I always feel that a beautiful movie should be watched at least three times in this life. "Sweet Honey" is like this, like a changing life, every time I watch it, I can find details that I didn't feel before.
When I was young, I met "Sweet Honey" for the first time, and I saw that a lover was married. Going around is still the love of this life, praise how great love is.
When I was older, I revisited a line that moved me even more. Li Qiao said to Li Xiaojun, "The purpose of your coming to Hong Kong is not me, and the purpose of my coming to Hong Kong is not you." It turns out that love is no match for survival, and ideals are no match for reality.
Perhaps, watching "Sweet Honey" again in ten years, will lament the unsatisfactory, ups and downs of fate. In the vicissitudes of life and the changes of people, love drifts with the flow, although Li Qiao and Li Xiaojun meet again, they may not end up as family.
In romantic love novels or movies, love is a fairy tale, transcending time and space, and transcending human sophistication. In an alternate story world, Cinderella meets Prince Charming who doesn't dislike her identity, and Sleeping Beauty only wakes her up once she falls in love. the prince. In short, in the face of love, all kinds of reality and logic can only give way.
The love in "Sweet Honey" is completely unlike an ideal form of love.
The Chinese title is borrowed from Teresa Teng's song of the same name. The love in the song is so simple and pure, "It's you, it's you, it's you who dreamed of you", which expresses the sweetness and beauty of love. Needless to say, you must.
However, the English title of the film is very subtle: "Comrades: Almost a Love Story" (comrades, close to a love story), the creator used the word "close" to slyly dispel the naivety and imagination of the Chinese title.
The love between Li Qiao and Li Xiaojun is always limited by the confinement of time and space, the ties of identity and the past. Not romantic and innocent at all, even very worldly.
As the only protagonist of the film, Li Qiao's greatest desire is to make money and to stand out in order to make a fortune; Li Xiaojun's obsession is to pick up his fiancée from Tianjin and live a peaceful life. Although the values are completely different, the two live seriously under their own philosophy of life.
Li Qiao worked at McDonald's, cheated people into cram schools, reselling tapes, and lined up to buy houses for others. He lived so hard, but he always hit his head and broke his blood. The goal of getting ahead was to become Brother Leopard's lover, and he was once dressed in fine clothes and food, and had a successful career. Li Xiaojun worked part-time to deliver goods and wanted to work at McDonald's. He was tricked by Li Qiao into a cram school because he could not speak English.
Such two people, like two parallel lines, should never intersect, but they met in a foreign land like Hong Kong. Because they were both "comrades" from the mainland, they became a relationship of mutual warmth. Li Qiao began to use Li Xiaojun to take advantage of him, while Li Xiaojun trusted her and asked her for advice.
The love that started like this is really not romantic at all, so trivial, realistic, utilitarian and worldly, so vulnerable.
However, I always feel that in this kind of love, the reality is more real and more charming than the ideal.
"The purpose of your coming to Hong Kong is not me, and the purpose of my coming to Hong Kong is not you." For Li Qiao, basic things such as survival and material things are the primary principles, which are far greater than the ideal love that does not care about one's life. She fought against fate, kept trying, and worked hard. Finally, after failing to start a business again and again, she chose Brother Leopard without any hesitation, because survival is her purpose.
However, lingering and desperate love is actually not moving, because if there is no entanglement, abandonment, and sacrifice, this love becomes so light and weightless.
On the contrary, mixed with all kinds of practical considerations, calculations, selfishness and interests, but still reserved a little space for love, it seems that this love is precious.
Therefore, Qiong Yao's love novels and those of Mary Sue's are the lowest level of love novels. Because love takes time out of reality, no matter how perfect and idealistic it is, it seems less reliable and real. And with the gray reality as the background color, the clarity and brightness of love can be reflected, and the difficulty and rarity of love can also be shown.
Under Li Qiao's strong will and desire to live, love is always looming, but even when she is with Leopard brother for survival and material, her love for Li Xiaojun is still not extinguished, Leopard brother at Li Xiaojun's wedding, At a glance, I could see Li Qiao's thoughts, "Don't worry about other people's grooms." This love flickers on and off, but it lasts longer than the desire to survive.
In "Sweet Honey", what makes this love more charming is time and space. Rarely has a love story contained such complex spatial and temporal aspects.
In love, emotion is often a moment, a look, a sentence, an action, a flashing expression, even the impulse of the body, it only happens in a short moment. Maybe it's just hormones or pheromones, but this moment is incredibly real to those who are in love. The first love between Li Qiao and Li Xiaojun was in that cramped space, the moment the two fastened buttons for each other.
