"Time has stopped, all that's left is to wait and grow old." - Wang Liyun
It is the bond that binds people together.
The emotional bond between two people, two families, and two generations spanned 30 years and experienced diluting and healing before reaching the end of the world.
The special historical background, the broad time span, the thick story text, and the selection of tragic family group portraits make this melodrama look like a low-profile version of "Alive" in our time, but the final audition level effect and I was a little disappointed by the depth of the plot. "I have a tree growing in my heart, and I'm about to be broken by it." The script lines are not well written, and the soundtrack is also somewhat mediocre. "Alive" at least has a solid base for the original.
A large part of the emotional power of the film comes from the actors' performances, especially thanks to Wang Jingchun's interpretation of this man with Chinese characteristics: there is always a bunch of keys hanging around his waist, and his posture is always slightly hunched. The cigarette was snuffed out again, and after the leap, it became weak again. At that moment, I wanted to resist for my lover, but in the face of the cold historical wheel and the huge social system, I had to compromise in an instant. In addition, Wang Xiaoshuai used a lot of frontal close-ups to let the Berlin actor not hesitate to contribute wonderful performances, and even left some scenes that may not need so long so that the actors can have more performance space. At the same time, Wang Xiaoshuai knows how to make up for the poor performance of young actors in key scenes through lens scheduling.
This seems to be Wang Xiaoshuai’s film with the longest time span so far, spanning almost 40 years of reform and opening up, from family planning, crackdowns, and layoffs from state-owned enterprises in the 1980s to coastal labor and the boom in real estate. Families have almost all experienced it firsthand. When the character named Xinjian holds the radio and wears flared pants to invite the protagonist to play in the dance hall, it seems that he has traveled back to Qin Hao in "Qinghong" and experienced the same fate of being "stricken". This is the "Wang Xiaoshuai Cinematic Universe", and it may also be the objects, costumes and scenes that Wang Xiaoshuai remembers the most from that era. Family planning is undoubtedly a historical node memory that most families today have felt more or less, and the tragedy in it is easy to feel.
And Wang Xiaoshuai's restoration of the age seems to be a little too delicate. The objects are neatly placed, the poster wall is spotless, and the natural light photography is always bright. This is probably the aesthetics of the model show. Maybe it's Wang Xiaoshuai's good memories of that collective era's idealism, and Jia Zhangke's less "clean" realistic era restoration in "Platform" maybe I like it more.
I like the scene where there is a prison visit in the film. The person outside the prison seems to be the person locked in the prison at that moment, and the actor who is being visited said "I'm fine" with an obvious disobedience. The political atmosphere of the era is well represented. After several scenes that showed fierce confrontation and satirical rewards were cut, Wang Xiaoshuai finally showed a very gentle attitude towards history. He intertwined the huge pain through multiple timelines to resolve it. Everything can be done at the right time. Obtain settlement and "liquidation". There is a lot of content that deserves to be explored in more depth, but almost nothing goes further. The "I hate this place, I hate them", "they bullied me and I did steal" young man will also come back with a gentle and stereotyped transformation in due time.
For three hours, the shuffling of the timeline didn't make the film look cluttered and incomprehensible, and the emotions before and after the cut point were relatively coherent. Just as the audience at the end of "The Thief Family" knows that the child will definitely call "Dad", the child will also tell the truth that was not told at the end and achieve reconciliation. It's easy to predict and it's effective.
If there is any change in Wang Xiaoshuai in this film, I think it may be that he is more willing to calm down and film the characters patiently. He uses a handheld long lens to follow the characters, and the actors perform. Cruel and oppressive situation. In addition to hand-held long shots, the film uses long-range shots for exterior scenes, emphasizes depth of field and occlusion composition for interior scenes, and maintains a small amount of blank space in the play to remove the suspicion of "like a TV series" and enhance the sense of film. But the meeting and reconciliation of the couples at the end seem to have taken too many and too long, as if this is the happy ending of the last episode of the TV series. The ending is not beautiful, and the point is unclear. The scene of the hospital reunion may be regarded as an emotional climax of meeting, reconciliation and confession. After that, the couple went to their son's grave and received a call to complete the "encounter of life and death". After this scene, the scene can be ended cleanly. The scene is actually moving enough.
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