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Before reading "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", the collection includes three novellas: "Klotzer Sonata", "The Devil" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". Each of the three novels is about the male protagonist's libido, infatuation, guilt, despair and demise. After reading one by one, I can't help but think: What are the other people in the novel doing? Would there be an outlet for his life if his wife was a feminist? In "The Devil", when describing the hero who wanted to commit suicide out of extreme self-blame, and took his pistol in the room, Tolstoy wrote "with bad intentions" about his wife: she would never I can't forget the painful smile when he said this. As far as the text itself is concerned, the distance between the wife and the husband and the wife's unspoken sympathy for the husband all create a great sadness: death is painful because of life. One is on his way to hell, and the other is at a loss in the distance behind; waiting quietly. Furthermore, Tolstoy's act of turning his attention to his wife also shows his fraternity. In this moment, the character is alive. Under the eyes of the "director", under our eyes, they exist clearly. There is no barrier between us and them; we rise with them. All selfish desires are stripped away, and people can be connected with each other. We find, then, that fictional grief is always rooted in reality where there is still hope; there are gaps in reality that allow someone like Tolstoy to still write. So we can't help but wonder: if his (her hero or Tolstoy?) wife was a feminist, would there be an outlet for his life? If I were a feminist, would there be an outlet in my life?
weird suicide
The soundtrack of "Old Boy" is obviously overflowing - the long melody spreads a rich and long-lasting emotion, and the bright rhythm of the percussion makes people feel non-stop, without the slightest rest. Using a soundtrack like this to set off those lust-filled, distorted, studio-shot passages, the final effect is prudent. But to me, it's not unforgivable. After all, not everyone can quietly stare at desire. Even, while watching the first half of the film, I was secretly looking forward to seeing a film that faithfully portrayed and finally crushed some kind of lewdness.
This is why, I would think that Wu Daxiu's male gaze at Mei Dao's neck when answering the phone in the Japanese food store is to express his desire for life; this is why, I will seriously consider the predicament Li Yuzhen poses to Wu Daxiu : Revenge is still the truth; this is why, when the middle-aged Wu Daxiu chased the young Wu Daxiu to the source of everything under the dim filter, I still want to believe that this movie is just a little bit of a corner to show self-recognition and redemption. Even if, even for this purpose, another woman, like the thousands of women in thousands of movies, sacrificed herself. ——If the core development of the film ends here, then it can be forgiven for the time being. Forgivable like a novel by Yasunari Kawabata. But, after going through countless montages to advance the plot and create visual thrills, after going through countless plots with backgrounds stripped away, after I thought the film could complete a plot-driven revenge/redemption story with a reasonable explanation (even if this is a little vulgar), the director kills his film like Oedipus poking himself in the eye.
The rout of the film started from the mirror of Li Xiuya. But long before the mirror appeared, we were able to see the clues of this inevitable collapse. This question starts with long takes and editing, and ultimately comes down to the script.
Long takes and clips
Park Chan-wook's long mirror handling is very weird. His long shot is too compact and flat, like the doorknob that Bazin has criticized as a visual symbol rather than a mechanical substance. Comparing the film's famous traverse long shot with Beratar's equally violent long shot in "The Whale Circus," Park Chan-wook's fault is immediately apparent.
The long shot of "The Circus of the Whales" reveals the real space while keeping the violence on the sidelines: the moving subject is constantly changing, and the camera is always moving with it. In the process of subject switching, there will be some gaps where the subject is unknown, and the camera will only use the previous trend to make slight mechanical movements until it catches up with the next subject. The movement of the character both allows and limits the movement of the camera, so it is always between the subjective consciousness of the character and its own mechanical nature. Combined with the violent images it keeps recording, a biting indifference emerges spontaneously. This shot continues to its end, but it is a scrawny, naked old man in bright light. The weak and ugly life is still the life of life. The visual power here is unparalleled. Violence fades away in this picture, and the thugs leave. But the scene is not over yet, but as people move away, it gradually rotates, and finally freezes on Janos' solemn face, which lasts for a long time. At this point, the two short and straightforward texts in this long shot have been completed: one is "the thugs ransack the hospital", and the second is "Janos saw it all". But Bellatar actually does much more than that. The elusive perspective brought by the long shot, and the time and space tension brought about by this elusiveness (obviously a very tense event, but the camera is always silent), reveals the horror of violence, and at the same time evokes our sympathy for it. Awe of life. Furthermore, Janos' face at the end of the shot also completes two narratives at the same time: one is to put the brutality of the thugs under the innocent gaze, and the other is to doubt the position of this innocent and pure person. But after so much analysis, we are still speechless in the face of this shot. You can't generalize Janos' expression, and you don't need to. What Bellatar has created is a complete time and space, and we are speechless when we face it as if we were facing our life.
