After dawn, let's talk about "The Last Night on Earth".
I watched this film twice at the New York Film Festival that just ended, ten days apart. In the ten days, I also spent a lot of wonderful time with other participating films, but I still feel that I have never been able to leave that night.
"Earth" is undoubtedly the most watched film at the 56th New York Film Festival. Both of the originally planned two screenings attracted a long standby line, and were even cut into the film festival's follow-up promotional short as a phenomenon. I lined up for the first game for 2 hours and failed to get the chance to get in. The second game was only four hours ahead of schedule to get my ticket. The organizer immediately announced additional screenings. And ten days later, the team in front of the additional games is still not short.
This kind of attention is not difficult to anticipate. The revolutionary 2D to 3D viewing method and the nearly one-hour 3D long shot recorded in the annals of history are sufficient for the gimmick of this film. Nowadays, when people walk into the theater, they just want to experience something that stuns them.
What I didn’t expect was that this movie that was the closest to the “dream” stunned me not because of its technical realization, but because it created a new structure, liberating an oriental surreal perspective, and its impact on life. The ultimate passivity performed a compassionate gaze all night.
[ dream ]
Movies have already had a lot of discussions about dreams—whether it’s David Lynch’s "Mulholland Road", Jinmin’s "Red Pepper", Nolan’s "Inception", Apichatpong’s "Magic Dream Cemetery" … Dream-making movies try to disassemble the coherence of time and logic from the level of film text and communication, and restore the interweaving and swing of dreams and reality: Why do people dream? Where does the relationship between the characters in the dream come from? Where will the dream eventually flow? It is an unfulfilled desire for reality, a conflicting spiritual personality, a broken and inverted memory, a secretly suppressed subconscious, a time concept freed from norms, and a shaky, irrational reality of salvation.
"Earth" upgraded the low-saturation picture, the use of natural light, and the rough scheduling of "Roadside Picnic" to complete a damp, damp, psychedelic dreamland that is out of the constraints of physics and time and space. In contrast to the twists and turns, scattered splicing, and unstable memories in the first half of the film, the dreams in the second half of the film are in order, complete, and one-to-the-end, and a complete immersion experience is realized in 3D. The image is in the ups and downs of the terrain. Shuttle in lightness, like self-repair of heavy memories. Many western critics summarized the film's delicate colors and emotional processing as references to Wong Kar-wai's films, but this is probably another general reading of Eastern aesthetics. Compared with the implicit and ambiguous struggle between lust and social norms in Wong Kar-wai's movies, the characters in "Earth" are innocent and childish. To them, leaving and pursuing is a kind of "Millennium Actress"-style destiny and obsession. And the hometown of Kaili, is the peach blossom source that did not know the Wei and Jin Dynasties.
On the surface, the story tells that Luo Hongwu, the actor played by Huang Jue, returned to his hometown of Kaili because of his father's death. Revisiting the old place reminded him of the teenage playmate Bai Mao (played by Li Hongqi) and his lover Wan Qiwen (played by Tang Wei) twelve years ago. In the meantime, he also visited the white cat's mother (played by Zhang Aijia) and talked about his youthful past with the white cat. At the same time, in his father's relics, he got an old photo hidden in a clock. He believed that this belonged to his mother who had disappeared very early, so he embarked on the path of searching based on the clues in the photo. At the end of the search, he entered a movie theater. At this time, the audience finally put on the 3D glasses with the actor, and started a long sleepwalk created by a 3D long lens for nearly an hour. In his dream, he met a 12-year-old boy in turn, who behaved like a white cat when he was young, and like the child who had never been born between himself and Wan Qiwen in his imagination; a woman who looked like Wan Qiwen, named Kaizhen ( Tang Wei); a red-haired woman (Zhang Aijia) is about to elope with a strange man.
