At the end of this movie, I was so angry that I couldn't help but scolded my hometown dialect. There is an old Chinese saying: "If you know something, you know it, but if you don't know it, you don't know it." Like her knowledge of the old Chinese saying, "Chinese people often say that if you get cancer, you have to die." Who said that? Isn't it Lu Xun?
Before watching the movie, the narrative angle chosen for this movie and the release of A24 made me have a lot of expectations for it. Before I read the good resources, I glanced at the director's resume. The 37-year-old Chinese-American female director was born in Beijing. , I went to the United States with my father at the age of 6 and graduated with a degree in creative writing. When I saw this, I actually felt a little bad, but I still warned myself not to watch the movie with any presets. What I didn't expect was that it was really perfect It confirmed every prejudice and bad expectation I had, and it was a wonderful experience.
For works of art, I think that creators must first have a basic sense of responsibility. When using a medium, they must understand its properties and laws. When it comes to a subject and depicts a cultural environment, it is necessary to have a minimum understanding of it. Whether the level of creation is high or low, we should not deny a person's creation. Perhaps none of the above mentioned is the most important, but at least we must ask ourselves whether our creation really responds to our conscience.
In addition to the first ten minutes or so of the American bridge, the whole story basically takes place in Shenyang, and it is full of a foreigner's imagination and speculation about the Chinese environment, which is exactly the same as the female protagonist's Chinese language. . For example, at the front desk of the hotel, two middle-aged greasy uncles brought three coquettish girls to the waiters who went straight in, chattering and talking, and the scene of offering sacrifices in the cemetery... All these scenes are presented in a seemingly "very Chinese" , but it is not the same as the reality, and it can also feel that it does not belong to the category of artistic exaggeration. The result is that it gives people a sense of orientalism.
Here I don't want to dwell too much on the film's irresponsible use of Chinese elements, but the main reason is its drama. One of the most obvious problems in this film is the large dialogues. These second-rate essay-like lines discussing the differences between Chinese and Western cultures take up a lot of space, which directly leads to the lack of effective plot points in this film. The picture is also rigid and lacking, and all the other actors in the same frame listen to the protagonist's chatter as motionless as a foil on the stage of a drama.
The lack of plot also makes the most important emotional core of the film unable to find its place. Grandma is terminally ill, and the whole family hides her while suppressing their sadness. This should have been the biggest internal contradiction of the film. In order to make this contradiction fully established and resonate with people's emotions, the first task is to prove the importance of grandma to the rest of the family. Why is she indispensable to the children? The two sons are all right, but what kind of feelings do these two grandchildren, who have grown up in a foreign country and can't even speak Chinese, have feelings for their grandmother? I thought I would wait for the heroine to return to my grandmother before explaining it, but I didn't. Some were just the heroine's bitter face throughout the film.
In addition, there is also a technical flaw in the film, which is that the film greatly elongates the proportion of the characters' reaction shots. Characters expressing emotions and expressing their reactions to other characters and environments are often presented through close-ups of faces, which are lengthened and accentuated in the film. This is a typical problem for filmmakers with literary backgrounds. It is the wrong application of literary artistic conception and literary attention to the heart of characters and presentation methods in image thinking. It reminded me again that I saw Nortel Literature at a small screening. The feeling of discomfort when it is a work directed by a senior sister.
Sadly, this problem is also the biggest problem for me in scriptwriting now. I am well aware of the difficulty of getting rid of literary thinking, establishing a sense of imagery, and presenting the reality of art through images, but this is the direction we should strive for. If you don't have enough ability, you should bury your head and move forward. If you really shoot this kind of work, I guess I would be ashamed to show it to my grandma and dare not tell her.
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