In contrast, the long shot of the fight in "Old Boy" is childish and powerless. The vertical axis of the camera is locked, forcing the distance between the audience and the characters. The traverse in the same scene makes all the schedules unobstructed, and the overly designed mise-en-scene makes the audience constantly stimulated by their actions without being able to see the emotional details of the characters. So the audience just sits and watches the repeated fights without any message or emotion. In addition, out of consideration for the performance of the camera lens, the group performers performed like a soldier in a Japanese factory game that lacked money, which made this scene appear deliberate and flat. The only highlight of this shot should be its movement on the horizontal axis: although the camera does follow Wu Daxiu all the time, due to the large scene differences, in some more chaotic fighting scenes, the audience actually has difficulty distinguishing the subject followed by the camera; Coupled with some "small problems" that inevitably occur when moving, for example, if you can't say stop and stop, you will always move for a second or two more; the camera does build a kind of "whale circus" to a certain extent. in between" perspective. But because the vertical axis is locked, the audience still can't walk into this squashed shot. This leads to an extremely paradoxical final effect: one axis of the lens is slightly poetic, and the other axis locks its future development.
In the same passage, the editing problem is also exposed.
At the end of this long shot, Wu Daxiu turned the whole scene alone, and Dugu stood in front of the elevator door. The camera features a close-up of Wu Daxiu's face, and this is supposed to be a moment for the audience to observe him up close - the background is virtual, and all the people who were knocked down by him fell to the ground. After venting his anger, his hair was messy, and he was panting... But after only five seconds, the elevator bell rang, the camera switched again, and the people who came to help stared at the accomplices on the ground. The result of such editing is devastating. As far as this passage itself is concerned, the elevator bell rings and the helpers arrive, as a "plot" (as in "thugs looting the hospital"), which interrupts the constant temporal tension of the shot aimed at Wu Daxiu's face. . So emotions are destroyed before they are fermented. But the problem here is not simply that emotions cannot be fermented. Such a suppression of emotion actually points to a structural problem that pervades the film, namely, that all the shots exist only for the sake of narrative, and have no real value in themselves. Once the narrative (i.e. the script) collapses, so does the entire film. In this paragraph, such an edit makes the close-up shot of Wu Daxiu’s face a screw in the narrative machine; and the failure of emotional fermentation in this shot directly blocks the final completion of the previous long shot—the middle The repeated fights in the long-range should have an emotional outlet, an explanation, not just a text description: Wu Daxiu turned the whole scene alone. So far, Park Chan-wook has accomplished a bizarre “creation”: taking a three-minute long shot and treating it as an element of a montage that surrenders to an external narrative goal.
(But in fact, we can’t say that in “The Whale Circus”, it is not an excellent narrative to build one long shot after another complete time and space. So the narrative here actually refers to a “literary” narrative, which is about to The textual image rather than the visual image is the basic unit of the narrative. But the completion of this narrative in the film is more roundabout: the film director needs to edit through the visual image that can directly target the specific textual image. However, this approach is two-way Thankfully. Movies are movies after all.)
script
As mentioned earlier, Park Chan-wook makes all the shots surrender to the narrative. Eating dumplings is not eating dumplings, wiping tears is not wiping tears. Halfway through the action, another shot is inserted, giving the previous shot a new meaning—even if the so-called new meaning doesn’t necessarily have to be revealed in this way. In short, the price of surrendering the camera to the external narrative is that the external narrative must not go wrong. A small difference is a thousand miles away. And the script for "Old Boy," if I had to say it, was a complete nonsense.
