Note: The text is longer. Basically no moisture.
After watching Yuyue Monogatari, the infiltration of aesthetic consciousness such as "things sorrow" and "your mystery" in Japanese culture can be seen everywhere in the movie. Among them, Genjuro's story has the highest degree of completion, and its artistic value and ideological depth are good, and it is worth mentioning.
I personally think that the Japanese aesthetics in the film are more reflected in form. It is also the model of "Legend of the White Snake". Chinese stories tend to have ups and downs in the plot, creating such and other difficulties for the combination of people and aliens, and then let the protagonist overcome them one by one. As for how the two get along in the time between the climaxes of the plot, either tacitly avoided talking about it, or hurriedly mentioned it. After all, the straight line between the two crests is too bland and lengthy, making it uninteresting and difficult for the audience to accept.
In this film, a lot of space is used to describe trivial matters, and there is tension in the subtleties, and it is not annoying. How is this done?
This is the first secret of form—constructing imagination and expectation.
The man walks through the twists and turns of the corridor, and sees the woman in layers of exquisite costumes, listens to her long and slow chanting, and admires her stiff and beautiful dancing. Everyone knows what will happen soon, but the man and the audience have to wait. Looking forward, watching her slowly cover half of her face with her sleeves. The picture is almost frozen, only the virtual and real light and shadow indicate the passage of time. The more tedious, ritualistic, or even staged the process is, the more fruitful the imagination of men and audiences will be.
This is the secret of the whole set of forms, the fruit is not important, the key is the imagination. The director invented a series of orderly rituals to guide the thinking of the people and the audience in the play.
This guidance begins the moment the five encounter the ghost ship on the river. In the vast white fog, only the protagonist's boat was floating on the river. The woman sang a solitary song, the flute sounded, and the ghost ship slowly approached from far to near. Inside the boat was a dying person. The road is difficult, it is better to turn back.
This seems to be borrowed from the "order" model in Noh drama, and the dialogue with the "ghost" is used as the opening to enter the play. At the same time, the content of the dialogue also acts as a "prophecy".
The protagonist's choice is to put down his wife and daughter and move on. As an outsider, the audience has some bad imaginations about this unknown journey, but they don't know how this bad luck will come to the protagonist. The director described the atmosphere of the prophecy on the river as both mysterious and desolate. In the mist of water, it is between reality and fantasy. The refugees meet the dying and listen to the prophecy of the dying. This is the aesthetic of "Xuanxuan". A standard scene in style. Whether it is the protagonist in the play or the audience outside the play, it is easy to develop a sense of emptiness and impermanence in life. While empathizing with the audience, the audience's appetite is mobilized to the greatest extent, and they are a little more patient with the later scenes similar to slow motion.
The second secret of form - breaking "beauty", transcending "sorrow" into love, and touching people with love.
The story of Genjuro is very simple and can be summed up in a few words: During the war, Genjuro had to temporarily abandon his wife and children to flee to a more prosperous place to sell porcelain. He met a ghost girl of a general and was happy with him. Later, with the help of a magician, he saw through the true face of the ghost girl, returned home in despair, found that his wife had died, and finally took his daughter to live again.
From the plot content of the movie (the novel is more like "The Legend of the White Snake"), it is quite similar to "Painted Skin" in "Strange Tales from a Liaozhai", but the way of expression is quite different. The story of "Painted Skin" is morally oriented. It was written for the purpose of educating the people. It pays attention to good and evil. Dev is the ending. The story of "Story of the Rainy Moon" is more aesthetically oriented towards "sorrow of things", and there is not much distinction between people and ghosts.
The essence of "Wu Sorrow" is "beautiful and tragic, and thus grief". The more splendid the "beauty" I described before, the more pitiful it is when it is broken. It is easy to break, but if the previous "beauty" is not enough to empathize with the audience, "sorrow" will have no power. Throughout the presentation of the entire story in the film, you will find that there are sad things about both people and ghosts.
For the ghost girl, the beauty of the flowers, the beautiful clothes, the graceful dance and the beautiful voice are all beautiful, but the death of the flower season is a sadness, and the sadness is prematurely withered in the beauty. Getting to know Juro and getting the nourishment of love looks beautiful at first, but then loses Juuro, the dream is shattered, and the joy of love is first tasted. Lonely, looking back again, the encounter with Juro is clearly more sad than sad.
For Fa's wife, the peaceful and comfortable life of a family of three is a beauty, and having to flee when a war breaks out is a sadness. She had to be separated from her husband, and was killed by rioters while waiting, but her beloved husband was hanging out with the ghost girl outside. Sadness after sadness.
For Juro, it is beautiful to be happy with the ghost girl, the mage exposes the truth of the ghost girl, and the happy life of the past few days has become a dream and a sadness. It is beautiful to get along with his wife and daughter at home, and it is sad to learn that his wife has passed away the next day. Sadness after sadness.
We can see that, perhaps to deepen the aesthetics of the film, the main characters in the film and the director are both broken twice. On the one hand, they tried their best to render the warmth and splendor of "beauty", and on the other hand, they made their "sorrow" like weeping, singing and sighing, overlapping and overlapping. It also makes people feel impermanent, and makes "the world is originally a place of peace, tears until dawn, and drifts with the flow" more like unintentional words from the heart, rather than carefully designed sensational copywriting.
The essence of the double secret of form is to infiltrate the aesthetic style of Japanese culture into the everyday details of the film, that is, the poetic everyday.
When I read "Pillow Grass", I felt that the author was probably very lonely. Although it always looks like the years are quiet. But only lonely people are particularly good at digging out the most sensitive perception in their hearts, writing ordinary trifles poetically. Sensitivity is never a single arrow. People who are sensitive to beautiful details are also sensitive to pain and sadness, but there is almost no such content in her book. After thinking about it, it sounds beautiful to live an ordinary life into a poem, maybe this is just her helpless choice, to give a layer of light to her long, boring and lonely life, and pretend to enjoy herself with immersive performances. That's it. Get along with loneliness first, adapt to it, tolerate it, and then bloom in its soil. This poetic beauty is more like the shallowest painting skin, drawing a smiling face for everyone to see. Beneath the smiling face are all the emotions, years, memories and tears of a woman's life that have passed in vain.
Sadly, this is exactly the value of "Pillowgrass" - on the very deep and lonely sadness, the beauty that is very mellow and gorgeous like cherry blossoms, but has passed away. So although I like "Pillow Grass" very much, I don't have the heart to watch it.
This film also chooses to use poetic daily life as the aesthetic entry point. The difference is that the film is mainly visual after all, at least on the bright side, it will definitely be broken neatly when it is time to break. But in this way, compared with the delicateness of the needles hidden in the cotton in "Pillow and Grass", the "sorrow" in the film is pleasantly and clearly vented, and the aesthetic value is slightly compromised. My husband said that this movie is better than the original novel, and I agree. But if it is said that the aesthetic expression of the film is stronger than the text, I have a different opinion.
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