It is so cruel and desperate that it has a beautiful and hopeful English name, called A Brighter Summer Day.
Yang Dechang spent a full four hours filming the past of a group of teenagers, with smooth flow, no craftsmanship, no flaws, and perfection.
It's so perfect that I'm thankful for Yang Dechang's death: he no longer has to doubt his own talent for the possibility of a bad movie in the rest of his life.
It is so perfect that I feel sad for Zhang Zhen's life: he may never be able to surpass himself at the age of fourteen in the rest of his life.
The collapse of the fathers
in our childhood, long or short, there is always a period of worship to the fathers.
They have tall, omnipotent figures.
Just like Xiao Si's father shouting injustice for his son at the discipline office, that kind of resolute, upright and unyielding voice.
But we finally found at a certain moment suddenly their souls weakened by the polishing of the earth.
Just like Xiao Si's father's failure in the examination room, his humiliation in the discipline office, the tears of hugging his head and crying with his mother, and his son's fierce scolding.
Just like Xiao Si surrounded by people with various accents, Fat Uncle, Wang Gou, and teachers all have a dull, fuzzy face that is mixed in with the crowd.
Our sketches of the other world we will grow up are thus subject to the first serious and serious questioning from the heart.
Since when did we peer into the imperfections of the adult world with a tinge of amazement and shame?
Since when have we been dragged into confrontation with that ugly but real ugliness?
The angry Xiao Si picked up the baseball bat beside him and smashed the light bulb above the teacher's head.
This teenager who refused to bow to the rules of the game shocked his parents.
Unable to suppress the little four called to the director: Natural? ! You can't even tell the difference between the real and the fake, and what movies are you making? What are you shooting?
This pure young man who is loyal to his heart makes his parents ashamed.
Fathers, you lost.
No matter how careful you are in this real world, or how handy you are, you have all lost to this stubborn and silent fourteen-year-old in the spiritual world, and there is no chance for you to make a comeback.
The last idealist
We may not have lost the last trace of reverence for idealists in the deepest part of our hearts, but we have no chance to be an idealist anymore. Because we watch one after another confrontation between realists and idealists, and the latter always loses. So as long as we are alive, we cannot be a pure idealist.
Honey returns from Tainan to find that the world is not his: the bosses are busy making money, but he is obsessed with Tolstoy's war and peace.
So, single-handedly, he was pushed under the wheel and crushed to death.
It's hard to forget Honey's outmoded navy uniform and flared trousers, like a lonely and abrupt label, standing for a long time in that adolescence that drifted away and disappeared.
- Now I am Honey.
When this sentence spit out from Xiao Si's desperate mouth, he embarked on the pessimistic fate of an idealist.
- I will protect you forever.
Even when Xiao Si didn't understand what it is to say how difficult it is in a lifetime, he said this to Xiao Ming so firmly.
He didn't want the girl he loved to become a shameless person, but this girl refused his self-righteous salvation with a posture that was a hundred times more mature than him.
When Xiao Si inserted a sharp knife that a Japanese woman had used for suicide into Xiao Ming's body, the girl he was nostalgic for, he even desperately shouted at her dead body over and over again to stand up, stand up, stand up.
Standing with him in an ideal world without betrayal and disillusionment.
It's just that she is dead, and he will spend his broken career behind bars.
That was the price he paid for his intransigence.
When Kitty's tape for Xiao Si was thrown into the trash, accompanied by a sentence of what the fuck, the final fantasy of ideals was ruthlessly and completely destroyed.
There is no room left in despair.
Precocious Elegies
In our memory, there is always such a kind of girl, they are not the most beautiful, they are the most charming, with the precociousness that does not match their age, they are fixed in our youth.
They fall in love early, play with their feelings, change boyfriends frequently, and become women prematurely. They are slutty bad girls that other girls despise, but other girls are actually curious and jealous of them. They were talked about and vilified as bitches by the other boys, but all the other boys were really ready for them.
Xiao Ming is such a girl.
It was the pressure of survival that forced her precocious puberty.
His father died early, and he and his mother were separated from each other and depended on others.
She understands the truth and rules of the world more clearly than anyone of her age.
She is a hated and fascinating woman.
- But why don't you understand? The world won't change for you, just like the world, I won't change for you!
It's just that when she said this sentence at the last moment of her life, it still pierced into my heart as coldly as shattered glass.
When the sharp knife was inserted into her body, it was not only Xiao Si who was embarrassed, but also a flower that matured prematurely and withered in a hurry.
The tone of youth in the dark youth
murder case is dark.
Most of them are scenes at night, with dimly lit pictures and depressing hearts.
Chinese classes, exam cheating, student uniforms, Elvis Presley songs, concerts, misses, gangs, foul language, fights.
It lacks the beauty and beauty that youth films and Taiwanese films are used to, and even lacks a kind of ignorance and innocence unique to youth. Some are just like a dagger-like rushing, sharp and calm breath.
When Xiao Si's knife was inserted into Xiao Ming's body, what I felt was not a shock, but a deep relief.
It seems that the gloomy youth of more than three hours is waiting for this moment to burst out incisively and vividly, and the unforgettable despair that can't find an outlet spews out at this moment, which is silent and cruel to this society and era. 's knife.
I am my ideal, and I am the ideal I resist and defend with death.
Those things that we valued as treasures in our youth and pursued hard, were kept forever in his dark youth by Xiao Si in this decisive way.
But more people lost it inadvertently in a certain year and a certain month, but on a certain day when they were old, they mocked their innocence and ignorance when they were young with a playful tone, and forgot the agitation that they had also had. Emotions and bright fantasies.
Xiao Si's choice makes it even more poetic and tragic.
The art of politics
I don't like politics, I like pure art.
But my sad discovery is that the best art is always tied to politics.
The murders reflect the repressed Taiwan of the 1960s. In 1949, the Kuomintang was defeated and brought a large number of people to Taiwan. In the 1960s, the hope of counterattacking the mainland gradually vanished, with material scarcity, economic recession, and panic of political confinement.
The group of four teenagers is the second generation who grew up in this environment. They no longer have the Shanghai, Sichuan, Shandong, and Cantonese accents of their parents. They speak Taiwanese Mandarin and Taiwanese. They listen to Elvis' American songs and read Japanese beauty magazines.
Yang Dechang spent his high school and college years in Taiwan in the 1960s.
After reading the history that is not the truth in the history books, they have left behind the civilization of thousands of years, they have become people without roots, and they have cultural gaps that are difficult to fill.
Art with a conscience should rebuild this long-lost sense of belonging and restore an era of depression and despair.
Just like when I read Farewell My Concubine for the first time when I was young.
It turns out that there is such a distorted and terrifying reality in our world.
Xiao Si's knife cuts not only the youth of a generation, but also opens up a calm and compassionate reflection on Taiwan's social transformation period.
As a result, the murders are by no means limited to a youth film. Its significance has gone far beyond the so-called cruel youth - it is not only a memory of the past, the memory of youth, it is a sincere and pious record and reflection of history and truth.
——Give me the most perfect youth film in my heart.
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