[Above the sea]
At first glance, I hurriedly understood it as a story about reconciliation-a person made up with each other through a dream and his insurmountable emotional memory: in the dream he taught the son who died in the lover’s womb to fight against each other as expected. He played a game of table tennis and named him "Little White Cat". In his dream, he asked why his mother was about to elope and decided to leave, and told his mother that he had prepared for her a long time ago. In his dream, he Finally, my lover and I came to the room that would rotate as soon as I chanted the spell, and kissed in the ruined house until the time was forgotten. The part of the iceberg emerging from the sea level of the movie has been convincing enough so far.
A few days later, when I jumped out of the set of stacked images, separated enough from the urgency of following the narrative, I suddenly felt that in the process of restoring the plot with my friends, this is a movie about one person and another. Movies :
Father, son, friend Baimao, Baimao's father, and the hero himself, are that man.
Mother, lover, and friend of the white cat's mother, is the woman, the woman the man is looking for.
And the greater surprise of the movie does not come from the superposition of these multiple identities, but because it builds an ingenious structure to imitate the essence of the spiral cycle of life; from an omnipotent perspective, it peeks into the powerless situation and resolves this situation. The immense kindness and faith required by the predicament; and this form itself is both a riddle and an answer; it is a visual attempt to express the "Diamond Sutra" that "the past is unavailable, the present is unavailable, and the future is unavailable."
[ Female ]
Bi Gan said in the Q&A of the New York Film Festival that if movie characters have their own attributes like game characters, then Tang Wei’s role is water attribute, and Zhang Aijia’s fire attribute.
The scenes of Wan Qiwen in the film are always accompanied by the elements of water: leaky rooms, rain, algae-grown water banks, and old swimming pools; water, in addition to creating an unpredictable green background, and rendering the atmosphere of memories, it also forms. The medium of mirror reflection obscures the boundary between reality and illusion. Zhang Aijia has red hair and a torch in the hero's dream. Interestingly, the first sentence Tang Wei said to the male protagonist in the film was to lighten a cigarette by fire; while Zhang Aijia's first sentence was to say to the male protagonist as the owner of the barbershop: "Cut your hair? No water. !"
The opposition of green and red, water and fire, and the complementation of lack of fire and lack of water, seem to be the split of personality: by separating the contradictory aspects of personality, the inexplicable part of the character is rationalized -an affair lover, who is detached and worried Uneasy and pessimistic, but still determined to elope together; a mother who has left the family behind, is free and easy, brave, and flamboyant, leaving her most precious things to her children on the road-these two images are one soul but different The open side A and B of the object contain each other and explain each other.
Before the start of the dream, the film also hinted at the relevance of Wan Qiwen and the protagonist’s mother. For example, when we first met, the protagonist kept telling Wan Qiwen that she was very much like her mother and wore the same makeup as her mother. At this time, Wan Qiwen was in a green dress, but the bright red lipstick dyed her mouth, like a flame on her lips. For example, the male protagonist traveled three times to find people (visiting prisons, hotels, ruined karaoke bars), but the first question to the clues was "Do you know Wan Qiwen?"; for example, the woman who visited the prison said that she was in jail for "fraud and Identity fraud"; for example, the male protagonist finally arrived at the karaoke hall where his mother was inaugurated, and after asking the boss to verify whether there was a singer named Wan Qiwen, he immediately asked "how old is she"-at this time, in the male protagonist’s mind. In Zhizhong, the two previously independent images of his lover and his mother have been shaken and penetrated. On the surface of his consciousness, he has doubted who the target is looking for.
And between these two images is the heroine of the male protagonist's dreamland, and the billiards proprietress Kaizhen, who is still played by Tang Wei. Kaizhen obviously has the face of Wan Qiwen, but with short hair and a short red jacket, perhaps as a tribute to the dream master Jin Min and "Red Pepper". Kaizhen's style and behavior are quite similar to the "Red Pepper" dream detective The jump is playful. Kaizhen in her dream, sometimes speaking the Kaili dialect and sometimes Mandarin, oscillates between hometown people and foreigners who will not stay for long. With the dream of becoming a singer, she is always ready to leave her man. The story around her seems to be the plot in the most precious green book left to her by the hero's mother. She said what Wan Qiwen had said, she wanted to light a firework but did not have a lighter. Her tenderness and courage neutralized the two images of Wan Qiwen and her mother, and became an ideal existence constructed by the actor's consciousness. So in the dream he took off with her and approached the moon together, and at the end of the dream, he really followed her to find the house in the book and made it spin.
