Yanji is the capital of Yanbian, the Korean Autonomous Prefecture. It can be said that Yanji is Yanbian, and Yanbian is Yanji. Yanbian is on the fringes of China and on the fringes of mainstream society.
Yanbian people like to smoke the red Changbai Mountain, which is very strong; they like to drink glacier beer and spirits; they like to eat large pieces of kebab and dog meat, and eat them with chili sauce. The Yanbian dialect also has a strong tone.
Some Korean films about Yanbian Koreans are cheap romantic comedies, not worth mentioning. The so-called Yanbian characters are seriously lacking in textual research, and they set Yanbian as a North Korean level without any sense of responsibility. The fake Yanbian people in this kind of film and television work misled many Korean audiences.
Hwanghae is the first film that seriously combines social crime issues with the Korean ethnic group, and coldly expounds it in the form of a realistic genre film, just like the original Yanbian accent of Kim Yoon-seok who plays 'Lao Mian' (this is what I take as Yanbian people guarantee), full of sincerity and thrilling.
I'll write this review to mimic the segmented structure of the film.
1. The tragedy of the Korean family The
Koreans have contempt and sympathy for the Koreans in Yanbian. There is also a direct description in the film. The victim, Professor Jin Chengxuan, saw Jiu Nan who was stepping on the spot and gave him some money to tell him to go to the bathing center to sleep, and told the driver , is Korean. It means pity him. The income level in Yanbian is very low. An ordinary person can only get one or two thousand yuan for work. However, there are many entertainment tricks in Yanbian, so this money is not enough. And to work in South Korea, although it is a little hard work, you can earn one or two million won a month, that is, more than six thousand to ten thousand. In addition, it is more convenient to go to South Korea, and it has become a common phenomenon for Koreans to work in South Korea, and there are a lot of social problems in South Korea and Yanbian.
In South Korea, most of the ethnic Korean working groups are living illegally and are completely exposed to crime. Sometimes they are the victims, such as the Korean woman killed by the owner of the seafood shop in the film, and sometimes they play the perpetrators, including fraudulent and violent killings. There is a phenomenon of migrant workers defaulting on wages in China, and the victims in South Korea are the Koreans who are living illegally. Even if people do not pay wages and there is no place to seek redress, at this time they can only resort to illegal means. In Yanbian, on the other hand, those who stay behind are often linked to potential criminal behavior.
A typical Korean tragedy is like this: the family collects money everywhere to send his wife to work in South Korea (women are more likely to find a job), the husband waits at home for his wife to send the money home, and the promising ones are like the 'Kunan' in the film, and Those who are not promising will only play mahjong and drink to survive, and they will also raise a mistress and the like, and wait for their wife to send money every month. Later, my wife had an affair with a Korean, and when she ran away, her husband lost his fortune. In the end, he had no choice but to smuggle to South Korea and disappeared into the vast crowd of illegal migrant workers. As for the children, without their parents to take care of them, they will form gangs with a large amount of pocket money at the beginning, and they are used to spending extravagantly. The worst way to end is to fight drugs and kill people.
Therefore, the background homework of the film is very sufficient, and the entry point is also very typical. At the beginning, it is the scene of playing mahjong. As I said earlier, the salary level here is low, so everyone will shift their goal to gambling money. Hisao is pinning his hope of repaying his debts on mahjong, but unfortunately he can’t win money. I have never heard of anyone who loves to play mahjong to win. over the money.
After that, the biggest failure of the film appeared. The two thugs who collected debts were Korean actors. It was very difficult for them to speak Chinese, and the quality of the work was flawed, which was very different from the authentic Yanbian dialect. On the contrary, the mahjong player who scolded Goryeo Bangzi had a very authentic accent.
⒉ Dog bite dog
is a common swear word in Korean. If you want to say that you can only choose one other than the common scolding of all countries, it should be "dog brat" (개새끼). Dogs are very pitiful, and somehow they are considered to be the most degrading animals. The word dog in the Korean context is just like fucking, and often appears as an emphasis. For example, Cao You? Not the same, very harsh.
The film begins with the narration of Hisao. The narration begins with his story about a rabid dog in his neighborhood when he was a child. At the end of the only narration in the film, he says that mad dog disease has begun to spread again.
In the film, Korean gangsters are wild wild dogs, while Korean gangsters are domestic hounds.
(Correction: Kim Yoon-seok described Lao Mian as a wild wolf in an interview. This metaphor is indeed more accurate.)
Lao Mian sought out Jiu Nan as a killer, and the target of the killing was former judo player Professor Kim Seung-hyun, who was also a gang leader.
Here, some people may not understand, let me sort out the plot. Those who understand it can ignore this section, and those who haven't seen it, please ignore it, there are serious spoilers.
