Movies are made with a purpose, and no purpose is also a purpose, and the purpose of Bi Gan's film is to diagnose the director's own problems first. When these problems are "isolated" from life through the role of film, they are solved imaginatively and even temporarily, and thus Bi Gan's confession: "My two films are vivid, I want to It's all over."
one
Dreams are confirmations of reality.
When the old hero Luo Hongwu was waiting for a possible old lover, Wan Qiwen, he chose to sit in the corner of the movie theater and fell into Nanke Yimeng. The movie also began to connect and mend the fragmented "previous love" through the plot. The reappearance and explanation of the lines, weaving a meticulous dream space like threading needles and threads, to a certain extent, confirms the memory of the hero, the investigation results of the hero from the crowd, and the information that the audience has already learned, so as to achieve rational knowledge. Perfection, free of emotional ambiguity, seems to be the best way to gain acceptance as the film draws to a close.
At the same time, this also confirms the "narrative method" of Bi Gan's film. If it is still not obvious in the previous work "Roadside Picnic", this film has already taken shape: the visual expression of text (monologue and dialogue information). degree presentation, a circular argument, thus giving the audience a feeling of confirmation and confirmation), the collage-style explosion of the plot (the protagonist carries the memories of later generations and the irreversible physical body of the years, and experiences the accelerated accumulation of life keys in a short time and high density. Moments), thereby erasing uncertainty (shots whose meaning is at a distance from the image), consolidating the known (things confirmed by words), gaining identification (logical understanding of the plot), and generating reflection. It may be inappropriate to generalize the movie in this way, but when Bi Gan hopes that the movie will alert the anxious people who "do not know it", this functional demand has surpassed or rejected the possibility of accepting and understanding diversity. .
One of the most impressive things is that when people are the most sad, they will eat the whole apple with the core of the apple attached. Originally a sentence with cultural flavor, it appeared three times in the film. It started with dialogue, then Li Hongqi cried and ate an entire apple, and finally the hero Huang Jue ate the apple core in front of Wan Qiwen in the dream. This is a "lyric" that is supported by logic first and then images. Because when he is sad, he will eat the apple core, so Huang Jue is very sad at this time. While capturing this logical confirmation, the audience infers how sad Huang Jue is at this time. As for the reasons for the sadness, the mother's departure when he was young, the unequal trauma experience between mother and child, and the years of gossip. The repression, etc., those things that are more worthy of being clarified to the audience, but accompanied by this gimmick or symbolic footnote of the intertextuality of words and images, they have become things that are really dusty.
Dreams are the confirmation of reality. With a stack of clues and straightforward "fulfillment", the rediscovery of the non-Freudian subconscious is completed. Therefore, Bi Gan's films have an obvious "confirmation" feature, as if After confirming your own experience, you can put your anxiety and frustration in the window of the screen, so as to obtain a truly unutilitarian examination and retreat from the safety line that has nothing to do with yourself.
two
Avoidance is confirmation of desire.
If the prominence of reason and the conservatism of sensibility are a major feature of Bi Gan's "confirmation" films, then the anxiety about desire can also be seen in his second film. This is of course unintentional by Bi Gan, but it reflects the deliberate avoidance of desire and the overflow of desire.
The film is not as candid as everyone, especially the director himself, expected. In fact, Bi Gan intentionally avoided some thorny issues of reality in the film. Luo Hongwu's pursuit of Wan Qiwen actually had insufficient motivation. The death of the white cat who was pity for the same disease was only a psychological resonance and a bystander, but in a dream, the runaway of his mother was a helpless achievement. It is the simplification of these thorny character relationships that causes the film to present a deep division: on the one hand, we hope that the audience can experience the misplacement of emotion and behavior from the core of these characters' contradictions, and experience the tension between emotion and reason in the form of perception. On the other hand, he is extremely afraid that the emotional explosion caused by the film will weaken the rational spirit of reflection, or make the image flow in sensationalism and lack ideological depth. This is perhaps the question all directors in the history of cinema have faced, and great directors have developed the character of cinema while reconciling the two. But in terms of balancing emotion and ideology, Bi Gan still needs to grow up, and the two films have increasingly exposed this unreconciled split and the ambiguity of the main idea of creation, which has resulted in the film's failure to truly open up this The key to the crux is to face the core of the trauma, not to hide in the labyrinth of memory.
It is precisely because of his ideological demands that Bi Gan rejects realism to present eroticism, whether it is a camera movement with a peculiar viewpoint (such as Tang Wei and Huang Jue's kiss on the grass), or a surreal setting and light and shadow (such as the moon in the last scene of the film). displacement, room rotation). As natural elements, water and fire do not represent any healing natural power. On the contrary, nature is constantly participating in the complexity of the human world. The leaking basement splashes with water, the never-ending sound of the water flow and the disturbing light and shadow of the picture suggest the mood to move; the kiss of the grass hides the lingering stones but is replaced by the faint green light under the water; the fire of the candle illuminates the shadows The Tang Wei of Tang Wei decorated the night of first meeting; and the torch in the dream once again pointed out the identity of the mother, leading Huang Jue to the object of the traumatic experience... Desire is unavoidable for Bi Gan. , The search for self-existence is not the more you want to be suppressed by the distance between image and meaning, and the more ubiquitous and ubiquitous overflowing from sound, light and shadow. This also constitutes an interesting phenomenon, the same image has a completely different experience just because of subtle lighting, voiceover, and rhythm changes.
Bi Gan's reference to Tarkovsky in the film is meaningful, and it is completely different from the feeling that Tarkovsky gave in "Stalker". The perception of desire boundaries can be said to constitute an important theme of his films. On the contrary, Bi Gan's citations to the glass cups that line the edge of the table and the sediment shot of the gloomy river no longer have the power to calm, no longer have the effect of abstinence, but more actively intervene in the memories of personal disturbed emotions In the composition, the network that promotes memory expands to a wider area. This also reminds that the meaning of each director's code cannot be copied, even if every citation of the text will produce ambiguous readings, not to mention the images with more time dimension. So when Bi Gan confirms his favorite images and his own experiences and writes them down, does vacating the burden of memory mean that he will have room to explore the nature of images instead of being a self-talking experience . Perhaps we should wait and the Bigan Church will continue to exist.
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