Avoiding the New Year's Eve kiss, we went to see "The Last Night on Earth". It was a smoggy night when I walked out after the show. With strong emotions pressing in our hearts, we were rarely silent. We ate two bowls of noodles without a word in a late-night snack stall that continued like a movie scene.
For several years, I dreamed of a person repeatedly. In the dream, sometimes he is a friend, sometimes a lover. It was far away from me at first, then slowly approached, and finally, in a dream, we forgave each other and hugged each other tightly. After that, it seemed that he never dreamed of him again. There are some dream scenes where at night, in a bar, in the dark of the street, I stand in the corner watching him silently. It was like Luo Hongwu was looking at Kaizhen in a dream. "Last Night on Earth" reminds me of those dreams again. Everything is terrifyingly real, and happiness is as fragile as a dangling thread.
There's a terrifying magic about this movie, like digging a well in the heart, digging out a black hole. Walking out of the movie theater, I kept flashing back that feeling for a few days. Walk in the tunnel and enter the mine; sit on the cable car and sink slowly. Let the unforgettable all be relieved, the ones who have gone to the end of the world to snuggle up again, the dead come to life, the fantasy of the youth comes true, the time stops, and the fireworks are eternal. There is a huge, enchanting sense of happiness that cannot be walked out for a long time.
A few days later, when I watched it a second time, I could clearly feel the solidified pain. Emotions in the depths of consciousness, touched by dreams, there is a barren place where words cannot be spoken and tears cannot flow. Everyone has this barren land, and some people spend their entire lives inaccessible.
But in the movie, Luo Hongwu arrives. He also took us there.
The story has a classic memory-style beginning. The middle-aged wanderer, because his father passed away and returned to his hometown, the dead brother, the missing lover, and the mother who ran away from home gathered into a huge loss. In many movies, the journey back home is also a process of understanding and healing, but here, the final release is concentrated in a dream. The tension between the long and the short of time contrasts. Decades of life are long, and the final search, in a karaoke hall that is about to be demolished at dawn in a desolate town, is urgent and pressing, and the past is compressed in this night. concluded.
The film is divided into two parts, life and death, reality: the atmosphere of death - Luo Hongwu's return to his hometown, recalling the past, interspersed with the mysterious disappearance of the woman in green. Dreamland: The atmosphere of life - Luo Hongwu reunites with his relatives and friends and cherishes farewells in his dream, and kisses and hugs his unforgettable lover. The former is a dark image of drowsiness, dampness, depression, depression, bitterness, stagnation, killing, etc. that cannot be resolved. For the latter, after converting to 3D, the world of dreams became unusually clear, as if the dense fog was blown away by the wind.
In the first half, there were some hard injuries that stuck in the throat. The biggest problem is the dialogue, not just Huang Jue and Tang Wei's blunt Guizhou dialect. Some dialogues, in the context of the story, are simply "wrong". For example, in a scene at the beginning of the movie, Luo Hongwu talks to an unidentified woman, frankly speaking about the disappearance of his old lover, and that whenever he thinks he will forget her, he will dream of her. These emotions that should be promoted by the plot are too clearly stated by the dialogue and narration again and again, which is self-defeating in the narrative. No wonder Bi Gan is nicknamed Guizhou Wang Jiawei, but Wang Jiawei's narration has the loneliness of Hong Kong urbanites. Bi Gan's "eat a whole apple when he is sad" and "tell a story every day to change the rent", it is Literature and art that are incompatible with the real atmosphere of a small town in Guizhou (thus, it is easy to be understood as pretending).
The image of the heroine, the mysterious woman with delicate makeup and amorous smoking posture, and a skirt like the "moist green" written by Eileen Chang, all show a "wrong" between the character and the environment, thus reducing the credibility of the tragedy .
Another example is that every character must use the name of a real Hong Kong and Taiwan star, and say, "Isn't this the name of a star" over and over in the lines, which is uncomfortable.
But in the second half, when the subtitles announced the title of the film and the audience put on glasses and entered Luo Hongwu's 3D dreamland, these flaws were covered by the immersive viewing experience.
Luo Hongwu's dream is the storage space of emotional memory in his brain, not only the visual 3D, but the dream space itself is multi-dimensional. It is constructed in the real scene (the karaoke hall before the dream), the memory scene and the virtual scene, like a city of Rubik's cube. And in the process of his dreaming, with the deepening of his emotional memory, he also descended to the lower space again and again, to the bottom of the memory. The distribution of these spaces symbolizes his difficulty in recalling memories.
