situation, but the plight of most people is not a desperate situation.
Desperate shooting is of course more contagious and dramatic conflict, but that often requires more artistic processing, and what "Sorry, We Missed You" pursues is a kind of undecorated, naked reality.
Watching a bitter drama like "Spring Stepmother's Heart", we may cry violently, but we don't think about it, what should we do if we are the character of Liu Xuehua? And watching a movie like "Sorry, We Missed You", we may not be able to cry, but thinking about it, there will be some.
"Sorry we missed you" in the title of the film is on the apology card of the courier company. If the courier is late, customers will be able to see this sentence.
The courier was missed, and some people said I was sorry, but the social problem was ignored. Who said I was sorry?
"Sorry, we missed you" seems to be a short story about a family, but in fact it is about the problems of the whole society, it discusses the shortcomings of the social system, and what it observes is the era we live in. There are fewer and fewer such movies.
Of course, the film also has many shortcomings.
The fuse that made Ricky truly collapse was that he was robbed while delivering the express. The design of this plot is somewhat deliberate. For the screenwriter, this is a lazy performance.
Contrast yourself with the famous Italian neo-realist film "The Bike Stealer". In Desica's work, the male protagonist’s bicycle was stolen, so he began to find a way to catch the thief, but to no avail, he finally chose to steal the car. This behavior led him to collapse.
Everything seems to be an active choice, but it is actually the result of being trapped by fate by society. This is clever.
Forcibly exerting external blows on the character to cause inner collapse is not clever.
Nevertheless, I still like "Sorry, We Missed You", and admire director Ken Roach.
What level of director is Ken Lodge? I'm eighty-four years old. I have been filming since the 1960s. I have been filming for more than 50 years, with countless masterpieces. I have won two Palme d'Or.
I like his "The Kid and the Eagle" and "My Name is Joe" the most. These two are not his Palme d'Or works, but they are both excellent realism masterpieces.
Ken Roach is certainly not the most accomplished director among his peers. His authorship is not even very strong, and he hasn't made many innovations in images, but he may be the one with the most "combat spirit".
Throughout his life, he has worked hard to capture the "truth" of society.
When filming "I Am Black", he criticized the British social welfare system; filming "Song of the Railway", he paid attention to the problems of railway workers' lives after the privatization of British railways; filming "Land and Freedom", he analyzed the land distribution system; "Family Life", he pays attention to individual psychological problems and family relationships.
The valuable thing about Ken Rocky is that when he shoots the bottom layer, he takes a real shot of their lives. There is no attitude of looking down, only the care of a head-up.
But he has attitudes and emotions. Many times, when we watch his movies, we will think that the old man is very cute, criticized for a lifetime, angry for a lifetime, and when we are old, the flame in our hearts has never subsided.
Sometimes I look at Ken Rocky and Lao Dongmu, and I feel a sense of inspiration inexplicably.
It's really amazing.
There are too many people around us, who are only in their twenties, and they have lost their anger and caring for the world and society.
Sometimes I also think, maybe it's not that Chinese filmmakers can't make great realism works, but that Chinese audiences simply don't want to watch such works.
If you look at "false" a lot, I prefer to push away the "true".
However, this world really cannot be without "reality".
Movies can be entertainment, art, and products, but at the same time, it can also be the driving recorder of the times, and someone should regard it as the driving recorder of the times.
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