Author: soy bean
There may not be a country in the world, like China, the anxiety of the people is so closely related to the house.
The Chinese economy kidnapped by housing prices has also directly affected the lives of Chinese people. The rate of wage growth will never keep up with the rate of housing prices. Young people have emptied the wallets of three generations and six people just to buy a house in the city; the huge wealth gap caused by investing in speculative real estate is tearing apart to some extent. society. With the soaring housing prices, stories of "fake divorce", father-son confrontation, and brother-in-law quarrel caused by the house are also staged in social news every day.
Compared with the richness and diversity of real-life materials, our film and television works seem so pale. Over the years, the best domestic film and television work on the subject of houses is still the 2009 TV series "Dwelling", which refers to high housing prices to the society. various problems. In the field of movies, the screen is full of fantasy costumes, spoof comedies, and patriotic themes, but it is rare to see realistic works that discuss the difficulty of Chinese people buying a house.
Therefore, whenever I hear all kinds of sensational news caused by housing prices, I think of Peng Haoxiang's 2010 movie "Victoria No. 1". The movie puts forward a bizarre theory. If I turn the house into a haunted house, will the house price come down?
Pang Haoxiang, Hong Kong ghost director, the most personal young director in Hong Kong in the past ten years. Spoofing and spoofing are his most important labels. His works "Buying the Killer and Shooting People", "Mr. Husband", "Pulp Comedy", and "Youth DreamWorks" have all won the love of young audiences with their strong personal style, and this cult style is popular in "World Small Reunion" , "Victoria No. 1" has played to the extreme; another series of Peng Haoxiang is "Zhiming and Chunjiao", which has a very high influence among young fans and has become a very important IP in the field of Chinese romantic comedies.
"Victoria No. 1" is directed by Peng Haoxiang. He co-wrote with Zeng Guoxiang and Yin Zhiwen, starring He Chaoyi, and guest stars such as Eason Chan, Zeng Guoxiang, Zhou Junwei, Xu Shaoqiang, Bao Qijing and Michelle Ye. The film was released in Hong Kong on May 13, 2010. When it was released, it was defined as a third-level film because it was filled with a lot of blood, violence and erotic scenes.
A Chang (played by He Chaoyi), a bank operator, grew up in a commoner family. Her wish is to buy a house with a view of the sea. In order to achieve this goal, she wakes up early every day to work in the dark and does several jobs, and she lives frugally. Reluctant to travel with friends.
She has a married boyfriend, a seriously ill father, and a younger brother to support. In order to make up for the down payment on Victoria 1, Achang chose to unplug her father's tube just to get his insurance premium.
Seeing that everything was ready, the Hong Kong property market suddenly began to grow wildly. The landlord repented and would rather pay the liquidated damages than sell at the original price.
Ah Chang, who had bet almost everything for the house, couldn't bear this huge blow. On the eve of Halloween, she raised her knife and rushed towards Victoria 1, killing several families and the police who came to the door, killing a total of 12 people. It can be said: the perverted female house slave raised a knife and slashed at the high house price, and twelve lives became a scapegoat.
In the film, these ghosts die in different ways, but when they die, the pictures are all bloody and cruel, and there are even a bunch of white flowered intestines.
The large intestine of the white flower, the drug-addicting male and female group P, the heroine as her boyfriend KJ, and the pictures of the sharp knife stabbing the pregnant woman, the drug-addicting brother, the police, and the heroine cutting off the penis of the man who seeks pleasure, playing cult, and extremely bloody , Erotic ability, and even shortlisted for the 47th Taiwan Film Golden Horse Award for Best Visual Effects , people can't help thinking that this is a continuation of Peng Haoxiang's always bad taste; and the murder scene in the film's reality line and the heroine's family , growth and alternate editing, which also makes some viewers feel that the process of watching the movie is slightly confusing and the rhythm is destroyed, but is this really a movie whose form is greater than its content? Is director Peng Haoxiang really blindly pursuing a form that attracts people's attention, rather than making the film an expression of some real problem and ideology?
the answer is negative.
The opening subtitles of the film directly explain that the film is adapted from real social events, and type these lines: a crazy city, in order to survive, it must become crazier than it.
Indeed, on the surface, the movie is a story of a perverted female demon who kills madly, and it is full of a lot of 18 forbidden scenes. Like many Hong Kong movies, there are countless commercial gimmicks, but in fact, this is indeed a movie. A serious work that directly points to the problem of social harm caused by high housing prices.
Murder is just a form, and so are some tertiary scenes, but it’s just that the directors use the B-level technique to tell the naked reality of the Hong Kong property market, directly criticizing this maddening and even perverted city. Housing prices have no vitality and the future of the city. The murder case is just an absurd shell, which exposes the increasingly acute social contradictions in Hong Kong.
As a small land, Hong Kong is an international metropolis. This contradiction directly causes housing to become the most anxious social problem for Hong Kong people. This cramped and tight living space has also created the special character traits and tense interpersonal relationships of Hong Kong people. Hong Kong movies, such as the shack in the "Young and Dangerous" series, Stephen Chow's "Kung Fu" and the Kowloon Walled City in Wang Jing's "Chasing the Dragon", and the dilapidated buildings in Zhang Zhiliang's "Cage People", all reveal Hong Kong Survival anxiety in this highly developed city.
But in these films, the people seem to be able to accept the reality of their helplessness, and by the time of Peng Haoxiang's "Victoria No. 1", the heroine has already started killing people with a knife, fighting against the whole society with her own strength, and turning the commercial housing that they are thinking of into. into a haunted house. In this way, you can buy a house at a cheap price. In this way, haunted houses have become a new choice for people who cannot afford to buy a house. This way of revenge, "crazy than the city", is full of helpless black humor.
The shack formed the earliest group of young and dangerous, and it is the place of Longxing of Chen Haonan.
The emergence of such images of individuals at the bottom of society resisting violence proves a certain change in Hong Kong film ideology. The government's forced demolition and underworld violence in the film have become a spectacle in Hong Kong society; the slogans on the streets and the people who marched also showed that the consciousness of resistance at the bottom of the society has been awakened. The heroine's killing with a knife, although extreme and inimitable, is also a resistance from the grassroots.
But whether the individual resistance can be like the heroine, fight against the ruthless society by oneself, succeed and change the fate of life. Peng Haoxiang believes that this is also difficult. Although the heroine who killed 12 people in a row was not severely punished by the law (of course, this is also the plot design that is most criticized by the audience), but at the end of the movie, the Hong Kong financial crisis caught up with the property market. The heroine kills to live in a haunted house, which highlights a strong sense of irony. No matter how hard an individual tries, he will not be able to resist the ups and downs of the market. Under the pressure of the government and the ups and downs of the market, how difficult it is for ordinary people to live in their own houses safely and securely.
After the return of "1997", a large number of Hong Kong people went north, and the production of co-production films in Hong Kong and mainland increased, which directly caused the loss of "Hong Kong flavor" of Hong Kong films. It directly points to the real problems of Hong Kong society, and keeps the core of Hong Kong-style humanistic concept unchanged, focusing on pure individuals, and still continuing the consistent "Hong Kong-style aesthetics" of Hong Kong films.
The same goes for Peng Haoxiang's "Victoria No. 1," albeit in the extreme style of a B-movie. Years after the film was released, when we witness the strange situation that the housing prices in the mainland are constantly rising and the society has been kidnapped by housing prices, we still feel a kind of trepidation when we think of He Chaoyi carrying a knife and entering Victoria No. 1. This kind of panic does not come from Fear of individual revenge, but a deep sense of powerlessness about the future.
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