I believe that few people will not feel abrupt after watching the first twenty minutes of the film. After all, there are too many possibilities implied in these 20 minutes of puzzling plot. The film begins with Wu Daxiu grabbing the tie of the suicide man, followed by a flashback from the question of "who are you", so we see a middle-aged man who is incompetent. This looks like a more stylized version of Mints. Immediately afterwards, Wu Daxiu was imprisoned for fifteen years. The true connection between this event and the preceding paragraph will not be revealed until much later. And before the audience sees what comes after, the current plot looks like a modern allegory, or an artificial experiment in human nature. Although these 20 minutes were a little messy, it was not without expectations. But in fact, right up to the end, the film remains in a kind of back-and-forth loop — throwing out a possible motif and then turning the focus elsewhere.
In the forty minutes after that three-minute traverse long shot (that is, before Wu Daxiu recalls his past about Li Xiuya), four pieces of information that are crucial to the formation of the play's structure are revealed. The first is in the paragraph where Wu Daxiu was walking alone on the street after the massacre in the prison. He said to himself at the time: "I have become a devil. After taking revenge, can I return to my true nature?" Second Tiao is the gradual clarity of the mastermind behind the scenes: he deliberately emerged from the darkness, told Wu Daxiu that it was all just a game, and asked him to find the root of everything before July 5th. Otherwise, he will kill the people Wu Daxiu loves. In order to induce Wu Daxiu to participate in this gambling game, he even threw a question that is quite tortured: revenge or truth? And this directly led Wu Daxiu to his high school. The third message looks relatively simple: after making love, Wu Daxiu blows Mei Dao's hair. The fourth piece of information is found in a parallel edited segment of Wu Daxiu, who is furious when he learns that his friend has been killed, and Li Yuzhen, the killer behind the scenes: The sequence of shots ends with a tear from Li Yuzhen. This tear is the last important message. I will not analyze the third of these four pieces of information here. The remaining three pieces of information show a dangerous commonality, that is, they point to three different motifs.
The first message naturally points to a dialectical discussion of revenge itself. That line does not exist independently in the film, but has a lot of help. For example, when Wu Daxiu returned, he murmured: "Laugh, everyone laughs; cry, weep alone." For example, in the paragraph where Mei Dao pretended to be a reporter to collect information about Wu Daxiu's daughter, Wu Daxiu said hideously on the road: "I Kill that bastard first." Another example is the sentence Li Yuzhen asked: "Vengeance is still the truth." These three lines are combined with the first message itself, showing an inexplicable fall into the net of fate The journey of the minds of ordinary people. And the questions raised by Li Yuzhen as a "Wu Daxiu expert" who appeared out of thin air enriched the process of revenge. In this way, with the director's extremely stylized audio-visual, "Old Boy" is also a good film in the circle that "trying to show the plight of people under the stylized shell". But the film doesn't end there.
The second message is more ambiguous. It has its own direction, and also has the direction of intertextuality with the other two pieces of information. "Wu Daxiu expert" chooses to show his face, which is extremely ambiguous in itself. First of all, it can enrich, to a certain extent, the motif pointed to by the first message, that is, the dialectical discussion of revenge. But at the same time, depending on the director's handling, the appearance of the mastermind behind the scenes can also change the theme of the film from revenge to fate, and people's reaction to fate (although the two are often two sides of the same coin). If so, then the elevation shots of Wu Daxiu's disappearance and his return have a plausible source -- a hint of an irresistible fate. Finally, this second piece of information also holds the possibility of bringing out a new character. This paved the way for the establishment of the fourth message itself and the motif it brought out.
Before the fourth message appeared, what we saw was that when Wu Daxiu and Zhou Huan were on the phone, Li Yuzhen killed Zhou Huan, who described Li Xiuya as "lewd", and yelled at Wu Daxiu on the phone, "My sister doesn't lewd. Then, Wu Daxiu was furious, the director took a set of parallel cuts, and at the end let us stare at Li Yuzhen's tears. Such sudden anger and sadness are very similar to Wu Daxiu's performance in the first twenty minutes of the film: they have no definite reason for the time being. At this point in the film, Wu Daxiu is uncovering the truth step by step, and it is not difficult for us to guess that Li Yuzhen's tears are at the beginning of a flashback structure, just like Wu Daxiu's hand touching the rain. Then since it is a flashback, there must be a source. Li Xiuya's mirror is the source of this.
