There is so much to record in this changing era, and the relationship between people is the most fascinating. Jia Zhangke is one of the few directors in China who continues to pay attention and expresses the relationship between people in the changing times. From "Xiao Wu" to "The Good Man in Three Gorges" to "Tian Destined" and now finally entering the theater, "Old Man of Mountains and Rivers".
Today is the third day of the release of "Old Man of Mountains and Rivers", and it is said that the box office has broken 10 million. Before the movie started, I deliberately checked the attendance rate, 80%, which is a good result for a director who is blooming outside the wall. Director Jia said that he has not released his own feature film in China for nine years.
About 20 minutes after the movie started, the title of "Old Man of Mountains and Rivers" appeared on the big screen, which made the audience who were already accustomed to entertainment movies not so comfortable. The film begins in Fenyang, Shanxi in 1999, a love triangle, a story of a rich class crushing Diaosi to seize the goddess. While watching the movie, the images of monkeys fighting for mating rights kept popping up in my mind. In the context of the skyrocketing personal wealth and the rapidly widening gap between the rich and the poor, the contradiction is cut from the common and sensitive angle of sexual resource capture. A few years ago, another film "The Piano of Steel", which showed the dilapidation of the Northeast, also cut in this way, which is an echo of Director Jia.
Unlike ordinary chicken soup, there is no diaosi counterattack here. The miner who was abandoned by the heroine did not get better after leaving the country. After being diagnosed with lung cancer, he could only return to the dilapidated home that he swore never to go back to. The reality is so ruthless, the poor are always helpless in the face of changes. We can clearly see that the rolling wheels of the times will crush the proud life into slag, without even a sullen fart.
The goddess who abandoned the miners at the beginning, although she has transformed herself into a female boss of a local gas station, lives in a mansion. But the only son was also sentenced by the court to the more economically powerful husband, and he left the country. Even the most powerful coal boss in the film has fled to Australia to avoid legal punishment. In turbulent times, no one can have a constant sense of security.
In the film, the bridge section where the goddess father died at the station is grafted onto the real news of a monk supervising the deceased at the station, which makes people strongly feel Jia Dao's attempt to record this era. The film also transcends the previous time dimension in terms of theme, and joins the collision between cultures. The 7-year-old boy returned from an international school in Shanghai to his hometown in Fenyang, Shanxi Province to pay homage to his grandfather who passed away. Western costumes, language and local customs seemed out of place.
The year-end love between Zhang Aijia and Dale is another color of the film. One is an elderly, divorced Chinese teacher living in Australia, and the other is a teenager who lived a rich life but left his parents early and grew up alone in Australia. At first, I was wondering if the two would be together? The kind of intergenerational love between teachers and students is really exciting. But on the other hand, I feel that such a scale should not appear in Jia Dao's films. In the end, they still roll together impulsive and lonely, which is both reasonable and unexpected. At the end of the film, the two were embarrassedly mistaken for mother and son by the airline company, and Dale's cowardice returned everything that seemed beautiful to the prototype. The mother, who was far away from her hometown in Fenyang, had an auditory hallucination of her son's calling after making a pile of dumplings. The last person danced the dance at the beginning of the film in the snow alone. The film does not have a clear value orientation, and presents an open story narrative, which also makes the audience have infinite reverie at the end of the film.
This is undoubtedly a somewhat depressing and even tragic film. It forces you to seriously examine the era you are in and the relationship between yourself and the people around you after a hard week. I was once worried about whether it would be accepted by a wide audience in such a fragmented, entertainment-oriented age. However, the power of tragedy to purify people's hearts can often be a few streets away from comedy. What we really need in this turbulent era is the courage to face the helplessness in life. And Jia Dao's works undoubtedly give us the best comfort.
View more about Mountains May Depart reviews
