Walking out of the theater, I said something to my friends, let me slow down.
In fact, before watching the movie, I deliberately avoided all kinds of online comments and analysis, but only knew a general outline. When watching a movie, the rhythm at the beginning made me a little "overwhelmed", but I quickly became involved in it, and even finally caused my mood to collapse badly. How intense are the emotions? Just after watching the walk on the road, I hummed "Friendship Is Everlasting" unconsciously.
In fact, after I left the theater, I kept thinking about whether it was because the director was deliberately provocative, so that the audience had so many tear-jerking moments. In the end, I personally think that the director himself is still restrained, and the reason why the film can evoke tears is more due to the common feelings among most Chinese people.
I quite like this movie. For a movie, as long as the audience can be moved, it is because the parties have found their own emotional resonance in the movie. For me, the strongest emotion that can be moved by "Long Time" comes from the restraint and forbearance of the characters' emotions in the film.
It is true that the movie can be said to be Wang Xiaoshuai's most "ambitious" in terms of story setting. However, in my opinion, it was also his most challenging one. Looking at his past works, he is actually talking about the shadow casting of a period of history, but this time, he stretched the whole casting, and postponed it for a whole 30 years.
For him, it is actually quite difficult for him to take care of this history and try his best to show and understand the relationship between the characters in this history. Like his predecessor "The Intruder", he can use a lot of metaphors to tell modern things well. But he didn't. This time he straightened things out and told everything. As for the rest of the emotions, leave it to the audience.
In my definition, Wang Xiaoshuai is actually a director who loves and is good at expressing selfish desires in movies. The "old three-line trilogy" of the past is clear at a glance. In this part, the most direct one is the "migration" of Liu Yaojun and Wang Liyun. They went from Baotou, to Hainan, and finally to Lianjiang, Fujian. They don't really want to integrate into their surroundings, they give up learning the local dialect. Local people in their shop, speaking in dialect, their non-integration of foreigners is particularly prominent.
In his own personal note "The Hometown of Thin Thin", his father once said a sentence: "It's really painful in my heart. As ordinary people, we can only go as the torrent flows, like the sand in the river, where it rushes." Wang Xiaoshuai wandered with his parents for half his life. He was born in Shanghai, was a child in Guiyang, went to Wuhan as a teenager, and drifted to Beijing as an adult. Therefore, the "sequelae" of this departure are projected in this "Long Time".
In fact, this wandering has also caused a "lack of identity".
The "identity card" is mentioned three times in the film. Liu Yaojun applied for his ID card for Liu Xing, when Liu Xing went home to ask for his ID card, and at the end, Liu Yaojun said, "It's time for Xingxing to change to the second-generation ID card." In fact, the meaning of the ID card here is very clear, because the adult Liu Xing's own settings, for him, the lack of "identity" has always been.
In the more than 30 years of historical torrent of "Long Time", in fact, everyone is looking for identity. The compound workers (the Shen family couple) are looking for a new job identity in the system reform, Liu Yaojun and his wife are also looking for their parental identity, and even Meiyu asked Jianxin to give her an identity during the prison visit.
Even in the end, the three families are looking for the identity of each other's "friends".
From the very beginning of the film, when Liu Yaojun carried his son into the hospital, the slightly abrupt "Friendship Is Everlasting" sounded and became the keynote of the film. As the plot unfolds slowly, we can see that the core of the film actually lies in the relationship between these three families, especially the Liu family and the Shen family.
This just fits the title of the movie, "Long Time". What is "Long Time"? In fact, it is very simple, it is to describe the friendship between the two.
However, how can we make friendship last forever? This is the most crucial topic in the film.
In fact, the answer is very simple, one persuasion.
Chinese people have always treated many emotional relationships in the so-called forbearance and restraint, wrapping all their private emotions in their hearts, and thinking of all kinds of "suppression". But in fact, in the end, it became an internal injury. As Shen Hao said in the movie, "There is a tree in my heart, and it will rush out of my body slowly".
The director concentrated this persuasion in the last half hour of the movie, and he directly asked everyone in the movie to reconcile here collectively, so that the originally restrained emotions of the movie exploded at the end. In fact, this kind of persuasion is a kind of empathy that most Chinese people have had for nearly a thousand years, and many viewers like me can devote themselves to it.
Perhaps, many people will say that the English name of the film is "So long, My son", which seems to refer to the policy in the context of that era. However, for me, the opposite is not the case. It is true that in the torrent of that era, that was an unavoidable point. But that's just a simple surface, what about digging deeper? Maybe incomprehensible. However, these backgrounds have directly or indirectly created Liu Yaojun's forbearance, kindness and strength.
Of course, the most obvious thing is that at the end of the film, the director has already given the corresponding answer, which is still a self-persuasion.
Although this time, Wang Xiaoshuai told the story very frankly, but it can be clearly found that he still left the last stroke. When Liu Yaojun and Liyun saw that Jasmine's child in the video was a mixed race, their expressions were a little relaxed and a little disappointed. The relationship between these three people was never mentioned in the movie from beginning to end, but stayed there like a thin shirt.
In fact, we all know that the emergence of mixed-race children has actually replaced the persuasion between the three.
So until now, is the original song "Friendship Lasts" really still abrupt? I believe not.
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