——In
view of the fact that "Confession" was nominated for the 83rd Academy Award, this new work directed by Tetsuya Nakajima can be regarded as a major event in the Japanese film industry in 2010. Although "Confession" was out of the Oscar tour and was not even on the shortlist, it was fully affirmed by the Japan Film Academy Award, winning four awards for best work, best director, best screenplay and best editing.
The film is adapted from the novel of the same name published in 2008 by Japanese mystery novelist Kanae Minato. The mystery of the original work has been revealed to the world in the novel, but the script did not care about this and started anew. From the beaded structure to the laying out and revealing of the suspense, to the deep torture of crime and punishment, it is infinitely closer to the original work.
The story begins when the murderer is "captured".
"Confession" does not have a strict sense of detective. Five stakeholders stand up to have a spiritual dialogue with readers and directly show their inner world. They are Mr. Moriguchi, the monitor Mizuki, the mother of Naoki Shimomura, a student in the class, Naoki himself, and Shuya Watanabe, a classmate who committed the crime with Naoki. But the form is not uniform inner monologue, there are speeches, phone calls, and diaries.
The original translation into Chinese is less than 90,000 words. In fact, the first chapter of the novel "The Clergyman" was originally a short story that won the 29th Japan Newcomer Award for Mystery Novel, which inspired the author to deduce it into what it is today. The first and last six chapters are closely related in time and logic, and are relatively independent in the first-person "confession". In fact, each chapter can be read as a short story.
The six chapters of the novel are named after "Clergy," "Martyr," "Merciful," "Aspirant," "Preacher," and "Preacher." "Clergy" Yuko Moriguchi is a young single mother. She does her due diligence in teaching and educating people, but she does not agree with the so-called "persuading fresh teachers" who seem to be caring but actually condescending and eager to preach, but tend to treat students as equals . She found out that the drowning of her four-year-old daughter, Aimei, was not an accident, but was deliberately done by two students in the class. On the eve of her resignation, she revealed the truth of the murder and the revenge she had already practiced in front of the class: mixing the blood of AIDS patients with the whole class. Milk for two students.
How to extend a story where murderers, tricks and reasoning are all exposed? How Moriguchi's revenge ended has become a new suspense.
From the perspective of two onlookers, Mizuki and Naoki's sister, the author shows Naoki's tragedy from "fear of Ai" to mother-killing. Then the "seeker" Naoki explained his life, why he made friends with Shuya, why he killed Mizuki, and what every strange behavior after drinking AIDS milk was for. Naoki is vulnerable, and Shuya, who doesn't even care about death, is eager to come to the door with a terminal illness. The contest between him and Moriguchi pushes the story to a climax and a cruel and unexpected ending in the next two chapters.
Chairman Mao said well, "There is no love for no reason in the world, and there is no hate for no reason". "Confession" can tell a convincing story about the edge of the sword - at least during the reading process, people do not question its logic of writing, because the author's restoration of the character's psychological trajectory: we are not in the kind of In extreme situations, but at a certain stage of life, we may be over-expected by our family like Naoki, or ignored by our family like Shuya, or we may not be able to endure the pain of being suddenly deprived of a loved one like Moriguchi. The reader's psychological identity with the characters is thus constructed.
However, the construction of such an identity is questionable. The novel pushes the not-so-uncommon situation to the extreme. It is written as a serial killing incident in a junior high school. While torturing people's hearts, does it also put the novel itself in a moral dilemma? Is the rebelliousness and hesitation of adolescence so exaggerated? Are we living in the world of Conan and Kindaichi?
If you don't know death, how can you know life?
Perhaps, this is a common problem of all social mystery novels, but it is more obvious in the theme of school violence.
The movie can fully inherit the story structure of the novel, largely thanks to the "socialist" path of the original. Among the major factions of Japanese mystery novels, the Bengue faction focuses on the delicate layout of the case and the rigorous reasoning of the detective, starting with the Edogawa Ranpo, while the social faction focuses on the criticism and reflection of the social phenomenon behind the case, starting with Matsumoto Qingzhang.
Socialists tend to focus on the motives of the perpetrator, and the human heart is the hunter's paddock for chasing the jackal. The labyrinth of the human heart is different from the case itself. It also has logic, but it will not be like the layout of the case. Once it is cracked, it will be unobstructed. This is why the audience clearly knows who is the murderer in "Confession", how, why, and how to be punished, and they don't mind watching the replay on the screen again.
"I hope these two people know the value of life. I hope they know this, understand how sinful they are, and live with a heavy burden." Yuko Moriguchi explained her "poisoning" behavior.