The space on the first floor, on the same floor as the movie theater before the dream, is a mine. After falling into a dream, Luo Hongwu pushed a mine cart into the dark tunnel. It was very quiet, a bit terrifyingly dead. The poetic narrative in the real part stopped at this moment, there was no music, only the sound of footsteps and the wind. The images of tunnels and mines are like birth canals and wombs, and the retrospective of this layer of dreams is related to two people he can't let go of, the brother white cat who grew up together, the child who was aborted by an old lover, and in all his life. In his emotional memory, the death of his brother and child was not the most painful motif in his life, so it became the first layer to surface. In reality, the body of the brother white cat was found in a mine and became the main material for this layer of dreams. Mine cave-uterus, corpse-fetus, the echo and replacement of the two completed the release of his first-level complex: he convinced himself that the white cat was the unborn child, and the white cat did not die, but returned to the unborn one. source.
In the dream, he came to the dark mine to explore, opened a small door locked with a ping-pong bat, and a child got out of it. The image of this picture is as if he released the guilt from the restricted area of consciousness. The ping-pong racket corresponds to the real-life visions he once expressed to his old lover ("He grew up like an athlete", "I can teach him to play table tennis"), and the racket has an eagle painted on it (the white cat's Father). This kid, he appeared out of thin air, but he was the most lively and vivid person in the whole movie. He joked with Luo Hongwu in a glib manner, invited him to play table tennis together, and praised his skills after losing.
Watching a dream deep in one's consciousness and knowing that it is "fake" is an experience like a "lucid dream" (a dream that knows one is dreaming). The audience at this time is like a god's perspective, knowing that this happy meeting between "father and son" is just a momentary dream. Because of this, there is a sense of coldness that is both moving and terrifying.
At the end of this dream, the child sent Luo Hongwu, who had lost his way, to the edge of the cliff, and asked him to take the cable car down to the distant lights. The paragraph here is extremely solemn and lasted for a long time, and it is one of the scenes that moved me the most in the whole film. Luo Hongwu was sitting on the simple cable car, watched by the camera, in the darkness, in the psychedelic singing like a shaman, he slowly sank. He didn't know where he came from before, and he didn't know where he ended up, only the one who walked towards the depths of his memory. Lonely.
He came to the second layer of dream space, a buffer zone of memory. Here, there is an abandoned prison (corresponding to the fact that he visited the prison and found clues to his old lover), next to the prison, in the dimly lit amusement hall, he saw the image of the modified old lover. The point of the refit is that he can avoid the emotional impact of facing her directly. So, the "moist green" in reality, the passionate red in the dream (he thought his mother would also have red hair), the long hair turning into short hair, the dialect turning into Mandarin, and the underworld that separated them in reality The eldest was also replaced by a "distant boyfriend" with a blurry face, and he had already moved away from love. The old lover has become the "Kaizhen" in the dream, Carey's pearl (it is a precious memory of his old lover), the transformation of this layer of dreams solves all the problems that hinder them in real life, giving them The beginning of a happy life in a dream.
After heroically taking out two thugs, he and Kay-jin are locked in the pool hall. In the predicament, he flew up with Kaizhen and descended to the third floor, where Meng's home field was in the "Wild Grapefruit Karaoke Contest" (Wild Grapefruit represents the hope of happiness).
The third floor is the space closest to reality - the karaoke hall before the demolition. It is also the reason why Luo Hongwu came here in reality. In the dream, the lively karaoke hall is full of joyful atmosphere, people eat barbecue and chat in the open-air cafe, and female singers sing on the stage. Luo Hongwu said to Kaizhen here that he hoped that she was the woman he was looking for, which meant that his subconscious began to test and he wanted to face his true emotions. At this time, Kaizhen showed obvious jealousy, said you should go find that woman, and left him and walked into the crowd.
In reality, Luo Hongwu's love started because his old lover looked like his mother. The memory of mother's love, mixed into the lust for women, is subconsciously unrecognizable. He did not complete the psychological "separation" from his mother, and he could not recognize the difference between the lover as an object and the archetype of the mother. In the chaos, he reminisced about his old lover instead of missing his mother. However, in the third space, when he tried to face the emotion, the theme immediately reached a conflicting point. Kaizhen's jealousy represents a growing conflict in his subconscious, eager to distinguish the woman who is the object of his lust from the archetype of maternal love. He needs to make important choices here.