But these physiological parts of pheromones are fleeting. Therefore, what moved us in the end was the eternal and unswerving great love. It was Yang Dechang's "One One" that NJ said to Ari, "I have never loved anyone else". It is Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera", which Ariza called "forever and ever" when he was getting old. It is Stendhal's "Parma Abbey" in which Fabrizio passes by Cleria many years later in the convent. Touching eternal love is always moving. Because this is the most ideal and purest form of love.
Spatiality is the more meaningful part of this love.
There are three types of love spaces in the film. Li Qiao and Li Xiaojun are both immigrants from the mainland. They met and fell in love in Hong Kong and reunited in New York.
Hong Kong is the place where love happens, the space in the present tense. Tianjin and Guangzhou are the identities and pasts carried by the two of them, and they are the spaces of the past tense. New York is a city where reunion and love have settled, a space in the future tense.
Hong Kong in "Sweet Honey" is a colony, and its unique geographical attributes make it have a completely different geography, culture and history.
Hong Kong is like a ferry in the torrent of history, and 1996, when "Sweet Honey" was filmed, was the last moment before Hong Kong's return to the motherland. At this transitional point in time, the new and the old, the Western culture and the Eastern culture, the history and the future, are evenly matched and extremely tense in the here and now.
Chen Kexin and Anxi sensitively captured the subtle tension of this moment, so they made the most meaningful love movie in the history of Hong Kong cinema.
There has never been a love movie that, like "Sweet Honey", takes place in the present, but also carries the past, and the ending points to the future.
Hong Kong, where the two met, is a colony, an island with no past and future in time (but also including past and future) and isolated and helpless in space (but belonging to both).
In the city of Hong Kong, modernity and tradition are so closely intertwined. It is this uniqueness of time and space that enables the two to temporarily let go of their past and identities and walk together.
McDonald's, BB machines and ATMs represent the modernity of Hong Kong. However, individuals in the process of modernization have retained something traditional—the Chinese people's affection. Li Qiao went to break up with Brother Leopard for a showdown, but because Brother Leopard was in a difficult period, he chose to give up his love with Li Xiaojun. This is more like a kind of morality from the Chinese; and Li Xiaojun's oath to his fiancée is also a kind of responsibility and morality, not love.
I guess that the love of "Sweet Honey" was somewhat influenced by Eileen Chang's "Love in a Fallen City". Eileen Chang has been sensitive to the uniqueness of the city of Hong Kong decades ago. Bai Liusu came to Hong Kong from Shanghai, and Fan Liuyuan came to Hong Kong from Malaysia. On this isolated island, the two wanted to refuse to greet each other and calculated each other, but they could never see the future. In the end, it was the fall of the city that fulfilled this love.
"Sweet Honey" is also a love story between two immigrants. However, decades have passed, and Hong Kong is still the floating, rootless city in "Love in a Fallen City" that cannot be completely separated from the past.
Because of this, the ending of "Sweet Honey" can only be placed in New York. The love between Li Qiao and Li Xiaojun, as well as the soothing happy ending of their reunion, is only reasonable in a city on the other side of the world. Because here, their respective pasts, identities, and memories can not become ties.
The title of the film is sweet, but it really does not live up to the name. Life is too hard and too hard, even though this love that makes fun of it is a little sweet, Li Qiao sat on Li Xiaojun's bicycle and hummed Teresa Teng's "Sweet Honey", but the tune she hummed seemed a little sad, no matter what. How sweet.
What's more, every love in the film is full of bitterness and regret.
Li Xiaojun's aunt showed affection and cared for half of her life, but Li Xiaojun and Xiao Tingshan swore to each other but eventually became strangers. Brother Leopard had a deep love for Li Qiao but died in a foreign land. A Thai prostitute and a white foreign teacher are the only love in the film that is mutually agreeable and has no resistance, but they cannot escape the fate of AIDS. The creator is so cruel.
But in fact, good creators don't believe in perfect love. Love that is riddled with holes and devastated is the most real and moving part of real life.
Li Xiaojun and Li Qiao have separated and joined together over time. Although they finally reunited on the streets of New York, they are more like the writer and director's unbearable heart. It is a reward to them and a kind of comfort to the audience. But in reality, it may be inevitable for two people to separate and miss, and reunion is just a luxury.
However, most of the various things in the world are not as sung in the song. What you have is a fluke, and what you lose is life.
Whenever I see a new film directed by Chen Kexin, or some of the current Chinese love movies, I can't help but think of "Sweet Honey" and Maggie Cheung. After all, we have seen the best Chen Kexin and witnessed the golden age of Hong Kong movies.
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