Of course, Lu Yanshi, a Shanghai intellectual who was dubbed a "counter-revolutionary", was lucky to escape the black and gun-smelling referee more than once.
It's a pity that we not only missed Lu Cun in "Return", but also missed the old couple, missed the number xxx, and missed the young master of the Lu family who flashed by in the alley. Also disappearing are the 20-year memories of Xining further west, which Yan Geling has carefully prepared for us.
In China's thousands of years of history, there are two gaps. The previous one appeared so long ago that it was necessary to start with Pangu’s creation of the world. Later generations often referred to this history as the “Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors” for this period of history, which did not even touch the tortoise shell. Years, no more than thirty years at most, this man-made memory fragment has been carefully summed up in five words by today's people - the Cultural Revolution (and the suppression and suppression of rebels).
In my teenage years when I had not yet gone to the north to study and could reunite with my grandparents on weekends, those elders who had walked through the darkness and absurdity kept a close eye on this history, except for "fighting against private interests and criticizing cultivation" and "revolutionary" "Teenager" sounds ridiculous and curious, but I can't dig out the chaotic and sticky details.
My grandfather who was born in 1922 would only teach me to sing "The Chinese People's Volunteer Army Battle Hymn" when he washed his face and groomed his beard carefully. These songs are connected with the "Youth Vanguard Team Song" which I sang together in school. The amazing melody unity makes people less interested. Although I also know that the old man was injured in the battle of crossing the river, and he did not participate in the battlefield that relied on human flesh to suppress the final outcome, but I still hope that he will talk to me after singing and washing his face. The origin of the various scars on his arms. But his story always stopped at some point in 195x, and of course I was busy turning on the TV and watching Mario Bros. breaking through the upstairs wiring.
The same plot happened to my grandmother who moved her family south from Jilin in the northeast. When they finally stayed in this Anhui city, which is close to Nanjing to the south of the Yangtze River, they finally intersected with the author Yan Geling’s own childhood life. Compared with my grandfather, a pure Anhui native, her story goes even further to the period when the Japanese occupied the three eastern provinces. She repeated over and over again how fierce the Japanese were and how her mother was when she was a daughter. Teach her to pay attention everywhere. When I was about to get tired of hearing these stories, I also left this steel city where I grew up for nearly 20 years. She never mentioned the Cultural Revolution.
"Lu Yanshi" made up for my regrets to a certain extent.
From the old Shanghai, which is spread all over the concession, to the new Shanghai, which still retains the overcrowded Tongzilou, Yan Geling tells the love story of Lu Yanshi and Feng Wanyu in the long span of time and space in "Lu Criminal Yanshi".
This story is constantly intertwined between the texts through forward and reverse order, weaving a personal history of dating in the easternmost and westernmost parts of China. The borderless besieged city forged for the "counter-revolutionary" in the northwest desert, all of which are bleak and cruel to the point of ridiculousness in Yan Geling's writings, while in Shanghai, a prosperous and dilapidated eastern metropolis, Chinese women have been living for thousands of years. It is also embarrassing to endure under the feet of several pairs of liberation of different sizes.
The "revolutionary friendship" between juvenile murderer Liang Hulu and Lao Ji, Deng Zhi and Lu Yanshi's "class friendship" between Lao Lu and Lao Ji, the pen battle between Dr. Lu and David Wei and Professor Ling, Lu Yanshi The family struggle between the young master and his mother Feng Yifang, as well as the ties between the three children, all of the above are gone in Zhang Yimou's "Return".
In "Return", you can only see the sunset red love story of an elderly couple who had been separated for a long time but could not really reunite. Books disappeared into the vague city.
I can understand very well what Zhang Yimou wants to do in his current position, except for the distress (or not at all) of paying the fine of the Wuxi Family Planning Commission, his generation's thoughts on the word "Cultural Revolution" An ambiguity that is unobtainable to touch.
Just like Feng Xiaogang took the "Tangshan Earthquake", which should have been (and was indeed) a hell on earth, in one stroke, and devoted his pen and ink to the spiritual repair of ordinary families after the disaster. Zhang Yimou's broken wrist-like "buying a casket and returning a pearl" abandons the truly valuable historical reflection in "Lu Criminal Yanshi", and twists the film into a tear gas at the interface between darkness and light.
This kind of compromise was doomed at the moment and before he silently accepted the overtime ticket.
I don't deny how moving "Return" is as a story about a rehabilitated husband and a wife suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The faint sobbing that came intermittently in the theater made me understand how kind Chinese people are. The touching and admiration of "hold the hand of the child, grow old with the child", there is the sadness after the aftertaste of the times that have been experienced, and even in the tears of the young people there is a regret of ignorantly missing the understanding of the love of our parents and mothers.
The girl next to me on my left started to cry as soon as Lu Yanshi and Feng Wanyu said goodbye at the train station. Her sadness in her boyfriend's arms continued until I vaguely heard the boy say, "Oh, I don't seem to have enough tissues." , she tried to stop crying so as not to make the already embarrassed young man even more at a loss.
It's a pity that their tears are cheap, and the kind audience will only remember after walking out of the theater, to whom is the vulnerability just now dedicated to?
The love between Lu Yanshi and Feng Wanyu in "Return" is simplified to have no beginning and no end. It seems that the so-called impact of the Cultural Revolution is just a pair of seasonings for the two people's strong love. Zhang Yimou transformed Lu Yanshi in "Lu Yanshi" from the old Shanghai resisting the matchmaking, to the playboy studying in the United States, and then to the enemy in Chongqing. The body was addicted, and finally, in the years when the northwest was indistinguishable between people and ghosts, the twine for Feng Wanyu's emotional epiphany was forcibly drawn into a bright and moving straight line.
All the details, including the crab meat that Feng Wanyu rotted off all her fingers to hide the hungry children and peeled for her husband, were all buried in the bottom line of the policy that Zhang Yimou must obey.
From beginning to end, Lu Yanshi, who was alive in the text, did not reach a compromise with his children. His lifelong debt to Feng Wanyu and his struggle for freedom disappeared in the Great Northwest where he had been killed several times.
On the other hand, Lu Yanshi, who must sacrifice his freedom to obey the organization, perfectly starred in a veritable "Human World Small Reunion" on the screen for our young people living in the moment...
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