A few days ago, Jia Zhangke's new work "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. So far, "Children of the Rivers and Lakes" is still ranked among the most popular films of this year's film festival with a field rating of 2.9 (out of 4.0). The heroine Zhao Tao has also become the best actress for her outstanding performance. hot. In a word, "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" may be Jia Zhangke's most important work since "The Good Man in Three Gorges". It not only connects many previous works of Jia Zhangke, but also connects the whole film through a unified and complete plot and penetrating characters. Chinese land.
Like almost all of Jia Zhangke's previous films, the problem addressed by "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" is the moral collapse that occurred in China's inland areas after the economic shock at the turn of the century. The film has a time span similar to that of "An Old Man in Mountains and Rivers" and a wider geographical span than "Destined to Heaven"; although it continues to tell the ups and downs of love stories in the wave of the times, this one undoubtedly has a larger worldview and is integrated into And more, as the author, Jia Zhangke's thoughts on China's development in that era. Of course, I personally never call this kind of "big" "ambition" in general, because the subtext of ambition is often that someone does not have the ability to realize it. "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" is obviously another kind of movie.
In the film, the protagonist is no longer the small-town youth that Jia Zhangke has always portrayed in his works, but becomes the leader of the local "gang" in Datong Guo Bin (played by Liao Fan) and his girlfriend Qiaoqiao (played by Zhao Tao) ), it is reminiscent that the story also happened in Datong and the protagonist’s name is exactly the same "Ren Xiaoyao". At the beginning of the film, the two people are talking about one and the same, so they naturally become mediators of the incident. The "righteousness" in traditional social morality is magnified in the social organization of the gang, mixed with the status and face of men in society, and adjusted to the background and background color of the entire film.
It can be said that "Jianghu Children" is constantly moving between the two loves of "being broken by the vain face of men" and "being pretended to be loyal by women", and the term "Jianghu" is repeatedly mentioned in the film. The first concrete meaning of the movie, the gang, has also been relatively typified in the first half of the film. It wasn't until Guo Bin was attacked on the street, and then he had a fire with another younger gang (like the combination of "The Godfather" and "City of God"), Qiaoqiao was jailed for shooting self-defense on the street, and the two Love also came to an abrupt end.
Similar to "Xiao Wu", the protagonist in "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" remains in a morally ambiguous zone as always, and is even a criminal at all. After Qiaoqiao was released from prison, he first went to the Three Gorges Reservoir area to find Guo Bin (connected with The Good Man in Three Gorges) who was investing and managing a hydropower station here, and was refused to meet with Guo Bin (connected with "The Good Man of the Three Gorges"). In the process, she was stolen by a passerby (played by Ding Jiali), molested by a motorcycle driver whose wife had gone to work in Guangdong for a year, and was actually a train kanye who claimed to be a tourist developer (played by Xu Zheng) ) All the way to Xinjiang... After experiencing a series of "human comedies", she also found her own way of making a living, and began to meet all the rich, middle-aged, greasy men in the restaurant.
In general, the Qiaoqiao played by Zhao Tao is not just a victim; in other words, all the people Qiaoqiao meets during the journey, even including herself, are more or less "Xiaowu". From the mining area to the Three Gorges and then to the desert, the map of the Midwest that Jia Zhangke drew in "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" on the one hand shows the basic path of Chinese population migration at the turn of the century. Spread deeper inland. Unlike the previous works, Jia Zhangke retrieved the familiar quality of life in "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes". The piled up symbols that have been criticized have been greatly reduced, and replaced by a very fresh and representative character. And events. Their appearance shows that money has fundamentally subverted the values of the people of the country, and then also disintegrated the relatively stable emotions and families in the traditional society.