But before starting to analyze Li Xiuya's mirror, it is still necessary to write two more strokes of the above three pieces of information, because they reveal a fatal structural problem. Here, we can borrow a little from the third piece of information mentioned above, that is, Mei Dao's smile when Wu Daxiu blows her hair. Imagine three situations: one, this film is a revenge story; two, this film is about an inescapable fate; three, this film is the story of Wu Daxiu and Li Yuzhen. The meanings of Mei Dao's smile under these three different subtexts are quite different. In the revenge story, her smile may only be used for projection by the selfish man; in the inescapable fate, her smile is likely to bring out a kind of unsolvable sadness; but in Wu Da In the story of Xiu and Li Yuzhen, she can be nothing. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, the subtext of the film is constantly changing. We see a lot of possibilities, but the film never picks one and goes on. Therefore, with the change of the subtext, the meaning and function of the lens are constantly shuffled and refreshed. This is the aforementioned structural problem.
Li Xiuya's mirror is precisely the last turn of the film's subtext, and this turn directly disintegrates the film itself.
The long shot of the sister and brother making out in the classroom before Li Xiuya took out the mirror is one of the best sequences in the whole film for me. The telephoto lens always tries to keep up with the subject, but never fails to find focus. Because there is no focus in this scene, there is only lust rippling under the lavender filter. Those undecided days were sweltering and firm, like an immortal dream. The unavoidable shaking caused by the focal length makes it impossible for the audience to grasp the characters, just as the siblings cannot grasp themselves. Park Chan-wook even stopped the soundtrack when his younger brother put his hand under his sister's skirt, so the audience and the characters held their breath together. This kind of harmony inside and outside the scene is so rare, but it was destroyed by the director himself.
After Li Xiuya took out the mirror, the film did not take a sharp turn, but almost self-deprecatingly presented some kind of bizarre repeated jumping form: the sucked breast in the mirror is undoubtedly a literary metaphor, but the sister and the one in the mirror They looked at each other and created a kind of ambiguity - although the action of my sister taking out the mirror itself was deliberately designed, the inevitable ignorance and trance in youth, as a result of this action with a clear direction, still presented a kind of ambiguity. Fluttering mood. However, immediately after, the mirror turned to Wu Daxiu, who was peeping outside the window, and then the camera quickly cut to Li Yuzhen's face, then an accelerated pan, and finally it panned to Wu Daxiu, who was peeping. Here, Park Chan-wook once again did the same thing he did in the aforementioned three-minute traverse long-shot sequence: he sacrificed the possibility of constructing a complete space-time in favor of an ambiguous long-shot. In a plot paragraph that can exist only as a text description. At this point, the text of "Wu Daxiu peeps at Li Xiuya and Li Yuzhen's sister and brother" is established, another audiovisual situation is sacrificed, and the film turns again: this time, it points to incest.
In the following paragraphs, the film has another theme roulette. First, in the dialogue paragraph between Wu Daxiu and Mei Dao, Wu Daxiu narrated: I have to repay my hatred. Then Wu Daxiu pointed out the incestuous love between Li Yuzhen and his sister in the elevator. Then Li Yuzhen said to Wu Daxiu disdainfully: You just forgot. These three points correspond to the aforementioned three possible motifs: revenge, the still uncertain story about Wu Daxiu and Li Yuzhen, and fate. And if the film only develops to Li Yuzhen's sentence "You just forgot", it is at least an Oedipus story that is not too outrageous: a person always believes that he is right, but finds himself under the guidance of fate Wrong, and in the end punish yourself out of resentment for your own weakness rather than for destiny itself. (In this way, Wu Daxiu's Korean pronunciation is similar to Oedipus, and the Oedipus complex symbolized by sucking breasts is also explained.) But Park Zanyu is once again in the paragraph where Wu Daxiu and Li Yuzhen are fighting each other. Dismantled my desk. He begins to emphasize the concept of incest: first Wu Daxiu sheds light on Li Yuzhen's relationship with his sister, then the devastating final reveal. Li Yuzhen told Wu Daxiu that all this was his revenge: he imprisoned him to wait for Mei Dao to grow up; and the reason why he and Mei Dao fell in love was because he (Li Yuzhen) pre-arranged The hypnotist hypnotized the two of them; and the reason why they had to fall in love was because Mei Dao was Wu Daxiu's daughter; Li Yuzhen waited for fifteen years, just to let Wu Daxiu - this was out of her own back then. The person who ruined Li Yuzhen's love with a long tongue - experiencing the pain of an incestuous love. After knowing the truth, Wu Daxiu became mad, and in the end, like Oedipus poking his eyes, he cut off his tongue. But at this moment, "Old Boy" is no longer an Oedipus story, but just an empty shell. Regarding the reason why it is just an empty shell, we need to analyze it from two perspectives.
