Light and shadow are the materials of time, and shadow play is the art of light and shadow. When the camera returns to the shadow play at the Great Smokehouse in China, the shadow play seems to have truly possessed the ability of time. It turns the years back and brings us back to the scene from thirty-five years ago in the play—the one we are familiar with The footage and the familiar past of Noodles - we and Noodles are experiencing events in the same unit (of measurement). The sad expression of my brother's tragic death, the sad soundtrack, and the close-up of compassion... everything was so natural and just right, but... oh... no... NO! Noodles laughed, before the end of the show.
Humans are an animal that seeks rational explanations, forever. I believe that this laugh is even more frustrating than the interpretation of the German military doctor who is obsessed with guessing in "Life is Beautiful".
Inserting a clip of the protagonist laughing in the interception of the past is not only logically unreasonable, but also greatly reduces the film in terms of artistic aesthetics. So, in my opinion, the only plausible explanation - as Richard Hickel has quoted in many critics - is that the scene where the noodles are laughing is the "now" in the film. So, there is: in the few scenes after Noodles realized that he was deceived by Mai Da, our audience also began to realize that he was deceived by the director. The entire narrative structure has changed: it is a narrative of memories of the past intertwined with delusions of persecution of the future.
I will inadvertently think of Wan Xiaoli's "Water":
"...
you escaped back to the village , and
it happened that people forgot about you and
worked with your relatives.
You went back to childhood , but
people still went to the edge of the cliff and were
still looking forward to two heroes. information
How come you are among the crowd,
forget that you just came back from there, there
is no joy
, he suddenly appears beside
you and smiles at you softly,
you want to hug
him tightly, but he slowly jumps up and
down like the wings just fluttered in summer Butterfly with red wings with
your mouth open, you can't stretch out your hand and stare blankly,
like a slow-moving scene in a movie, you can never freeze,
he freezes you freezes time, but you can't freeze the
sky and the earth to crack, the flood is monstrous."
If you have to use an analogy, in the play Mai Da is the "I" in "Water", and Noodles is the "he" in "Water".
Maybe Mai Da has not betrayed "he" like the "I" in "Water" in reality. Noodles, but, also maybe, he really betrayed.
---
Also, the reason why I came to write this movie that I saw a long time ago in the middle of the night is because - whenever I see him, I always think of Mai Big. Maybe, Noodles, like me, also suffers from persecution delusions.
Recommended listening: Wan Xiaoli's "Water", from the album "North of the North"
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