The 175-minute public release version of "Long Time" is a tough test for the audience's bladder. I was very fortunate to finish watching it successfully. I remember that the last time I saw a domestic film of almost the same length in the cinema was "The Golden Age", which was four and a half years ago.
To be honest, until now, I have already developed the habit of reading basic information on the Internet except for the plot before watching a movie, but ignoring almost all online and offline publicity, which helps to gain a general understanding of the background of the main creator of the movie. (Of course, he is familiar enough with Wang Xiaoshuai), and at the same time, he will not be disturbed by information bombardment with too clear tendencies, which will affect the intuitive judgment of the film. Therefore, I also firmly believe that the favorable impression of "Long Time" is by no means the same as those who follow the main traffic of the scoring website.
The story of this movie is actually not complicated at all. Liu Xing, the only son of Liu Yaojun and his wife, and Shen Hao, the only son of good friends Shen Yingming and his wife, who work in the same factory and live in the same tube building, entered the restricted area while having fun, causing Liu Xing to die. This incident Form a knot between the two that has lasted for decades. The film quietly travels through the time and space between the present and the ditches, showing the working-class life scenes and interpersonal interactions from the 1980s to the present, the collapse of a specific history, and all the emotions are forever hidden by Liu Yaojun and his wife, who accompanied them to leave Inner Mongolia, to the southeast coast. The ghosts of the deceased sons turned into thoughts that could not be replaced in any form until they returned to their hometowns again.
It is easy for critics who have been inculcated by the grand narrative part of Chinese film history to solidify Wang Xiaoshuai and his "sixth generation" directorship as an eternal and static stereotype, and this view of understanding has basically failed today. "Intergenerational division" itself has a very strong meaning of rectifying the name of the new film youth in the early days of reform and opening up. Today's new directors seem to no longer need such incentives to motivate their lives, so the established intergenerational and intergenerational characteristics should be Follow the change of the times and become history itself. Just as in "Long Time, Heaven", borrowing the grievances between the Liu family and the Shen family, the cultural scenes of the past 30 years are engraved on the screen one by one. Wang Xiaoshuai's works have always written about the "older" groups of a specific era. Their youthful blood has become a cloud of smoke, but their spirits are not old. In this film, it is an attempt to wipe out the past and present.
Recently, I watched Xu Anhua's first film "Crazy Robbery", which was restored under the auspices of the Hong Kong Film Archive. The most impressive thing was not the controversial screenwriting details, but the aftertaste given to the audience by the seamless editing of time and space. There is almost no doubt that this is not The invention of the Chinese film industry, but it seems to have a special interest in telling Chinese stories. "Long Time" contains almost no flashbacks. It seems to be disorganized. In fact, I think it is an attempt to clean the impurities of historical wounds with the combination of unfamiliar images. It goes without saying that any kind of history that is spoken today, no matter who it comes from, will easily cause the recipient to have some kind of over-imagination about the past, especially the past that has never been experienced, such as excessively beautifying the character of the Republic of China or the 1980s. For example, the excessive demonization of the market appearance in a certain period, in fact, most people will unconsciously wear colored glasses when judging history. The same is true for "Long Time", no matter what the creator's original intention is, the history presented in the audio-visual structure will inevitably have a natural filter, but if the past is constantly collided with the present, it can be produced to a certain extent. A space for reflection. In the film, Liu Yaojun and his wife, played by Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei, had a textbook-level performance scene at the juncture of Shen Hao's confession. In the 1980s, listening to the tape recorder and dancing, the attitudes of various people under the music, the non-negotiable tug of war against the second child, the love and guilt of Shen Yingming's sister Shen Moli and Liu Yaojun's love and guilt, and the rebellious Liu family in Fujian The escape of the adopted son "Xingxing", all kinds of subtle potential connections, threading needles and wires in the passage of time, constitute a small situation in a big history.
The actors in the film can be called the best lineup in Wang Xiaoshuai's films in recent years. It goes without saying that Wang Jingchun and Yongmei, who were awarded the Best Actor in Berlin, Qi Xi, Alia and even Du Jiang and Wang Yuan of the new generation, are all given to others. Just the right feeling. In response to the Inner Mongolian background in which the story takes place, Inner Mongolian actors such as Yongmei and Alia, who have both qualifications and strength, firstly improved the hypothetical texture of the film. Of course, I will never deny that the social issues involved in "Long Time" will be very exciting to the Berlin judges, but the film's own narrative model based on TV melodrama has been dismantled and reconstructed into an image that can last for three hours of real time and space. , is Wang Xiaoshuai's greatest aesthetic contribution to the film.
In all fairness, in terms of the level of proficiency in film creation, "Long Time" can still afford the capacity of such a length. Even if it includes scenes such as the scene of going to the grave, it is still a little delayed, but this is still in line with the film's own establishment of "Yu Sisheng". The rhythm of "Listen to Thunder" is consistent, it's just a question of how effective it is. In the final scene, Jasmine made a connection in a foreign land and held up a child who most of the audience thought would be an illegitimate child, forming the last little suspense of the film. In fact, such guidance exists in other parts of the film, some of which have nothing to do with the plot, but are closely related to the audience's acceptance. For example, whether Shen Moli's feelings for Liu Yaojun are ambiguous, or secret love, or is it based on the tragedy of losing her only child to the Shen family. repayment mentality? The psychological space is enigmatically attractive, and it is like the stand-in for the deceased son adopted by the Liu family. It is quite a family carnival scene in the Peking Opera drama "The grace of a meal in the past life", which has been destroyed and rebuilt again and again, so that people think that In their long decades of life, Liu Yaojun and his wife had no other life except "stars". Is this setting intentional or unintentional?
But no matter how we discuss it, the slowness of history and the obsession with the impossible vision of "Long Earth" in the same film have already reached the level of being ready to be seen, which in itself is very telling. .
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