Before long, a cry suddenly cut through the darkness, and a baby was born. The child is a boy, whose father Lin Wenxiong named Guangming.
The night is still cold, and the sky may be getting brighter. The child was still crying from time to time, the ink outside the window faded a little, and it soon returned to silence.
This moment is the beginning of a family tragedy. With the birth of the baby, there is also a story we are about to tell. The storyteller is called Hou Hsiao-hsien.
What floats and sinks in the vast sea is the wandering Taiwan, the turbulent island is Keelung with constant nostalgia, and the ordinary Lin family lives in the sad city. The film is based on the Lin family, connecting a period of history between Taiwan's recovery in 1945 and the relocation of the Nationalist government to Taiwan in 1949.
National hatred and family hatred, nostalgia and cynicism, warmth and indifference are intertwined in such a complex way. People also speak Taiwanese, Japanese, Shanghai dialect, hate killing or meet and love each other. This is the background of the film era.
Just as the movie begins with the birth of a baby, who was born in the dark and named Guangming, but was delivered by a Japanese woman, the fate of the child's life is also difficult to match. Director Hou Hsiao-hsien tells a folk epic beyond the macro perspective. Under the historical ring, there is the poetic youth of a generation that has passed away, the ordinary life blown by gunpowder smoke, and the constant coolness of autumn when Hu Qin pulls.
If you look for an answer in history, you can see that in that era, the bloodstains between Taiwanese natives and outsiders are still there. The isolated island of Taiwan has been drifting for decades, but after the liberation, life has become more dire. Speculators from outside came to the island to seek a profit, and formed cliques to act indiscriminately. The Kuomintang from outside wanted to say they were traitors, but the Shanghai Gang from outside thought they were blocking their way of making money. This province and other provinces, the same clan cannibalism.
They are struggling to find a recognition of their identity, hesitating in the changes of fate and mute in the changes of language. Is it Japanese, Chinese, or Taiwanese? What is the motherland, and where is the motherland? The world has changed several times, but it is still struggling to survive in the blood and rain; the homeland is elusive and hard to find, where will the people on this land go? The pursuit of the motherland, the statement of history, the recollection of the family, and the consideration of human nature, the language of the film is always drawn in line, calm, but it is indifferent and vast clouds of smoke, condensed is not forgotten for a long time. forever hurt.
In the movie, Tolerance, Wenqing and others meet again after a long absence, and have a chat and drink in a restaurant. When talking about the confusion, one person sang in a low voice: "My home is on the Songhua River in the northeast, where there are forests and coal mines, and there are soybeans and sorghums all over the mountains..." Everyone reconciled, the singing gradually began, and for a while, they lingered over the small town. But where is home, where is home? Only the drizzle was misty and lingering for a long time.
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