[ male ]
The protagonist obtains ideal objects that can be pinned on by splitting and reconstructing the personality of female characters, while the men in his consciousness use them to share their different spiritual identities. Putting aside the objective reality that these characters are real or fictitious, etc., there may not be an answer. From the protagonist’s narrative, we can know that the basic social identity of the protagonist-son, father, husband, brother, have not been satisfied: one does it. An unsuccessful son (the mother left home early), an unsuccessful father (a miscarried fetus), an unsuccessful husband (unavailability of a lover, the breakdown of the actual marriage), an unsuccessful brother (a friend who was caught by his own mistakes) kill).
At the beginning of the film, the male protagonist’s ghostly narration said, "It seems that all the story begins with the death of a friend." Looking back on the film, the male characters other than the male protagonist are no longer in the world: the unborn son, the murdered teenager. The friend Baimao, the father who has just passed away, is probably the boyfriend Zuo Hongyuan of Wan Qiwen who was shot and killed by the male protagonist. These seemingly separate images form a circular relationship: the white cat’s father is nicknamed Eagle, and he has been in jail for many years when he white cats was young; the young white cat used the male protagonist to give Zuo Hongyuan a father’s gun, but because of the male protagonist Zuo’s delay was killed by Zuo; the male protagonist found Zuo’s girlfriend Wan Qiwen and fell in love with her in order to track down Zuo Hongyuan; Wan said that he was pregnant with the male protagonist’s child, but he was forced by Zuo’s existence and did not leave the child behind; The male protagonist Wanhe planned to assassinate the left in the theater; the timeline of memories came to an abrupt end when the male protagonist used the white cat's gun to the left-the male protagonist suddenly left his hometown for many years.
At the entrance of the dreamland, the male protagonist carrying a kerosene lamp, explored a deep and humid tunnel, and entered a small and simple room; then a teenager wearing a bull skull mask walked out-this faint space is the mother's womb and the white cat The buried mine? Is the bull skull a sign of death or a mask of personality? The teenager promised the male lead to take him out of here after playing a game of table tennis, and then took out a table tennis racket with an eagle totem inscribed. At this time, the two images of the son who could not be born and the friend who died young, the white cat, have begun to stalemate, and their relevance is when the male protagonist puts on the boy’s father’s windbreaker and named the boy "little white cat". It has completely overlapped. Who builds with reference to whom? In other words, both of them are projections of the betrayed and abandoned.
The actor is full of sympathy, guilt and dependence on this young image at the same time. He arranged for the young man to be the night watchman in his dungeon of consciousness, allowing him to grasp the map of the entire dreamland. In the end, the boy acted as his guide and drove him out of the cramped space on a motorcycle. On the road, the two sang together, one calling himself "the kindest ghost", the other calling himself "the naiveest killer", and calling each other a liar. The male lead asked, "The door is not closed. Are you afraid of someone stealing things?" The boy replied, "Who will come but you?" The abandoned self, but also left his innocent innocence and longing for love.
[Dream in Dream]
The film’s rather fantastic scene is where the male protagonist sits on a cable car after bidding farewell to the teenager, gliding slowly from the mountain to the valley along the aerial ropeway. At this time, the mountains were suddenly filled with an almost creepy ancient chant, just like the famous "Puppet Ballad" when Motoko Kusanagi and the puppet master were combined in "Ghost in the Shell", a kind of ancient Shinto priestess. Music, like the cry from the beginning of the prehistoric era, is also like a call from above the ghostly ruins—there is a discussion to add that it is a big song of the Dong ethnic group—it totals five hundred and the music of Miyuki Nakajima constitutes an important sound memory of the film. The protagonist sank to the depths of his consciousness amidst the religious murmurs, and there was the woman he had been looking for.
The main body of the dream takes place in the simple night market in the mountain col. This day is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. From then on, the night will be swallowed by the day.
