After repeatedly recommending it to a friend, he gave it two stars after reading it. By the way, he said that I admired it so much without any literal evaluation, so I just wanted to write my opinion on "Sister Tao" or the reason why I like it, no It's a movie review, and I don't have the expectation of changing other people's ideas.
The superficial impression of this movie in all aspects makes it easy to label it "life flow", "warm", "moving", etc.; these labels seem to me to be extremely broad Ambiguous, because they never exist before the director's creation, but can only appear after the viewing activities are completed. So these labels are far from sufficient as a standard for the audience to make demands on the film in reverse.
Is "Sister Peach" touching? Of course, to a certain extent, it is indeed touching enough, but we should realize that all the trigger points for touching people come from the character image of Sister Tao, her appearance and demeanor, her temperament and quality, and her dedication. And Ye Dexian's exquisite and delicate performance (I won't go into details about this), there is a living person there, and no one can sculpt her, including the director himself. Xu Anhua also has no intention of stirring the audience's perceptual nerves, leaving her to do other richer and more important things.
If I had to choose some keywords to summarize this movie, "ignorance" and "indifference" would be its core themes. Roger's neglect of Sister Tao and the society's neglect of the elderly have formed intertextuality; the reason why I don't think that "Sister Tao" has a life flow is because the plot itself has a very obvious logical development, and there is a very clear arc between the characters. , the main line is in the narrative rather than the display, that is, Roger has a transition from neglect to attention during the period from Sister Tao's stroke to her death. The reason why it is called indifference or realism is that the main protagonist of society did not follow Roger to pay due attention to the elderly group, and the director threw a deeper problem to the audience, making the audience realize that it is their responsibility to go. Proactively seek specific solutions to problems.
To grasp the narrative trajectory of this film, we should grasp Roger's psychological (behavior) trajectory. In the indoor scene at the beginning, Roger packs his luggage, Sister Tao cooks, Roger waits for dinner, Sister Tao serves the meal, and Roger eats. There is no dialogue in the whole process. There is no friction between the two, and the movements of both parties are as smooth and mechanical as machines. Roger was unaware of the existence of Sister Tao at this time. Sister Tao has worked in his house for 60 years. To him, she is the most natural and necessary element in life. , it is difficult for him to take the initiative to think about Sister Tao's physical condition and inner thoughts. The audience here may not feel awkward, because the normal state of us and our relatives is likely to be the same, and the fast-paced life does not even leave us room for quarrels. It may also be because we are used to watching family dramas full of quarrels and are unaware of this sense of distance, which is actually numbness, apathy. It wasn't until Sister Tao was admitted to the hospital with a stroke that Roger's life began to change.
Because Roger felt the huge inconvenience caused by the lack of Sister Tao in his life (he didn't know how to use the washing machine or what clothes to wear when going out), he gradually realized the existence of Sister Tao, including the ox tongue that was accidentally discovered in the house where his classmates gathered, Roger That is to realize that these are not always open to enjoy. From tacit understanding without language, to very stiff and embarrassed asking Sister Tao "do you eat oranges" and "I'll help you pay for the nursing home", to patient and humane communication, this gradual transition from alienation to care is textual The basic external meaning, even so, has not weakened the cruelty. The physical distance has shortened the spiritual distance. The price is the burning of Sister Tao's life. Roger's remedy can be said to have done his best, and it can also mean this regret. irreparable. In the nursing home, Jiang Meiyi's disgust for her mother to her crying after her mother's death was used as an echoing point. From this point of view, "Sister Peach" is by no means a so-called life-flow movie that relies on the simple display of the master-servant friendship, although its theme sounds a bit old-fashioned.
On the basis of the basic narrative surrounding the relationship between the characters, Xu Anhua constructed the extension theme with its own local characteristics, that is, the inner meaning of the text, and the "indifference" juxtaposed with "ignorance", which reflects Xu Anhua's transformation from "To the Furious Sea" The kind of sharpness and cruelty that is rare in women, which continues to this day. Including but not limited to the elaboration of the current situation of aging in Hong Kong, the issue of fees in the nursing home industry, and the indifference of social groups; specific to the vegetable hawker who deliberately teased Sister Tao, the singer who immediately made a bad face at the end of the performance in the nursing home, and the moon cakes sent to the elderly during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Immediately after the end of the visit, the hostile service attitude of the waiters who visited and visited constituted the overall social outlook of Hong Kong.
The difficult state of the specific characters in such a living environment is thrown into a lot of details. The director borrowed the perspective of Sister Tao to use the documentary low-camera, hand-held, flexible zoom photography style (the photographer is Jia Zhangke's Yu Liwei) observes the nursing home as a microcosm of society. When Sister Tao first arrived at the nursing home, her expressive close-ups alternated with moving cameras to capture the "human world" there. The environment is very real, not just a photographic reality. I doubt that it was shot in a real nursing home at that time. of. Afterwards, a scene I liked very much: Sister Tao, who had a stroke, got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, and it was difficult to move. The complete paragraph shows that she pushed open the door of each toilet, still unable to accept the dirty smell of the toilet, and staggered back to the scene. I took toilet paper at my place of residence. I used a crutch to tear open the paper to plug my nose before I went to the toilet. In this process, I used a close-up view of the lower body and a high-angle view with an obstacle in the foreground. The mother-in-law in the countryside packs her bags. The performance of this situation has effectively shaped the difficulty and discomfort of living in this environment. This torment can be experienced through the complete situational performance and audio-visual language; Sister's gaze swept across the glass door of the three old people who were doing Tai Chi side by side (Uncle Jian had just catered to and coaxed his mother-in-law to go around in circles), which seemed to be an exquisite design of a trapped and marginalized visual shape.
The inner social critique is also wrapped with a more solid indicative base, that is, the urban state of modern Hong Kong and the outer reality of tight land resources. This layer of base penetrates into even more subtle details, from the inside and the surface to the film with a very localized cultural attribute and text thickness. For example, at the beginning, when Roger was packing his luggage, he put the bed on the wall. This setting implies that The interior setting of Hong Kong exists due to the urban characteristics of an inch of land. As well as the display of a large number of urban exterior scenes, Roger cut into the composition of the crowded and dilapidated buildings from the two sides of the upward shot when looking for the nursing home. The pictures of such dilapidated and market-like houses run through the entire film.
In short, the amount of information in this film is very large. Such a simple and general introduction will definitely not be able to explain its themes one by one, but it is clear that this is not just a film that depicts the inherent relationship between characters. A simple family film, it carries the projection of the director's personal situation, the attention of special groups, the insight of social atmosphere, and the anxiety of urban issues. In my personal viewing experience, "Sister Tao" must be a Hong Kong film since the new century. One of the most valuable masterpieces in history.
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