Angrily, Kaizhen went to the karaoke hall and borrowed a fire from the peddler. The peddler asked her to light a cigarette by herself, and said, "The mad woman is here." The crazy woman is the image modification of the white cat's mother in reality (Luo Hongwu has lived by her side, this is his only imagination of maternal love), she lit a torch and stumbled down a slope to a lower place. space to go. There is the deepest memory of Luo Hongwu. Luo Hongwu, who originally hid in the dark and looked at Kaizhen, was attracted by her and walked down with her.
In reality, his memory of his mother remained at his mother's departure when he was a few years old. The mother went missing with the beekeeper after a nearby fire. His mother had told him that he would not be stung by bees by lighting a torch. So the white cat mother in the dream dyed the red hair that Luo Hongwu imagined, holding a torch, and came to an iron door. The image of the hive appears many times. When Luo Hongwu went to the women's prison to find Tai Zhaomei, they were separated by an iron mesh with honeycomb holes. In the dream here, the locked iron door also had a honeycomb pattern. The mad woman is the mother who tried to break out of Luo Hongwu's subconscious. She waved a torch in her dream and forced her lover to run away with her. The faceless beekeeper is on the other side of the iron gate, which symbolizes a protection of memory (he avoids facing the man who took his mother).
When the mother opened her mouth, the panic, helplessness, and desperate madness seemed to plunge into the depths of her emotions. It was a warm memory that existed after birth and before language with her mother. It is impossible to restore with consciousness, but only a glimpse of Tangao's love in the subconscious dream. Here Luo Hongwu faced the worst nightmare in his life - being abandoned by his mother.
This scene is indescribably moving, sad, and silent, like walking to the end of the world to say goodbye to my mother, all disguise peeled off. He asked the woman in the dream, do you have to go with that person and why? His subconscious is trying to explain this huge trauma. And the mother in the dream muttered to herself, "I am too bitter, honey is sweet with him. The person I care about is too young and will forget me", which is exactly a painful and perfect reason. So Luo Hongwu let go of his mother with tears.
Abandonment in reality became his active act of righteousness in a dream. It was he who raised a gun to coerce the beekeeper to take away his mother, which gave this memory a new meaning. Before leaving, his mother asked him, do we know each other, why do you want to help me. Faced with this direct pain subconsciously, he chose to avoid it. He denied it, turned around in tears, and left with his back to his mother.
When I saw this episode, I felt unspeakable suffering and unspeakable sadness. It is the initial separation of life. It is hidden in the deepest part of memory. Only in a long dream, one can face it and become independent from it.
Before her mother left, Luo Hongwu asked her for "the most precious thing", and she took off her watch and handed it to him. The image of the clock, which is both time and memory, has appeared many times in the movie. The real father, who had been drinking to the "broken clock" before his death, represented that he lived in a stagnant time. After Luo Hongwu came back, he took the clock away as a relic, took out the photo of his mother hidden inside, and started to move the hour hand, indicating the restart of family memory and personal life time and space.
In the dream, Luo Hongwu took the watch and walked back to the third floor space, saw Kaizhen in the backstage of the karaoke hall, and gave her the watch. At this time, he has completed the separation from his mother, and the passing of the watch means that he agrees that Kaizhen is the projection of the mother archetype (but no longer the chaos and Oedipus before the separation). Emotions begin to flow, poetic and pure. Kaizhen smiled and said, "How can anyone give a watch casually, a watch represents eternity." The emotion and emotion will always be in the endless and complicated thoughts of this down-and-out middle-aged man's long dream, filtered to the last simple thought. He just wanted to find her and say his eternal love.
At this time, Kaizhen took him to the last floor of the dream, the house where Kaizhen stole when he was a teenager, it was the fourth floor that was remodeled, but there was no longer a mother. Kaizhen said, "How did it burn like this?", which corresponds to the reality that her mother had burned down the beekeeper's house. At the same time, she said, "The roof leaks, it rains heavily outside, and there is light rain inside." , The old house where Luo Hongwu dated. The images of water and fire are completely integrated here, the mother retreats, and the space of love is completely occupied by Kaizhen. Finally, the spell is chanted, the stars will skydive, the lovers will kiss and gather, and the fireworks on the dresser will also burn in the dream.
It's hard to imagine that Bi Gan has completed such a perfect story. Not perfect on all nodes. He has artificial flaws and inappropriate literary art, but he still arrives accurately, like landing on the moon with a broken plane. I thank him for giving me such a dream, which in the current film market is definitely a kind of extravagant willfulness.
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