Some images of grass snakes and gray lines gathered in the night market: "Chunfeng Guest House" obviously corresponds to the "Xiaofeng Restaurant" named by his father after his mother, the slot machine corresponds to the dancing machine, and the wild grapefruit karaoke alludes to Wan Qiwen's problem for herself. The light boxes here have also been seen in the night market in Kaili, and the fireworks shop responded to her smoking habit. A singing competition is being held on the small stage next to it. An electric toy truck enters the field of vision, leading the protagonist's pace. He was sometimes the cheater who wandered around his lover, and sometimes the son behind his mother. He said that this was the last chance to see "her", but he could not recognize "she" or "she", so he had to repeat "you". Much like a person I know", "I wish you were her."
The most touching plot in the film is that the male protagonist follows his mother around the rugged mountain road to the top of the mountain. At this moment, a man is waiting by the truck outside the iron gate—the male protagonist isolates him from the abyss of consciousness—and the mother is Ready to elope with that man. After confirming his mother's mind, just like when he used a gun against Zuo Hongyuan, he once again used a gun against the man who wanted to take his mother away, but the purpose was to force him to take his mother away and realize her freedom. But he still couldn't help but ask his mother why he wanted to go with him. The mother's first reason was so childish, like an excuse that a child was looking for for someone he cared about: "I have suffered too much, and his honey Very sweet"; and the second reason, she said, "The person I care about is still young, and he will soon forget me."
[Birth and Death]
"In the face of someone's departure, the only thing we can do is to fabricate some reasons that can alleviate the pain, so that their last act of concern falls on themselves. We rearrange those coincidences in order to give them some meaning. "When his cross-examination was, "Why leave such a young me?", his comfort for himself was, "I am still young, I can actually forget"-even if he never forgets, he will even treat her. Seeking is regarded as the motif of his life.
He couldn't hide his tears, so he had to pretend to be a robber and said that he would rob her of her most precious thing. She took off her watch and he let her go.
At the beginning of the journey, at Xiaofeng Restaurant, the clock was taken off and replaced with a portrait of his father. In that dark and rainy room, the standing water reflected the circular light of the chandelier. The male protagonist sat by the bed, took apart the clock, and found a picture without a head from the back of the clock.
The shadow of the lamp in the water, the clock that does not walk, and the photo without identity-the three images overlap vertically, linking the time of dwelling, the flow of fantasy and reality, and the spiritual support that cannot be concreted.
At the end of the dream, he gave Kaizhen the watch his mother had given. It was also a watch that did not go. Kaizhen complained and put it on her hand. Time hooked up Mobius at that moment: Who happened before and who happened after? Is that passing the mother's watch to the lover? Or is it a scene in which the mother was given a watch by her lover when she was young? Is it the deconstruction of life or the reincarnation of time? Perhaps time has never been long, the birth and death of hues, the birth and death of sound, living and dying at the same time, the past and the future are disorderly. And this is the ultimate passivity of life, or the ultimate freedom of life?
——"How can you give someone a watch? A watch represents eternity."
——"How can you give away fireworks? Fireworks represent short-term."
——"Aren't we just short-lived."
Are we not eternal?
The rooster crowed, the day was about to dawn, and the dream was about to wake up. The fireworks that we lit before we left did not shorten when we left; the calendar said it was the longest night, I said it was too short; I asked you if people know they are dreaming, you say dreams are Forgotten memories.
I am a wandering ghost, a dying old man, a middle-aged man who has returned to my hometown without changing my voice, a young man keen on danger, the fetus that has never been born? I can be any of them, imagining the story he and she should have in the dark amniotic fluid or the slow cave; or maybe they are all me, carrying the regrets and sorrows of aging, and also taking off the youth. I can never say the phrase "Don’t go" for the guidance and comfort of my heart. I just remember the mantra that you believe in. It makes the universe revolve like life, annihilating countless choices and star tracks, and I will slide like that suddenly The cup, with redemption-like devotion and inevitability, falls again and again, like meeting you again and again.
Tonight, do you count the stars in the sky?
View more about Long Day's Journey Into Night reviews
