[The viewing version is the mainland theater version] It is just based on a memory point, trying to record the changes in the feeling of this film.
[This article is authorized to be published on the public account " The Cinema at the End of the Universe ". 】
There is a paragraph at the beginning of "Long Time" that I found extremely abrupt at first, but later found quite memorable.
The teenage Xingxing, who was the replacement for the dead child, ran away from home again, and was not heard from after a night. Yaojun and Liyun searched hard to no avail. After the rainstorm, the ground floor of the low-lying dilapidated room was flooded with accumulated rainwater. Liyun, who walked into Sekisui's room, first picked up the photo of the husband and wife and the young star, and then another photo of the two and the dead childhood star floated out from under the cabinet.
As a viewer who has just started watching the film for less than half an hour—and a viewer who temporarily identifies or presupposes the film as a realistic subject matter and style—I am utterly perplexed by this deliberate treatment.
As the WeChat group friends complained, if the previous photo can barely be used as a natural situation (in the predicament of not being able to find the young stars) , the latter photo is completely surreal” "Mind power" was forcibly absorbed into the story, pulled out forcibly to build up the psychology of the characters, and set up time-space echoes - this is hardly in line with the laws of motion that water, as a flexible liquid substance, should have in daily life images. Even if the characters are emotionally understandable (or, in other words, they can be rudely brain-filled), for many audiences, this is also a last resort to put the screenwriter's will above the characters and expose them to the narrative horizon.
But then, an episode I recalled in a conversation with my fans and friends gave me a little understanding of this process, and even began to have some (still meaningless) desire to interpret.
Before entering the room, Yaojun and Liyun searched for stars in the undulating alleys of the town. The sudden torrential rain made the visually very dry, rough, and monotonous town space reveal a haziness different from usual, and even hidden a long sense of spatial hierarchy in the blur. After crossing a path, Yaojun hid in it to avoid the rain - the rain completely "drives" him to the eaves or the road hole. When he looked up, there was an open-air path ruled by the rain, and Liyun happened to be on the other side. Under the eaves, he brushed the rainwater from his hair in a dazed and determined way.
This seems to be one of the few scenes in the entire film that really opens up the depth of space. On the one hand, the two got lost in this endless search, and were forced to retreat to a narrow "cave" in the rain. Water, on the other hand, is the material vehicle that is repeatedly (though not naturally and effectively) touched upon in the film. Between these two places of shelter, it seems that it is not rain, but frozen time.
Given such a psychologically realistic interpretation of the passage, the plot arrangement for the subsequent entry into the room seems less embarrassing.
It seems that the running process of the two not only presents a kind of "saturation" in the physical sense, but also represents a kind of "erosion" of memory time and space. Therefore, when the water flows into the low-lying land, what they enter is not just a "broken old house", but a room inside memory and psychology. They do not dive into the memory space and reverse the future like in Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, but can only wear cloth shoes to step in a messy "shoal" and pick up the life memories engulfed, deprived and shattered by "water". Therefore, the emergence of the two photos is not so much a reality as it is a necessity that the subjective world is superimposed on the natural reality.
After such a round of imaginative additions, this is basically my favorite passage in the whole film.
However, the problem is still not over. In any case, this is just one possible way of understanding an isolated episode for me, as a regular viewer. A way of understanding can often only be used as a dismantling of the thin content level, but it cannot support the artistic effect of the content itself through the transmission of the form - in other words, the content that the text can contain is not necessarily smelted into The "content" of the movie.
As a viewer, I am still unable to produce this abstract process of psychological refinement when the image is presented. Or, if the pursuit of the "real" effect of the image at this moment is also a kind of quick success for watching, I should try to put this paragraph into the structure of the whole film after watching it to examine its status and perceive the possible time and space. flow.
However, even if I choose the second path calmly, I still have no way to let this interpretation spread and ferment into a kind of emotional magic in time and space. To me, the overall structure of the film is like this empty room with memory fragments suspended. In too many parts, as an audience, I can't roam in it smoothly, but can only accept the plot, emotion and the so-called "sense of change in world events" that are pushed to me by the tide under the will of the creator and screenwriter. And these plots seem to be more like a kind of "inevitability" that is stitched together by chance but the result is logical. Between the jump from "accidental" to "inevitable", the film does not give sufficient arguments. As a result, these seemingly long passages are only smackable passages, and cannot renovate the entire work.
The main characters in the film seem to still have empty, blank, meaningless moments, but I, as a viewer, were filled with precise and delicate "meanings" in three hours that could have been heart-wrenching. They hit me so frequently, and I didn't have the time to have a natural enough response to the characters' emotions (besides the actors' hard-working performances).
I can't be shocked when the young stars kneel down, I can't be moved when old friends meet again after many years, and I can't be happy because of a reunion phone call that pinpoints the time again at the happy ending; There is no way to be infected by the repeated refrains of the soundtrack at the fixed point of time and space switching, and there is no way to identify the symbols of the era as a life other than flat "symbols" in the shots that compress the space, and there is no way to communicate with the characters in the dry and hard dialogue. The interactions between the characters are captured in close-up.
Because before the further construction between characters, time and space, I can't even identify them as a relatively independent character, and I can't identify them as an acceptable and rounded film technique - they It should be a vivid part of "life" in Wang Xiaoshuai's mouth, not a tool of expression.
If this is a story that is chronologically choreographed and accumulated, I may be able to resonate almost transcendental when they walk into an empty room, and their existence in the narrowness may fill this lack of meaning and lack A living space.
If there are not so many equally prominent coincidences in the arrangement of the plot, then these two photos may be used as an exact overflow point in the entire empty scene of the times, and I may be able to freeze the characters' still waters at this overflow point. Emotions, and even determine the distance between the creator and the characters and their creative personality.
If each character has a more complete psychological path and richer foreshadowing, there are enough trivial and seemingly meaningless details, not just "plot" points and "behavior" diagrams loaded one after another. Show that I might be able to get closer to their lives, instead of just stripping the actor's performance into an artistic fault that can be praised but like thin ice.
But now, I was directed to follow the actors into this empty room of UFO memory, and at the same time, I was excluded from the real and comfortable story situation.
The room is so "empty" that it gets "filled" so easily that this overflow immediately translates into a new "emptiness". And as an audience, I am just a wandering soul at a loss.
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