There are two people who want to kill Professor Kim. One is Professor Jin's partner (hereafter referred to as the eldest) because Professor Jin had an affair with the eldest lover. He asked his left and right hands to bribe the professor's driver, and the driver found two stupid killers to stab him.
As for the eldest son's affair with Professor Jin, some audience members may not understand.
In fact, there are two details that explain the relationship between Xiaosan and Professor Jin. One is very obscure, the clothes the junior wears are exactly the same as those worn by Professor Jin's wife at the beginning, indicating that the professor bought them the same clothes. Another is more obvious. Boss Kim Tae-won kept mumbling when he was dying: That kid slept with my woman...in my house...slept with my woman....
This detail also named the motive of the boss Jin Taiyuan to kill Professor Jin: love killing. His motive for ordering the driver to kill the professor had been unclear until then.
Another person who wants to kill the professor is a bank employee. The reason is also because of a woman. He has an affair with the professor's wife. In addition, he works in the bank, and it is easy to deal with the inheritance. Killing the professor can get both money and money. So I inquired about the restaurant I often go to, and it happened that the Korean waiter heard that the waiter remembered his wife's best friend's lover doing this, and contacted him to take over the job. This person is Lao Mian, and Lao Mian will find a desperate fool to use it. Abandoning it, the unlucky Hisao just smuggled across the Yellow Sea and started his desperate road.
Jiunan's road became more and more dangerous, because the police were incompetent, so the matter became a big one. The boss mistakenly believed that Jiunan was hired by the driver. He was afraid that the matter would be exposed, so he tracked down and silenced him. He forced a lot of Koreans to confess and found Laomian's head. If he wanted to kill Lao Mian, even if Jiu Nan was caught, he couldn't find him, so he hurriedly sent someone to Yanbian to kill Lao Mian, but unfortunately Lao Mian was relatively invincible.
Lao Mian thought, this is a good opportunity to make money, so he found a group of Korean laborers to negotiate with the boss.
Afterwards, everyone saw Lao Mian, a wild wolf, chasing and killing Jiu Nan, a wild dog. Jiu Nan found out that he was being played by Lao Mian, and asking him to take his thumb back was just a trap to appease him. After escaping, Jiu Nan went behind the scenes to investigate Find the professor's wife, return the useless thumb to the family, and swear to kill the mastermind behind the scenes.
The professor's wife should have told the bank clerk about this immediately, and the bank clerk hired two more Koreans to kill Jiu Nan. These two have never killed anyone, but after kidnapping Hisao, they were confused and killed.
Hisao found the business card in their car, it was the banker's. During the process of tracing Lao Mian's whereabouts, the boss found that a Korean waiter was drunk and flaunted that he had killed the professor. At this time, Lao Mian came in, and then the black dog who grew up in the Korean greenhouse died with Lao Mian. In the end, Hisao also understood the relationship between the professor's wife and the bank clerk, and gave up revenge.
As for the reason, I think it is because the professor's wife reminds him of his own wife. Hisao was seriously injured and died in the Yellow Sea while holding the urn, and the carnival of a group of dogs was over.
At the end, Jiu Nan's wife got off the train and walked quietly to the exit at the unusually quiet and empty Yanji Railway Station.
The ending of this paragraph can be said to be open-minded. Is the ashes that Hisao brought back his wife? Is the wife really home? Of course it's boring to struggle with this, because open endings have their purpose.
There are two possibilities.
A. Hisao's Dying Hallucination
This is almost as true as Inception's reality statement. After Jiunan beat the owner of the seafood shop, the boss found Jiunan's wife to make a fuss. Jiunan's wife wanted to go back to Yanbian, and the boss was so embarrassed that he killed her. The basis of this statement is that after all, Jiu Nan Meng’s wife is not one or two times, and the final scene is completely consistent with his previous memory of sending his wife on the train. The empty and dreamy scene of the train station is also in great contrast with the extremely realistic style of this film. It is a memory style of. He died on the way home holding his wife's urn, expecting his wife to come home.
B. The ending is reality.
This has another meaning. Hisao died holding the urn of a strange Korean woman, and at the same time, it reflects the fact that there are many similar murders of Korean women in South Korea. So that all the stories are like their own, they are mistaken for the wife, and the wife got rid of the seafood shop owner that day and set foot on the road home. This argument is based on the fact that paid wage earners were sloppy in identifying the body, not sure if it was the wife but cremated directly. In fact, when Jiu Nan called the police station for consultation, he also satirized the human rights protection system of South Korea's vicious criminals. He refused to release the murderer's information, so Jiu Nan could not confirm whether the murderer was the owner of the seafood shop, nor could he determine that it was his wife. South Korea protects murderers more closely than victims, so there have been a lot of problems.
