Tang Junhong, a female college student who was abandoned by her boyfriend, accidentally found the scene of the theft of Bai Yide, a boy who stole underwear, and after investigation, found that the other party turned out to be a graduate of the same school. At first, she was just mischievously teasing each other, and then she began to obsess, thinking that she was justly stalking and intimidating the other party, and unexpectedly the soulless Bai Yide died unexpectedly, so she felt guilty, and later she met the deceased's mother Blue Lake by chance...
Mental illness, The Iedipas complex, righteous demons, Internet bullying, just like his documentary works, Zhu Xianzhe wants to talk about a lot of aspects in the film, "Termite" is not a film that can be summarized in three words and two words, whether it is the self-deprecation of the protagonist Bai Yide at the beginning, or the sudden death of his halfway through the story, the unconscious face twitching when diving from the bottom of the sea to the shore, showing an uncompromising posture in this first film, narrative, performance, and genre.
Zhu Xianzhe should not have meant to pay tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, but his letting Bai Yide die halfway through the story was a very provocative arrangement for me. And let us recall the opening of this movie, the audience is like a voyeur, watching Bai Yide steal his underwear home from a distance, turning his back on the camera in the room and facing the mirror to desecrate himself, Zhu Xianzhe deliberately does not let us see Bai Yide's face clearly in the mirror, but through Wu Kangren's miraculous interpretation, we feel a kind of pain from the tight muscles of Bai Yide's back, breathing up and down, and feel a kind of pain - even if we can't figure it out, it is a pain that hurts the heart and lungs, or a pain that we don't want to live.
Zhu Xianzhe has said in past interviews that he is deeply influenced by Krzysztof Kieślowski's "blue,white and red trilogy", and "Termite- Mystery of Desire" is also a tricolor film, unlike Kiszlovsky's contemplation and search for definition of love and politics, Zhu Xianzhe seems to be more interested in "pain", and the audience is forced to empathize with the different levels of pain experienced by the three protagonists with intrusive handheld photography. Bai Yide, Tang Junhong, and Blue Lake are all people who are rejected by love, or who are powerless to love, and must rely on desire to dispel their love that has nowhere to go, to soothe the layers of pain, and emptiness.
Although Zhu Xianzhe said that there is no deliberate correspondence between the three colors and the three protagonists in the film, I think there is still something worth discussing.
White, the most impure color in this film, is the saddest color of Bai Yide's semen; after Bai Yide's death, we find that white is most likely still the purest color with the change of position of Tang Junhong, who symbolizes red, and we find that white is most likely to remain the purest color; especially compared to the sad blue, that is, Bai Yide's mother, Blue Lake, a woman who has been labeled as ominous and bitter.
Tang Junhong is the only character that runs through the entire movie. In the first half of the film, we define Bai Yide from her point of view. In the second half, we went through her to get to know The Blue Lake, and then from the memories and dictations of the Blue Lagoon, we pieced together another small part of the outline of Bai Yide. Zhu Xianzhe's Bai Yide, who has always been revealed, is a character who is naked and forced to spread out on the table, but with a sense of distance, as for us as spectators, we are with the outsider Tang Junhong, constantly changing the preset position of Bai Yide.
Zhu Xianzhe takes bai Yide's death as the center, and designs a lot of symmetrical plots before and after. One of the most interesting is that when the film is about 1/4 of the whole film, it arranges for Bai Yide to return to the place where he stole his underwear and track down the clues that intimidate the owner of the letter. Bai Yide's uneasiness at this moment (I know that someone is spying on him in the shadows) is naturally in order to echo the scene where the film progresses to about 3/4, Tang Junhong hides his "relationship" with Bai Yide, and enters Blue Lake's personal studio as an assistant, but unexpectedly because of his handwriting, Blue Lake recognizes that he is the person who wrote a threatening letter to her son. Tang Junhong, who was weak-hearted, did not dare to face the Blue Lake standing behind him, and for a moment the six gods had no master, so he fled the blue lake studio. Later, after several thoughts, she decided to go back and confess everything to Blue Lake, and the two finally embraced each other, and Blue Lake snuggled in Tang Junhong's arms and cried bitterly. It was the warmest shot in the whole film, the sun was full and not too fierce, spilling on their backs. Subsequently, Blue Lake fell into a deep sleep in the chair, the cicadas chirped, and the dead son appeared behind her, slowly crouching down, and the always gloomy face had sunshine and appeared soft.
Love, lust and death, lies and betrayal, sin and redemption, Zhu Xianzhe climbed the complex and gray area of emotion and human nature in the most sincere and poetic way, rather than a simplified summary of wishful thinking. The final scene of "Termite" is a close-up of Tang Junhong's face returning from the sea, echoing the opening word card and the diving scene that appeared after Bai Yide's death in the middle of the film, the mysterious sea means to include everything, and can also be interpreted as the amniotic fluid symbol in the mother's womb (reminiscent of the end of "Gravity"), then Tang Junhong after embracing the blue lake, Tang Junhong who broke out of the water from the seabed, Tang Junhong, who tilted her head slightly to force out the sea in her ears, her confused demeanor (reminiscent of Bai Yide's signature action), It seems to imply that the living she has become "one" with the dead Bai Yide in some form - normal and abnormal are often only a line apart, the perpetrator may also become a victim, justice is not the same as for Skywalker, thieves and whistleblowers finally reached a reconciliation in this ritual moment.
Zhu Xianzhe's "Termites - Desire Mystery Network" is my favorite Taiwanese debut after Zhao Deyin's "The Returning Man". Zhu Xianzhe is a fifth-grader, he and many of his contemporaries in a similar situation, with a film dream to return from the United States, but because of the bottom of Taiwanese films, or turn around, or struggle for a long time to have the opportunity to make the first feature film, I hope this film will not become a masterpiece.