From the structural point of view, "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" still adopts a segmented structure close to that of "Old Men of Mountains and Rivers". However, "Children of the Rivers and Lakes" removed the obvious subtitles and used boats and trains to connect the scenes where several stories took place. The film also connects many important elements in the old works, such as the street art troupe in "The Platform", the flying saucer in "The Good Man in Three Gorges", the funeral and Guan Gong in "The Old Man in the Mountains and Rivers", and it gives these elements a similar but similar feature to the previous works. Never the same connotation. These elements have become the testimony of the protagonist moving around; so far, "Jianghu" has also added a layer of "wandering" that is inevitable in traditional martial arts movies.
Of course, after watching, many critics will inevitably have doubts about this method of creation, believing that the film has created a "Jia Zhangke World" by overkill. However, upon closer inspection, it is not difficult to find that the main part of the film still reflects Jia Zhangke's new understanding of the period between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, and other self-quotations and tributes play a connecting role. It is worth mentioning that Jia Zhangke has always had the idea of connecting all of his works (see "Jia Xiang II", dialogue between Jia Zhangke and Wang Taibai), so to a certain extent, "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" is a movie that will appear sooner or later. It is probably the only summative work that can include almost all of Jia Zhangke’s previous works, and at the same time unearth the "other side" of the story. This is why the author emphasizes the special value of this work.
The film also continues to be highly sensitive to pop culture at the end of the nineties, which is reflected in the many familiar pop songs in the film. Among them, Ye Qianwen's "A Life of Shallow Drunk" appeared in the opening clips of the brothers, confirming Jia Zhangke's status as the "Chinese DJ King" before the film premiered. However, unlike the popular songs that were simply quoted in the previous movies, this "A Life of Light Drunk" was also the theme music of the Hong Kong film "Blood Two Heroes", which was popular on the mainland at that time. Jia Zhangke's choice of this song not only showed his personal hobbies and the influence of Hong Kong movies on mainland youth at the time, but also allowed the relationship between the characters in the two films to form an intertextuality, which foreshadows the fate of the two.
In addition, the film also deliberately inserted passages with obvious collective nature, such as radio gymnastics, square dance, community chorus, etc., in sharp contrast with the "sweet sound" of the Hong Kong and Taiwan song "How much love can come back". This is the situation in which individual and collectivism coexisted in China at that time (until today). After Qiaoqiao left Sichuan and entered Xinjiang, all the songs disappeared. They were replaced by electronic sounds with a strong sense of the future. These sounds have been combined with the fast-developing traffic lines and unchanging ruined buildings over the past two decades. , Formed a weird and absurd magical atmosphere, which can be called "Shanxi version of cyberpunk".
Compared with the fantasies about the future in the third part of "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers", the method adopted by "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" is undoubtedly more real and more skillful. On the other hand, Jia Zhangke's record of the times has gradually transitioned from a "destined to heaven" type exploration to a more imperceptible mixture of shooting methods and media. If it is said that referring to the changes of the times through different frames is the echo of the world film in Jia Zhangke's creation, then the use of different media in "Children of the Rivers and Lakes" is the result of Jia Zhangke's continuous resonance with the times for more than 20 years. From film to DV, to HDDV, from handheld to aerial photography to surveillance camera, Jia Zhangke has never stopped recording Chinese society. This makes "Children of Jianghu" not only endogenous to the continuous extension and development of technical means, but also present The stagnation and fractures faced by certain areas of China.
At the end of the film, Guo Bin, who was drunk and paralyzed, returned to Datong to seek help from Qiaoqiao, but because he couldn't bear his own disability and the bullying of his brother, he took the initiative to withdraw from Qiaoqiao's life. Qiaoqiao was leaning against the wall alone. At this time, the camera didn't try to focus on her, but found her in the surveillance video. The image that has become clearer in the past two hours or so has become increasingly blurred at this moment. This is probably the most ambiguous moment in all Jia Zhangke's films: we will never know whether the two people's emotions can be maintained. Qiaoqiao may be waiting, or thinking, or giving up... But one thing seems to be certain. , That is, in such an era shrouded by wealth and the Internet, all the reality between people no longer exists.
View more about Ash Is Purest White reviews