As for me, I am inclined to A, because it is more obvious.
Regarding the point at the end, I will quote another wonderful reply, which I completely agree with.
<2011-02-18 07:43:32
The meaning of ginthes' open ending is to be open. It is not necessary to say whether it is A or B.
Or to understand the purpose of the director's arrangement: he could end when the protagonist's body was pushed into the sea, but he didn't do it; he could also shoot a realistic busty station scene to tell everyone that his wife was indeed back, but he didn't either. Do this. why?
The tone of the whole film is realistic, cold, and cruel. When the protagonist is pushed into the sea, the cold and cruelty reaches its climax. He and his wife (?) will never be able to return home, and can only sink in the vast Yellow Sea. But there are still warm pursuits under the cold surface: women, children, families, these few warm feelings are scattered in the film. Therefore, such an ending was finally arranged, so that the audience could find a little hope and warmth from the icy and boundless Yellow Sea before. However, the director didn't want to be too happy and endearing to be hypocritical and weaken the realism of the whole film, so he arranged it to be open-ended. In reality, it doesn't matter whether the wife comes back or not, the important thing is that it is an expression of attitude. I also arranged a lot of foreshadowing in the previous chapters, which shows the director's good intentions. >
In a word, Hisao's motive is to find his wife, and at the same time pay off the debt owed by his wife when he went abroad. The boss's motive is also because of the woman who wants to kill the professor, and the banker is also because of the woman and money. Lao Mian is completely for the money.
Women and money, the purest male hormone stimulation motive, makes the puppies bite wildly.
In the film, the dog is a metaphor, a theme that runs through the film as a whole, and the director also deliberately arranged many details.
At the beginning, Jiu Nan's narration is about dogs. Jiu Nan and Lao Mian met in a messy dog market. When Lao Mian instigated murder, he said to Jiu Nan, "Are you going to be a dog all your life and be slaughtered by others?" There is a very interesting episode. After Lao Mian landed in South Korea, the director arranged a plot where he and his subordinates gnawed at the bones of the Northeast sauce in a dim and decadent rental house. The remaining bones inherited the strongest weapon in history. ——The bench satisfies the advantages of being readily available in life, waste utilization, environmental protection, etc., and has killed several Korean gangs.
And the scene where they gather to gnaw on the bones, is it reminiscent of a bunch of wild dogs gathering in the wasteland to gnaw on the bones?
⒊ attention to detail
The Korean folks are sturdy, and they will fight with you even if you are not pleasing to the eye. The beginning is very simple, just one sentence: 'Look what? ' After that, the small ones made the fists and the big ones called and asked people to use the knives and axes. In the final analysis, it was all because of alcohol and impulsiveness. Of course, this happened a few years ago, but I don’t know what’s going on now. It seems to be more civilized. Those who have never encountered a fight while eating out may have gone to South Korea to fight. laugh. This kind of male impulse in the original sense is even proud of many people, and the characteristic of this impulse is directly reflected in the Yanbian dialect. The Yanbian dialect is not as quiet as the Seoul dialect (that is, standard Korean), but the cadence is very strong. , there is a bandit, and there are a lot of swear words mixed with it. Gorgeous or elegant rhetoric never appears in spoken language. Most of them are very direct and full of blood, so when Koreans hear Yanbian people speaking in dialect, they think they are going to fight. .
I would like to stress again that although the Chinese in the film is lame, the Yanbian dialect is perfect, especially the Lao Mian played by Kim Yoon Suk, who is a textbook-level Korean image in both manner and tone. My dad even thought that Kim Yoon-seok was a Korean from Yanbian.
It’s a pity that Korean local audiences can’t understand many dialects in the film, and they don’t even have Mandarin subtitle support. As for foreign audiences, they shouldn’t be able to distinguish dialects at all, and only watch subtitles. I don’t know how well domestic subtitles are done. When it comes to dialect point-to-point translation, just don't mislead the translation.
Therefore, Director Luo is so authentic in the details, and Jin Yunxi is so dedicated to learning dialects. No one except the Yanbian people can feel the same way, but they still managed to achieve this thankless detail. This kind of craftsman The spirit is amazing. This is as surprising as a pure Beijing director and Beijing actor filming a pure Sichuan drama.
As for Ha Jung Woo, he may not be as diligent as Kim Yoon Suk in terms of his lines because he has not many lines, but his acting skills are still very superb. , The two actors have done this. The Jiu Nan played by Ha Zhengyu speaks with complex changes in his eyes, which makes people very worried. As for the old Mian played by Jin Yunxi, there is nothing to say.
