"Outstanding Citizen" is a movie that is black to the end. All the characters are not spared. Under the director's lens, they all become the target of sarcasm.
In the film, no one can stand in the light and look down on the darkness. On the contrary, everyone is standing in the gray area, performing the weakness of human nature.
Wouldn't it be depressing to watch such a movie?
Not at all.
Because the film always deconstructs itself in a self-deprecating posture, and the essence of self-deprecation is "I know my virtue, but I can't change it", so honestly it is a kind of cuteness, which makes people cannot bear to be harsh.
The film tells the story of a Nobel Prize winner who returned to his hometown, but encountered various embarrassments in his hometown and almost died in the end.
As I watched it, I kept wondering, if Mo Yan returned to his hometown of Gaomi Dongbei Township, would he experience the same dilemma?
I will come as much as I want.
That is a gap formed by the gap that must be faced. When you get out of poetry and the distance, and return to the poor country, you find that you have already become a stranger.
As Mo Yan wrote in the book, "The way to know your hometown is to leave it."
Leaving gives you a perspective to escape and find the coordinates of your hometown from a wider world.
It turned out that it was just a place where you happened to be born, nothing more.
The difficulty of returning home is never physical, but psychological.
Just like the protagonist Daniel in the film, after 40 years, he returned to his hometown-an Argentine town called Salas.
During these forty years, Daniel lived in Barcelona and wrote about the people and things of his hometown, and was admired by everyone. In the past 40 years, his hometown Salas has been sealed by time without much change.
The dusty road is still the same; the people in the afternoon still sit in front of the door in a daze; the small stalls sell outdated clothes and toys as usual; the mottled walls are full of paint graffiti...
"Nothing has changed." Sometimes, I don't know whether to feel relieved or sad.
In order to welcome Daniel's arrival, the town of Salas used the "highest specifications" they could think of.
The mayor personally greeted him, the firefighters cleared the way, accompanied by the beauty pageant, and Daniel stood on the fire truck and passed through the town to accept everyone's scrutiny. In the auditorium that can accommodate 50 people, there are hundreds of people squeezed, and PPT-style short films are played on the screen, reviewing Daniel's life, streamers, applause, and golden medals. All sections are like a commendation ceremony in the village...
Although everything in front of me has been decorated with the word "hometown" in peace, it still can't conceal the cultural gap and the embarrassment of time and space dislocation behind it.
This is simply a brief encounter between people from the two worlds because of their "hometown". Salas's "highest specifications", in fact, can't even reach the bottom line of another world.
In any case, Daniel couldn't help crying. He raised the medal of "Outstanding Citizen" and said: "In a sense, this is more important than the Nobel Prize."
In order to return to his hometown this time, the rebellious and unruly him took off all his defenses. The behavior that was once rejected has become acceptable here: you can hug, you can take pictures, you can accept interviews, you can attend boring activities...
He insisted on walking instead of picking up and sending off by car, because walking on the land of his hometown made him feel at ease.
However, slowly we will see that Daniel's patience to his hometown has been exchanged for his hometown to "blackmail" him more vigorously:
In an interview on TV, the host asked irrelevant questions and didn't care about Daniel's answer. In the end, we knew that this interview was purely for drinks.
A little fat guy found Daniel, stubbornly thinking that his father was the prototype in the novel, and threatened Daniel to be a guest at home.
A father came to Daniel with his paralyzed son and asked him to buy an expensive electric wheelchair for his son. He also took it for granted.
A fan girl came to Daniel's hotel and voluntarily dedicated her life, in fact, to let him escape from the small town and live in the big city.
The warm hospitality of the mayor is nothing more than using Daniel's popularity to endorse his political career. In his eyes, art is just a bargaining chip that can be sacrificed for politics at any time.
...
In this way, everyone in the town is using his own eyes to stare at the part of the halo behind Daniel that can benefit him.
All this has nothing to do with literature and art from the beginning.
It was like the fat driver who picked up Daniel back to his hometown. The car had a flat tire and was trapped in the wilderness. Daniel embarrassedly used the book he wrote to make a fire, but the fat driver could tear off the pages of the book and use it as toilet paper without hesitation. Compared with survival, literature has no meaning to the people here, although what is recorded in these words is their survival.
The film highlights the incommunicability between the two worlds through two paragraphs.
The first paragraph.
Daniel gave three lectures during his three days in Salas. The first time, it was overcrowded. Everyone felt like watching a panda and wanted to hear about the new world that this celebrity would bring; by the second time, the number of people had been reduced by half, and the president of the Artists Association rushed in and distributed it. A flyer with a fragment of Daniel's novel: "Look, everyone, this man is trying to please the whole of Europe by slandering his hometown." On the third time, there were only 5 people left in the whole lecture. Outside the venue, leaflets insulting Daniel were scattered, and the statue just erected for Daniel was also painted with a big cross in red paint.
