I thought a lot of naive things
They're all high on the edge of life
——Zang Di "Yushu, Rider for One Hour"
Lee Chang-dong tends to present the rough, market-oriented real world in his films. Whether it is the framing of the street, the interior (home and public space), or the choice of the image of the actors (leading actors and extras), it is very close to the daily life of ordinary citizens. It's almost a re-enactment of the real world, and audiences looking for romance and fantasy in movies may be left behind.
"Oasis" was filmed in 2002 and is the finale of Li Changdong's "Green Trilogy". This time, Li Cangdong chose the love theme with the most romantic potential, although it is a story of two disabled people falling in love. The actor Hong Zhongdu is obviously mentally handicapped (so he took the initiative to replace his brother's hit-and-run charge and was sentenced to prison). The heroine Han Gongshu is the cerebral palsy daughter of the victim who died in the car accident. She has no ability to live independently because of her physical disability, and can only make ends meet under the care of her brother and sister-in-law. The encounter between these two people began with Hong Zhongdu's innocent goodwill - after he was released from prison, he would bring gifts to visit the family of the deceased. He has done a lot of reckless and reckless things like this. We see the reactions of all the normal people around (the indifference and anger of strangers, the disgust and helplessness of family members), but Hong Zhong remains unmoved. His disability lies in the lack of perception of other people's emotions. He is not persuaded or attacked by others, but still follows his emotional logic and is obsessed with doing what he thinks should be done.
So, during such an untimely visit, Hong Chung-do meets Han Gong-sook who was abandoned in the empty house after the move - another equally innocent person. The scene in which she appeared is very dreamy. Although her face is distorted by her disability, and although every movement is trembling, she is obsessed with fiddling with a mirror so that it reflects the sunlight on the ceiling. Following her line of sight, we saw a snow-white glowing dove spread its wings in the air. In an instant, the broken, chaotic reality soars to an impossibly pure state: the body is trapped, but the mind is free to fly freely in the imagination.
However, no one cares and no one wants to understand the spiritual world of a woman with cerebral palsy. Her brother and sister-in-law accepted Han Gongshu's disability housing allowance and moved into a new home without Han Gongshu. Hong Zhong, who witnessed all this, once again sent out an inappropriate question: "You guys have moved away, what about your sister?"
There was no answer, so Hong Zhongdu himself provided the answer: his own phone number. You could say he was attracted to Han Gong Sook. Maybe it starts with physical attraction, but it's more like a lonely person being attracted to another person. Although Hong Zhongdu is healthy, his family also refuses to accept him. So, he could only wait in the dark for a phone call, a message from the same kind.
An incredible love seems to be about to begin. But Li Changdong's cold side is here - he never creates a simple fairy tale, but is committed to restoring the reality of reality. The relationship between the two still began with an attempted sexual assault and Hong Zhongdu's out-of-control physical desire (there was a foreshadowing before, and then there was a response). After that, Hong Zhong fled in a hurry, and then came back with guilt and promised to give her the respect she deserved. Only then did they start to build the relationship between the two.
It's almost clumsy child love: naive conversations, naming lovers after each other (one "Princess" and one "General"), dancing in forgotten rooms (the elephant on the tapestry and the Indian woman also join their dance), he pushed her wheelchair down the street, took the subway, went to restaurants (and then went to the garage where he lived and ordered takeout to eat together). He did everything he could think of to make her happy. And in her imagination, she has a healthy and light body, and can dance and joke with him - that is her real happiness. Unbelievable to say, there is a suffocating tension in the miraculous passages that soared into everyday life, and the whole dream of achieving this tension is that she has a healthy body. For her, the dream that was destined to be unfulfilled was precisely something that normal people never realized. However, it is these two people who are regarded as incomplete by the world, but they easily accomplish the most difficult thing that love can achieve: build a world that belongs to them. This is the most humble and noblest love in the world. Humble, because their need for love is so innocent and simple; sublime, because they are reckless and do not seek understanding.
The misunderstanding of such a love by others is doomed. The two worlds are doomed to be irreparable—not that they cannot be bridged, but that the hard, indifferent real world completely overwhelms the other marginal, fragile emotional world. People have already made a hasty conclusion about everything: one is a mentally retarded rapist, and the other is a defenseless woman with cerebral palsy. In the eyes of normal people (including all the relatives of the protagonist), the disabled have been alienated into inhumans, so that they have no time to see a trace of beauty in the two protagonists, let alone imagine that the two protagonists have any possibility of human behavior. - And the deeper psychological reason for this situation is that when people are condescending, the pain of others is not important, their own world is everything. They are not at all willing to make any effort to bridge the two worlds, they would rather choose not to see the other.
At the end of the movie, Hong Zhongdu, who was convicted of rape, suddenly fled the police station frantically, and he came to Han Gongshu's downstairs. There was a tree there, and the projection of the tree fell on the wall of Han Gongshu's room, and there was a picture on the wall. The painting reads: Oasis. Han Gong-sook once said that at night, the shadows of the flickering branches on the wall paintings frightened her. And Hong Zhongdu climbed up the tree, in order to cut down every branch, in order to destroy the green of the real world, so that the shadow of the tree would no longer disturb the "oasis" on that wall. Although, it's just a symbol of an "oasis" abandoned in a dilapidated house. In a world where people are desolate, there are still innocent people who are willing to believe it.
In this way, Li Changdong examines our society of so-called healthy people: the indifferent and selfish Hong Zhongdu family, the mercenary Han Gongshu family, and all the indifferent spectators (including us off-screen). The "sexual assault" case that was judged as a crime in the movie was out of pure love. And normal people's legal sex (the neighbor couple's sex incident at Han Gongshu's house) is extremely morbid because of repression. In the end, the reversal of good and evil in these two worlds ends with the gentle collapse of the marginal world that the disabled have struggled to build—but with the force of this collapse, it sends out an irony to the world of the able-bodied.
Li Cangdong, who chose to tell such a story, is more like a narrative poet, but the material for his poems is not crystal clear and clean words, but all the things in life that are disliked and left behind: a bowl of bean rice, a pair of beautiful A vulgar wall painting, an ugly smile, an ordinary man's ballad ("If I were a poet, I would sing for you."). The poet did sing for them—and with great skill purifies all this dusty thing into a poem so delicate and sharp it is almost like a shard of a mirror in a movie. They sting you, but you see the purest thing because of it - the light reflected on the wall by all the mirrors.
Looking at Lee Changdong's film career. He was 43 years old when he made the first film "Green Fish", so the film has almost no youthful transition, but has a mature style from the beginning, and then it just keeps moving towards vastness and depth. He looked at the real world with the eyes of a middle-aged man: he saw that the world was full of mud and sand, among which ugliness, worldliness, and evil constituted the main part of this real world. He never avoids and beautifies the real world, but he is more obsessed with observing the pure part of dirty things - he drives it miraculously in the film with all his attention. Or, let's say, Li Cangdong redefines purity with movies: purity is not a misunderstanding of the beauty of the world in human childhood, not a distant place as a spectacle and landscape, not even in the past civilization of mankind, but right here, it Struggling with endless blood, tears and mud, it has escaped from a hopeless vulgar life, it has tasted the darkness and horror of human nature countless times, but it still maintains (or survives) a human childhood innocence inside— - This is the purity of Li Changdong, the purity of "Oasis".
As Hesse said in Siddhartha: "Innocent people can love, that is their secret."
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