Jin Yunxi said that he understood the role as a simple and simple Goguryeo, with a broad temperament of the mainland, a bold temperament, and an informality. People don't offend me, I don't offend people. (Although Lao Mian is brutal in the film, he does adhere to this principle.) If Jiu Nan is a role that can be substituted and represents the disadvantaged group; then Lao Mian is completely different. He is a stylized and objectified character. This character is also the other side of the Korean family, an unfamiliar Korean family that South Koreans are not familiar with, but also an abstract side of a real Korean family.
We can see this from Lao Mian's condescending attitude towards Korean gangs: Lao Mian swaggered into South Korea, the Korean gangsters in Busan are his younger brothers, and the Korean gang boss completely lost the initiative when negotiating with Lao Mian; On the contrary, Jiu Nan smuggled into South Korea after all the hardships. As Koreans, the head of the Busan gangster, the restaurant waiter, and Professor Jin Chengxuan also had a condescending attitude towards him. The symbolism of this double face is obvious.
Yanbian under Huang Hai's lens is also very interesting, very real, and it expresses the feeling of bizarreness very well. It's not worth refuting. Most of the scenes, including Gou Market, were also shot in Shenyang and other non-Yanbian areas. The difference from reality is that the Koreans prefer cleanliness and don’t wear shoes at home. Of course, the long husband and wife in the film are not there, and they live so dirty. Chaos is as it should be.
Let's talk about technical issues.
The tone of Huang Hai's shot is dark and hopeless, just like the mood of the protagonists in the film; the set is also built very realistically, the details are done enough, and the art work is amazing. From the scene of chasing Jiu Nan to the car chasing scene, there seems to be a lot of rough and broken scenes such as DV mixed in, which is very dynamic.
There are also many highlights in terms of sound effects and music. Not to mention the realistic and textured sound effects of cutting fingers, stabbing with a knife, and chopping with an axe. The music at the beginning and end is great, and it hits the heart directly. The background music of Hisao being chased by the police is very encouraging.
The most impressive is the two BGMs when Lao Mian started the killing ring. One was when the Korean gang was besieging and suppressing the Korean gang. With the sublimation of the killing scene, it gradually began to sound bloody, desperate, muddy, and incomprehensible. Angry music. This music also appeared when Lao Mian and the Korean boss were fighting each other at the bus stop, which was very shocking.
Director Luo took more than a year to shoot this film. Before that, he also went to Yanbian to conduct on-the-spot investigations and interviews to collect materials, which also took a year. Generally, a commercial film has a shooting period of at most three months, which means that when he finished filming, everyone has formed the crew four or five times. The long-term shooting has led to frequent changes in the crew. Director Luo is a perfectionist, because the previous chaser was too successful. So he was under a lot of pressure, and he was also short-tempered. It is said that he beat the assistant director to the hospital because of his disappointment during the filming process. It seems that he has a bad reputation among the staff. And it is precisely because of this stubborn temper and perfectionism that such sincere genre films can be made. However, the poor treatment of the lower-level staff in Korean films has always been a topic of discussion. The crew maintains for three months or one year, and the remuneration they get is about the same, including the starvation death of a non-famous female screenwriter a while ago, which is also a bad habit in the Korean film industry. As a result, according to the gossip, the most bad representative director is Director Luo, saying that he is a one-shot success. As for this question belonging to the periphery of the film, it is better for the benevolent to see the benevolent and the wise to see the wisdom. What I want to say is that he collaborated with two signature actors and took it very seriously.
Director Luo's debut film "The Chaser" is amazing enough, and "Yellow Sea" has a higher level of aura and has a great style. After Huang Hai, Luo Hongzhen is enough to be on the top Korean director club. Many fans (including myself) think that , he has the confidence to be as famous as Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan Wook.
⒋ In the end
, from a social point of view, the sadness of the Koreans is that they are like the situation of Jiu Nan in the film. The Chinese call them Korean sticks, and the Koreans do not regard them as the same kind. They are eternal Gentiles. Often trying to find a home, but always reminded: you do not belong here.
Many Koreans live on the fringes of society. This image is perfect as the protagonist of a crime film. What is commendable is that Huang Hai's unusually cold perspective has tried his best to objectify topics that are easily controversial. In the tragic bloody violence , all the way to the end of the style, there is no vulgar warmth or deliberate touching and other bridges, only the desolation of killing and fleeing all the way. No sympathy, no contempt, no exclusion, no moral compulsion or preaching. The director's line of sight is straight from the beginning to the end, but behind his calm point of view, we can still see his love for the disadvantaged Korean migrant workers. Just when we see Jiu Nan who was chased into the mountains and whimpered, we would sigh. His sadness; at the end of the film, at the dreamy and quiet Yanji Railway Station, when Jiu Nan's wife got off the train and passed by, she seemed to say silently: "Go home." Even if it's just a dream.
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