Although I cried while watching "The Thirteen Hairpins of Jinling" like many others, tears are not a criterion for evaluating a movie. This is a rare good work by Zhang Yimou in recent years, and it is also an outright mediocre work, even if strictly speaking, a mediocre and insincere work.
The film's pursuit of details is staggering. It is said that an episode took Zhang Yimou's royal composer's efforts for several years. In order to train the new college students to become the elite Qinhuai courtesans, a group of people trained for two months, and even passed the test. "Self-touch" to feel the beauty of the body, not to mention the high-cost Hollywood special effects technology to increase the viewing experience.
However, when these so-called "sincerity" with all their strength is placed in the national suffering of the "Nanjing Massacre", it becomes extra absurd. This kind of absurdity lies in the fact that the whole society, including Zhang Yimou, even the original author, the adaptor, and the weeping spectators, did not really reflect on suffering rationally, but began to treat suffering in a way of consumption, and used the so-called "sincerity" to promote the theme of suffering. Cash in on business profits. When people talk about the beauty of style and exquisite scenes, and when the media keeps exaggerating that the box office exceeds 100 million a day, about suffering, about human nature in suffering, it is consumed and dismissed in an extremely superficial way.
The Nanjing Massacre, like the Auschwitz concentration camp, was the most tragic human catastrophe in the world in the last century. But if we compare Auschwitz, the philosophical reflection on the absolute evil of the Holocaust and genocide triggered by Auschwitz and the resulting social consensus, the Nanjing Massacre is still bleeding on our nation. One of the many wounds of , in fact, has not been really faced and reflected. Our memory of suffering is vague, and our understanding is frivolous and evasive - including the Holocaust, but also the various natural and man-made disasters that have occurred over the centuries, whether it is war, massacre, or famine, our memory is often vague, value judgments It can even be adjusted at any time according to a certain need. All of this is dispelling the bitterness and seriousness of suffering, and consciously or unintentionally evading the true thinking of suffering, and actually rejecting the possibility of living towards death and building the present based on suffering.
In such a society that generally understates the suffering of the past, it is not so strange that some directors who consume suffering and go straight to the box office emerge. It is also not surprising that the film has attracted widespread criticism from the international public opinion circles and the filmmakers did not buy it, but it easily surpassed 100 million in China. Such a film is by no means the problem of Zhang Yimou alone, but the result of conspiracy. The reason why we say "collaboration" is because from Yan Geling's original work to the social soil that produced the original work, from the audience to the media, all of them are actually providing fragments for the completion of this soft, cynical realism puzzle for "The Thirteen Hairpins of Jinling". .
As a jigsaw puzzle completer, Zhang Yimou tragically fell into a paradox. The more skillfully he completed the bridges, the beautiful scenery, and the best war scenes, erotic teasers, and human transitions. The farther away the suffering, the less sincere the attitude towards suffering. And those so-called breakthroughs actually show the distance between the society we live in and a normal society: the same is the bottom line of human relations, one is clear, the other is vague; the same is suffering and the worst, one is for reflection and the other is for consumption.
If the current Chinese directors and artists cannot face suffering, or have no chance to face suffering, at least they must learn some necessary restraint and not consume suffering. As for Chinese society, it is difficult to have a truly good life without completing the reflection on suffering, facing up to the bleeding wounds, and facing the absolute black pain.
Reprinted from Xie Yong, special commentator of the 21st Century Business Herald
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