First, the film's final focus on the concept of incest was a devastating blow to its play structure. We know that Wu Daxiu's line is actually flashbacks. We see his vengeance and search before we learn the reason for his captivity. However, for a long period of time, Wu Daxiu rampaged without knowing who was behind the scenes - what supported him was not so much a clear desire for revenge, but a kind of tyranny like a headless fly. It can be said that the three-minute long shot of the fight was the climax of Wu Daxiu's bestial outpouring. And until the memories of Li Xiuya came to light, he still insisted on his revenge. So he went on like Oedipus. And according to the already written script, he should finally find that he was just spinning in place, and punish himself for it. However, the incestuous fate that Park Chan-wook arranged for him could not complete his flashback, because the existence of desires precedes human relations. At the same time, very "coincidentally", the first half of the film is almost based on such a desire. And the lust and ethical crisis brought about by the incest of father and daughter are all neglected to show. Incest is just a preset concept in the film. Therefore, in the structure of the play, "Old Boy" is about human relations to explain human desires; but in terms of emotional composition, it is about human desires suppressing human relations. We can't explain Wu Daxiu's motive for cutting his tongue: if his motive lies in the crisis of the legitimacy of his desires, then with his personality of raping women and kidnapping nurses at every turn, he probably doesn't care about these; It lies in the collision of fatherly love and love, so his fatherly love has not been fully demonstrated; if his motive is to feel sincere guilt for his long tongue, then he should not cry for revenge after learning the truth. ——If it is said that before this paragraph, the construction of the film text is supported by practical shots; then in this paragraph, everything becomes a naked obscenity. What Park Chan-wook did was like lengthening the beginning of the famous flashback of One Hundred Years of Solitude to 200,000 words, making a gorgeous stream of consciousness directed at Colonel Aureliano Buendía, and then using the rest of the far-fetched The 60,000-character frame column of the deceased. It's not a question of being mean or not: it's a question of being stupid or not.
Second, as mentioned earlier, each turn of the film refreshes the meaning of the previous shot. And the shuffling caused by the film's last turn directly destroys the film itself. When Li Yuzhen explained everything, we found: First, Mei Dao crying alone on the subway was no longer because of loneliness, but just because it was after she was hypnotized (Mei Dao's clothes in the two shots were the same), so her tears It has become a prop that echoes the final ending; second, in the paragraph about Wu Daxiu's past at the beginning of the film, the pair of wings he bought for his daughter has become a prop that echoes the final ending; third, Wu Daxiu is in Japan The stare at Mei Dao in the shop no longer reflects a desire for life, but is just a prop that echoes the final outcome. Fourth, "Laughing, everyone laughs; crying, weeping alone" is no longer a sentence. The monologue of Yingjing (a scene of revenge), but only a prop that echoes the final outcome; 5. "Whether it is sand or stone, sinking into water" is no longer a sentence of Yingjing (a scene of "sin no matter how big or small"). The monologue is just a prop that echoes the final outcome; Sixth, "like an antelope in the hands of a hunter, like a bird in a trap, escape" is no longer a monologue that fits the scene (should not escape the fate of the scene), But it's just a prop that echoes the final ending... Li Yuzhen's revelation makes all the beautiful paragraphs and elements of the film come crashing down. He squeezed everything into his incest narrative. But if all the previous scenes in the film have vanished, how can the anger of Li Yuzhen and Wu Daxiu be convincing at this moment? Finally, as the final secret is revealed, Old Boy becomes an empty shell. In this sense, Park Chan-wook is indeed a master of shuffling: as soon as he shuffles, all the cards are gone.