The second paragraph.
The town held a drawing competition and invited Daniel to be a judge. At the award ceremony, Daniel found that the paintings he had selected had been replaced with works by three related parties.
He felt very angry, grabbed the mayor’s microphone, and generously stated: “Some primitive tribes in Africa don’t have the word'freedom' at all, because they are free. Here,'culture' is hung up by the government every day. On the lips, it just shows that this is a cultural desert."
what's the result? All Daniel got was "traitor, running dog" insults and rotten eggs flying in.
This and Daniel's speech at the Nobel Prize Ceremony at the beginning of the film formed a clever intertextual relationship.
Facing the Swedish royal family, judges and audiences full of audiences, Daniel, who has always been unhappy, said: "I feel very sorry to accept this canonization as an artist. It shows that my work meets the tastes of the judges and the king. , But it has nothing to do with art itself. But I am still grateful, thank them for proclaiming the end of my creative career."
It is also an out-of-date remark in the face of the public. The difference is that in a more civilized society, even if everyone does not understand or even strongly opposes, they will give polite or hypocritical applause; while in Salas, Daniel is embarrassed like a family dog and has to flee through the back door in panic.
"The only thing we have in common is that we were born in the same place."
This sentence was what Daniel said to the fat man who stubbornly used his father as the prototype of the novel, and now it can finally be said to everyone in Salas.
Dragging Daniel from the high altar into the abyss, this small town named Salas only took 3 days.
The good show is yet to come.
Daniel meets his first love, Irene, who is now married to his childhood friend Antonio.
Just when Antonio deliberately kissed Irene in front of Daniel, in order to complete his humble show and revenge, Daniel discovered that the girl he had slept with before was actually the daughter of Antonio and Irene.
Finally, the story inevitably came to an end.
I still remember when the sky was just right when I first arrived in Salas, Daniel stood on the fire truck and passed through the town, accepting the admiration of everyone; and at this moment, when he was about to leave, he got in Antonio’s car and went through the town again. Standing on both sides of the stubborn fat man, the president of the Artists Association, the mayor of the town... the people are still the same, but their eyes are full of hostility. Daniel stood in the car and crossed the street guarded by the traffic police, like a parade, accepting the trial of the crowd.
As the car drove into the wilderness, Daniel ran deeper into the darkness. Behind it was Antonio and Mimei’s boyfriend holding a shotgun, representing the entire town to impose the final punishment on the traitor.
In the lens, in the green night vision goggles, the red front sight is wandering beside Daniel. One shot, two shots, three shots... "Bang!" Daniel fell to the ground in response. In the air mixed with the smell of grass and mud, he smelled the breath of the grave.
If the film ends here, how can it be considered black to the end?
At the end of the film, on the scene of the new book launch, Daniel appeared in front of the media with his new book. The new book is called "Outstanding Citizen", which records exactly what happened to him in his hometown.
At this time, Daniel, swept away from the decadence when he revisited his hometown, looked radiant.
Faced with a reporter’s question on "Is the novel real or fictional," Daniel pulled off his shirt, revealing a scar, and asked the reporter: "Look at this scar. It may be caused by an operation, or it may be caused by a bicycle fall. Or a gunshot wound, what do you think? There is no truth in this world. The so-called truth is just an interpretation used to influence others."
At that moment, the victim’s motives suddenly became doubtful: perhaps, his return to his hometown was just the last time he spent on his hometown in order to retrieve the inspiration he had lost for 5 years; or perhaps, he never returned. In his hometown, all this is his conjecture full of superiority and vanity. As he himself said: "There are three things indispensable for creation: paper, pen, and vanity."
In the end, under the bombardment of the media flash, Daniel sat in a civilized world, enjoying all the glory brought by his creation, showing a complacent smile.
Note that his smile at the moment is the same as the smile at the Nobel Prize award ceremony, and the soundtrack in both places is also the same, the tune is passionate, as if he is at the pinnacle of life.
Perhaps all of this is just a show by a self-proclaimed intellectual, and the silent hometown and the solemn podium are the shows where he won applause.
It may be true that people come out of poor villages; but who can guarantee that in the poetic distance, there will be no pretending to be overwhelmed with superiority?
This open ending slapped everyone's faces like a slap in the face.
I still can't say clearly what it's like.
I just keep thinking of a scene in the film: a dead flamingo lying down in the pond, like a piece of melting rose soap.
No one knows how this bird, who likes to live in groups, could die alone.
Perhaps, it was cruelly banished by the same kind in the hometown; perhaps, it just pretended to die, then changed and lived a different life that the original kind could not understand.
——————
First published on the public account: [Zige said the movie], welcome to follow the discussion~
View more about The Distinguished Citizen reviews
