I never thought that watching Li Cangdong's movies would be so touching. This is like a clear spring gushing out in the boundless desert, a miracle, great, but also humble and insignificant, but also true, pure, and penetrating love. This is regardless of all the desolation around. Still want to bloom in this cruel land, beautiful and strong love.
【A little simple feeling】
Characters are undoubtedly the most critical and core part of "Oasis". The perfect shaping of the two characters and the subversive interpretation of Xue Jingqiu and Wen Suli can be said to be the soul of the film. And Li Cangdong is very clever and efficient in character shaping.
Taking the beginning of the movie as an example, during the seven or eight minutes from about 2.5 minutes to about 10 minutes, on the premise that the audience does not know the identity and past of the characters, the camera is always given to the hero Zhongdu. Later, through the dialogue at the police station, we learned that Zhongdu had just been released from prison and his relatives had moved. After explaining this information, Zhongdu and his younger brother went home. Here, the story to be told in the movie is just the beginning.
So in these 7 minutes of time that has nothing to do with the story, Zhong Du went from borrowing cigarettes, buying clothes for his mother, looking for a home, throwing oranges and spitting downstairs, going to the supermarket, eating tofu, going to the phone booth, eating Bawang's meal, and getting arrested. , where is the significance of this series of events, if I say, is the characters. With just a few minutes of "idle writing" at the beginning, which is not directly related to the story, Li Cangdong made the role of Zhongdu very three-dimensional and felt, and also established a life-like and realistic style for the work.
In the slightly shaking hand-held photography, Zhongdu shows a wandering state that is incompatible with his environment, whether it is the uncertainty of his action intentions, or the repeated encounters with obstacles, including the incompatibility of his clothes. , are intended to show this; secondly, his character, unassuming, inconspicuous, a little humble, kind, a little simple, with a little childish childishness, and even not so "smart". . Everything that happens in the story after that deeply reflects the characteristics of Zhongdu in just a few minutes, and the pre-delineated characters also make the characters' subsequent behaviors seem natural, allowing the audience to enter the characters with an impression. world, easier to understand and empathize with.
When Gong-soo comes on stage, we see master-level characterization again, the use of surreal imagery of doves and butterflies.
Gong Soo's vision first enters the picture with a subjective lens. Here not only is the image of the dove surreal, but Gong Soo is also humming softly in the imaginary. Immediately afterwards, the dove disappeared and turned back to the halo reflected in the mirror, and the beautiful humming sound also turned into Gong-soo's moan. Here, there is a sharp contrast between beauty and cruelty, fantasy and reality. The beautiful fantasy comes first, and then is broken by the cruel reality. This point is put into Gongzhu, which is her yearning for beauty as a disabled person. So Gong-soo, a character that was quite difficult to shape due to his own setting, stood up all of a sudden through such a surreal brushwork. From this, it can also be seen that every surreal passage is initiated by Gong-soo, and it is Gong-soo's imagination, not Chun-do's, which also corresponds to the attitude of the two characters towards each other: Gong-soo hopes that he He is a normal person, so he can love Chung-do better; and Chung does not expect Gong-soo to become a normal person, and his love for Gong-soo is completely unaffected by her disability.
Wen Suli's performance undoubtedly has the greatest contribution to the shaping of Gongzhu. With the physical disability of the character, Gongzhu's emotional expression is not clear to the audience, and there is no clear line between her joys and sorrows. The dividing line, whether it is happiness or sadness, joy or pain, often needs to be inferred indirectly according to the situation at the time. You can think about it this way, Li Cangdong doesn't want the audience to know whether Gongzhu is happy or sad, there is no need to distinguish her sadness or happiness. In front of her cruel fate, her emotions are trivial and worthless, both sadness and happiness. It's the same, it's just a protest against life, against the world.
The symbol of "Oasis" is naturally very important. Li Cangdong's films are realistic, and "Oasis", an image with a romantic temperament, its realism lies in the environment in which it exists - the desert, which is "Oasis" "The extremely important theme, Li Cangdong did not ignore the existence of the desert while expressing the oasis. In the cruel world buried in yellow sand, the meaning of the oasis for the two is each other, while the meaning of the oasis for the real environment is the relationship and feelings between the two, a kind of opposite to the environment and difficult to accept , understood relationships and feelings. So we can see that the tree shadows on Gongsoo's oasis canvas come from the external environment, which is actually the shadow cast by the desert that symbolizes the real world. This is also why Li Cangdong takes the trouble to describe the respective families of the two protagonists. In fact, it is an indictment of human nature and the real world, and even the hypocrisy of unreservedly tearing apart the family.
There is such an admiration in the film, Zhongdu encountered a traffic jam, so he directly picked up Gongzhu and sang and danced on the highway. In the night with the lights shining, how lonely their romance was.
The film that uses the feeling of encounter between strangers to reflect on the real society I immediately thought of Hirokazu Kore-eda's "The Thief Family". It is no exaggeration to say that integrating realistic thinking into the story is that "The Thief Family" can win the most Palme d'Or. one of the important reasons. In "The Thief's Family", the family formed by several characters eventually fell apart. It was Hirokazu Koreeda's final fate through this family. He wanted to show the instability of non-blood families at various levels, and then to traditional families and non-blood families. and the social reality behind it to make a more profound reflection. For "Oasis", Gongsoo and Chung are both "abnormal" as individuals and their "abnormal" relationship makes their love unusually "fragile", when Gongsoo tries his best at the police station When she tried to "voice" to protest against the people around her, or tried to prove Zhongdu's innocence, her attempt was completely ineffective, and the two of them were powerless to save it, and all this was Li Cangdong's cruelty. Thinking about the living conditions of the people represented by Zhongdu and Gongzhu in the context of reality. Their survival depends on each other's newspapers to keep warm, but under the impact and exclusion of the external society, they are like an oasis in the desert. , the slightest carelessness will be swallowed by the sand.
No matter what the subject matter of the story or the way of presentation, Han Ying has never stopped on the road of realistic reflection and criticism. I think this is also the most valuable part of their creation.
The film ends with this composition in the voiceover of Chung-do reading the letter: The door acts as a frame to place Gong-soo and Oasis's canvases in two separate spaces, but they are still in the same large frame Inside, in the bright sunshine and the dust filling the air, Li Cangdong gave this tragic story one last glimmer of hope.
2020.11.21
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