On the last day of this year's Beijing Film Festival, I re-watched Wong Kar-wai's "Breakthrough" at the China Film Archive. The high-definition restored image quality was very transparent, and it felt like I was watching a new film.
Although I've watched it on TV two or three times over the years, it's the first time I've rewatched it in a movie theater.
The viewing experience of this screening was perfect, I was moved, and wanted to write something on the way home. Although there have been many articles and interpretations about this movie, and I can't write anything new, I still want to leave a memory for myself.
Thinking of the experience of watching Francois Truffaut's "The Four Hundred Blows" in the Film Archive a few years ago, the biggest emotion at that time was that these old movies were rewatched after so many years, and they are still not outdated at all. Whether it's the way the story is told, or the cinematic techniques used by the director.
There are many such timeless classic films, such as Ozu Yasujiro's "Tokyo Story", Ingmar Bergman's "Marriage Life" and "Bad Girl Monica" and so on.
Of course, Wong Kar-wai's "Spring Comes Together" is also, maybe this is the charm of the classics.
The impression of this movie has always felt that he is just a love story with a gay theme, starring Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung. They played He Baorong and Li Yaohui, who traveled from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires and broke up on the way to see the Iguazu Falls.
Even if you can't remember the specific storyline, you won't forget the classic line "Why don't we start over again".
Rewatching this time, I suddenly found something I had never thought of before. What theme does the director want to express through this film?
A pair of gay couples from Hong Kong and a Taiwanese straight man Xiao Zhang, who has an ambiguous relationship with Li Yaohui, met in a foreign country and only met.
The end of the story is in early 1997, when Li Yaohui finally saved enough money to return to Hong Kong from Argentina the day before Comrade Deng Xiaoping died, and made a transfer in Taipei. He visited Xiao Zhang's family at the Taipei Night Market and took a photo of the lighthouse he had sent to his family from "The End of the World."
In the end, Li Yaohui said that he finally understood why Xiao Zhang can walk around the world, because he has such a family, and he will have a sense of belonging wherever he goes.
But he didn't. He didn't know if his father would forgive him after returning to Hong Kong.
In the era of 1997, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is about to return to the mainland, and the British government is about to withdraw from this colony. Hong Kong people do not know what will happen in the future.
In this context, what the director wants to tell is not a gay love story, but rather the hesitation of the human heart in the context of that era, and it is about identity.
I finally understood why the first shot of the movie was the passports of two people, but soon the passports could not accurately define who they were or the identity of Hong Kong people.
The sense of belonging that Lai Yaohui said is not the sense of belonging of Hong Kong people.
The stories of small people in the context of this big era are placed in Buenos Aires, on the other side of the globe, adding a sense of romance and confusion to the story.
This film won the Best Director Award at the Cannes International Film Festival that year, and the directors who have won this award are actually doing similar things to Wong Kar-wai back then.
In terms of genre, this is a romance film. Although the relationship between the characters lacks motivation and the plot has no clear cause and effect, except for the main line between Li Yaohui and He Baorong, many secondary plots have been left blank.
Wong Kar-wai didn't want to tell a good story, he just wanted to capture an emotion, a state of loneliness. It was originally a trip about love, but in the end it turned into a person who fell into a foreign country, no money, no love, no one to talk to, no one to listen to.
Watching two men quarrel, break up, and go on different lives after each left. Especially in He Baorong's line, we don't know what he went through with the foreigners, but in the main plot, we saw that he stole a foreigner's Rolex for Li Yaohui's sake and was beaten.
The director is not interested in explaining the cause and effect of the story, he prefers to focus on lyricism and freehand brushwork.
We see a lot of emotional empty shots and those iconic hand-held shots of Dukofon, like the cameraman is slightly drunk and the lens wobbles just right. Coupled with several director-selected soundtracks and songs, the soundtrack reshapes the visual rhythm of the film.
In fact, we often see this approach in the main competition films of the three major European film festivals, such as "Good Times", "Neon Demon" and "You've Never Been Here" and other films in recent years. "It was used 20 years ago.
Everyone has heard of Wong Kar-wai's filmmaking experience back then. He had only the outline of the story and no script, so he took the crew to Argentina. But without a script, it doesn't mean you don't have ideas, you don't know what theme you want to express, and you don't know what you care about and think about.
Although it was a guerrilla-style filming process, the main creators of the crew improvised into the material if they liked music, photography, photos, and some scattered story clips and any other things that could inspire creative inspiration.
Although it is an improvisation, after Zhang Shuping has taken care of editing, art and clothing, the use of color and editing methods in the film will infinitely enlarge the freehand, always serving the mood and rhythm of the film.
Regarding the visual style of the film, the creators mentioned an American photographer named Nan Goldin (who wrote a special article on Adventure Film), and her work focuses on the life of the LGBT community in the 1980s. The roughness of the film and the colors of red and green are used in this film, which perfectly integrates with Du Kefeng's photography style.
In fact, the photography style of this film is different from "Chongqing Forest" and "In the Mood for Love", but most of everyone's impression of Du Kefeng's photography comes from these films. Discover his difference in this film.
This is like Faye Wong's cover of The Cranberries. Later, we felt that the unique singing style was Faye Wong's original style, just as we later thought that this was Du Kefeng's style.
The impression of Wong Kar-wai's film style now comes from these films, but "Happy Spring" is definitely the most extreme of them.
The entry point of storytelling, the way of storytelling, the expression of the theme to the presentation of a personal visual style , etc., can all transcend time. I think as long as human beings are still making movies, the directors of art films will always do this. Even if they change to a different director, the visual style will be completely different, but the first three advantages, in terms of creative skills, will not follow changed over time.
As for the art of film, unless there is a VR-style film technology innovation, audio-visual language and narrative style innovation, otherwise the film will be like this, in Godard's words, "movie starts with Griffith and ends with Kiaros. Tammy".
Shooting a typical love story with a strong personal style is similar to Nicholas Winding Refn's "Desperate Drive" or Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Assassin Nie Yinniang".
After ensuring the integrity of the story frame, the director spent more time on the state of the characters, and made a familiar subject matter with a completely different feeling.
After re-watching, I found that there are not many emotional scenes between Li Yaohui and He Baorong in the film, but the relationship between the two has a strong emotional tension. I think this is the charm of editing, or because of the personal charm of the two actors, Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung. . I finally understood the line, "I always thought I was different from He Baorong. It turns out that when I was lonely, everyone was the same."
I think we'll love this story because it's about loneliness. Everyone has moments of loneliness, so in the end we are all the same, we will understand how Li Yaohui felt at that time, and then we will accidentally resonate emotionally.
View more about Happy Together reviews