Epilogue
The play structure of "Old Boy" is not entirely useless, on the contrary, it has a certain degree of ambition. This starts with two similar storyboards: at the beginning of the film, Wu Daxiu is dragging a man who committed suicide, and Li Yuzhen is dragging his sister. The same overhead shot of the living, the same overhead shot of the dead, and the same close-up of the side of the hand; these all show the similarity of the two passages. Before Li Yuzhen's passage appeared, the function of Wu Daxiu's passage was only to reveal the flashback structure of Wu Daxiu's line, and at the same time quickly establish a dramatic tension at the beginning of the film. But after the Li Yuzhen paragraph appeared, we found that Park Chan-wook used the exact same storyboard at the beginning of everything as the beginning of the flashback structure, which seemed to be intentionally establishing some kind of intertextuality between the past and the future. Wu Daxiu's flashback is a homicide narrative, while Li Yuzhen's "flashback" is a suicide narrative. Wu Daxiu was played by fate, so he wanted to shoot it; Li Yuzhen let go of his sister's hand, so he wanted to shoot himself. Such a consideration also explains Li Yuzhen's sentence "We sisters and brothers love each other knowing that we can't love each other. Can you do it?" and the redemption of love at the end. Because in fact, it was Li Yuzhen who let go of his lover's hand, so he was not qualified to justify his cry; while Wu Daxiu cut his tongue, stepped forward as the devil, and finally accepted the love of Mei Dao. If such a reversed structure can be perfectly realized, the effect should be quite beautiful. But, as a result, Old Boy doesn't do what it tries to do.
Now we can go back to the first subsection of the article and talk about Tolstoy's novels: Tolstoy's writing is extremely sensual. This sensuality stems from a simple, yet cruel, pain, and a sense of morality brought about by this pain. It is also a description of human desires and what happens around them. Tolstoy can describe the external environment in the third person straight to the psychological depiction that is more delicate than the first person, and switch viewpoints at the climax of the story. A single sentence brings the couple and their relationship to life – real to the point of cruelty (The Devil). Although the theory of film performance cannot be directly applied to novels, I would like to draw an analogy here: Tolstoy's novels are undoubtedly "experiential". He writes the life experience of each character with absolute respect for life, which stems from a kind of blade-like straightforward empathy and creation. The eyes we cast on the real experiences created by the author will eventually be reflected in our own lives. When we try to solve a puzzle for a character in a novel, we are solving a puzzle for ourselves. That's why, reading Tolstoy's novels, I have such positive questions in my mind: If I were a feminist, would my life have an outlet.
On the contrary, the progressive "Old Boy" was reduced to an empty shell in the end. Putting aside the original problems of the script, such as procrastination and round-tripping, is the director himself partly responsible for the film's failure? The answer is yes. We can easily see Park Chan-wook's problem from Lee Soo-ja's mirror: the director is willing to sacrifice the character's real emotional experience for a textual description. Of course, he seemed to be complacent, and before the final rout, he did not forget to review the motifs he had briefly touched on before. He thought he had reconstructed all the previous shots at the end of the film, not knowing that he had only diluted them. So much so that when we look at the face of the self-sacrificing sister, we can't even mourn the misfortune of her brother's selfishness, because her selfish brother, Lee Woojin, never really lived in Park Chan-wook's fictional world pass. So, just as stagnant water cannot flow into a river, "Old Boy" has become a compressed biscuit with no outlet. That's why I dedicate a section to long takes and editing: the formal problem of art is its moral problem. Even if only once, if you use tricks and tricks in form, and tilt it toward your selfish desires rather than your motifs, then you will no longer be able to maintain a pure relationship with your work. Impure results are often very tragic: your character may have to inexplicably cut off his own tongue for the sake of your insanity.
The fourth commandment of Kieslowski's "Ten Commandments" also tells the story of a father and a daughter in love. But he builds a tight-fitting image palace for the father and daughter, and draws out the truth of love itself from the indeterminate "truth." And what about "Old Boy"? I was expecting the film to "faithfully portray and ultimately defeat some kind of sleazy", but it turned out to be not even sleazy. The character's mood is diluted little by little: eating dumplings is not eating dumplings, wiping tears is not wiping tears. Few of those emotionally charged passages are spared from the director's conscious or unintentional narcissism—except for the aforementioned third important message: Oh Dae-soo blowing Mei Dao's hair. That shot is self-contained throughout: the subsequent episodes are jumped on, and themselves are not included in the director's symbolic labyrinth. At the end of the film, beneath the fairy-tale soundtrack, all that remains is broken emotions and broken structures. But among the feathers of this place, the smile of Mei Dao is very precious. Only that smile escaped the director's clutches, just like Anna Karenina's doomed suicide.
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