The target of "Confession" criticism is mainly Japan's juvenile law. "A teenager under the age of 16 can kill someone, as long as the family court approves it, and he can enter the juvenile detention center." The two murderers in the Amy case were just thirteen years old. Moriguchi couldn't accept the ending that Aimei died and the murderer was easily exonerated. "Children are innocent. I don't know what era this is a myth." She sarcastically said.
Some people may not understand that since she has stepped down from the altar of the "clergy", how can she be called a "preacher"? The way she preached was to take students from suicide attacks on campus to unintentional mother-killers? Indeed, this is her ultimate vengeance, and her way of preaching.
"Don't you think this is the real revenge and the first step for you to be a new person?" The last sentence of the novel is the title. For the weak Naoki, only when he feels the real threat of death will he realize the value of other people's lives; for Shuya, who despises his own life and death, only the death of his mother who only cares about him will make him realize the loss of others. The pain of a loved one. In this way, it is killing and education.
In his masterpiece "The Origin of Modern Japanese Literature", Kakuto Karatani pointed out that "children" is really a new discovery in modern society. In the past, children were not particularly cared for and treated because they were young, they were just regarded as "incomplete". people". The "fraternity" and "tolerance" that we now regard as universal values have a history of only one or two hundred years in the East. Is the tolerance towards the murderers, especially the sympathetic young murderers, unfair to the victims? Is it the indulgence of crime? Is it another hideous face of modernity veiled in the veil of "human nature"?
But the novel itself is also very terrifying, full of hostility, and there are wars between relatives and lovers. "Others are hell"? Is this a critique of modern Japan's "unconnected society", or does the author take Japanese society's indifference and alienation deep into the pores of the family as the norm? Do not understand.
Movies are always better than novels
The movie version of "Confession" doesn't make much changes to the original work. It is still a segmented narrative that changes perspectives. Seven or eight out of ten are retained from the beginning to the end; must be offset.
The heroine Moriguchi-sensei has the biggest change. First of all, for Moriguchi in the novel, revenge and redemption are two sides of the same coin, rather than pretending to be revenge for redemption. In her opinion, the murderers are no longer worth living, but they are in a numbness of "don't know death, how can they know life", and even if they die, they "couldn't repent of their sins". Although she knew that the chance of "winning" by drinking milk mixed with blood was very low, "I believe that as long as there is no chance, it is the right sanction." It was not her who replaced the blood, but the famous Japanese "Persuading Freshmen" Teacher", Aimi's father Sakuraguchi.
In the book, she is a Medusa who has no arrows and no tears. In the movie, after she resigned, she met Mizuki and couldn't help crying, which is a common strategy in movies to find sympathy points for bad guys.
And at the end, the revenge that is more excessive than HIV-let Shuya detonate the homemade bomb that killed his mother himself, in the movie, it is paradoxically resolved by Moriguchi's last line "Just kidding". In the last chapter of the original novel, when Moriguchi called Shuya, he was not outside the middle school's auditorium, but standing on the university campus where Shuya's mother worked. The line in the movie "I silently prayed that you didn't press the detonator button, but you did" followed by "It's not a dud", and in the book she also reminded Shuya, "I think you heard the police car and the siren too. the sound of". This is not a bluff.
In general, movies have a stronger moral sense than novels, and TV has more conscience than movies. This is determined by different ways of transmission, and there is no difference between superior and inferior. This may partly explain why a first-class novel cannot be adapted into a first-class conceptual film: a near-perfect work has been adjusted in three views, and everything has turned sour.
In addition, the biggest difference between Mizuki and the novel version is that the dark line that she likes Naoki has been cut off. Her friendship with Naoki makes her resentment against the new head teacher who forced Naoki to go to school more reasonable, and the cuts in the movie are greatly reduced her role in Naoki's line. In the book, Naoki's mother did not publicly criticize Mr. Moriguchi, but vented her grievances in the diary; Naoki did not paint with blood in the convenience store like performing art, but secretly smeared blood on the goods.
It can be seen that in order to achieve a more stylized effect, the film exaggerated the details intentionally or unintentionally, coupled with Nakajima's personal label for "Confession", the dark blue tone of the picture, the noisy metal soundtrack and the sharp and messy music. Edited to make the movie look like a lengthened gorgeous MV.
It is here that the film really draws a clear line from the original. The original work excavated the horrors in daily life. The classroom where Moriguchi made his revenge confession should be a quiet classroom that can be seen everywhere, not a chaotic MV shooting scene. Seeing horror from ordinary places is not only skill, but also the basic skills of horror themes. At the beginning, it was announced that we were in another world, please follow me and start visiting abnormal people, and I was timid.
——Su
Wan
published in the "Literary and Art Newspaper" after revision (April 18, 2011)
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