Text: Overnight flowers
In last month's Golden Rooster Award nominations, Tu's "Old Beast" was nominated for best actor and became the candidate for the upcoming Golden Rooster Awards. From the First Film Festival to the Golden Horse Awards for film emperors and scripts, "Old Beast" as the debut of newcomer director Zhou Ziyang can be described as a fruitful harvest.
The supervising producer of the film is the sixth generation of director Wang Xiaoshuai, to some extent, it continues the sixth generation of directors' attention to the living conditions of ordinary people and the meaning of individual lives, using a personal style of authorial lens language to reflect the changes in the spiritual world of people in the changing times, with the director's personal life experience and perception.
Because of the similarity of certain levels, the "old beast" is also regarded as the "old cannon" of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, and the two works are still very different in thematic content and video style.
If Guan Hu's "Old Cannon" is an elegy dedicated to his father, the writing of the old Beijing rivers and lakes is extremely romantic and gorgeous; then Zhou Ziyang's "Old Beast" is from a modern perspective, truly and objectively presenting a person who is at a loss under the values of the new era, the changes in the world of Ordos, the cold and warm feelings of human feelings, reality and magic.
01
From the original name "Old Bastard" to the final "Old Beast", it is not only a change from spoken language to written language, but also from a slightly subjective and straightforward sensibility to a concise and powerful rational expression.
The beast, that is, the animal nature, is the opposite of modernity, showing the vitality and fierceness of the original life force. The old, as opposed to the new, is a natural law of the animal world's birth, old age, illness and death, and in human society, it contains a kind of sadness that Shaohua has passed away.
In our aesthetic habits, we always like to use a popular level of moral standards to define people, so in the past literary and artistic works, it is inevitable to divide the binary camp of decent and villain, good and bad. The complexity of human nature itself determines that people cannot be simply judged by the dualistic concepts of good and evil, good and bad.
The multiplicity of Lao Yang's identity and the multi-faceted nature of his personality determine that he cannot be defined by an "old bastard". As a tidemaker of the past, the loss of the rich class undoubtedly gave Lao Yang a devastating blow. The opening part of the film focuses on Lao Yang's sloppiness, poverty, disconnection from the times (he does not use ATMs to withdraw money), full of vices (gambling, meeting lovers), and even stealing life-saving money for the operation of his bad wife who is seriously ill.
As the plot develops, we also see a more complete old Yang. He cherished his love and righteousness, remembered his past kindness for life, and did not hesitate to repay his brother's kindness with the family's emergency money; he used his life's hard work to lay the foundation for his children's roots in the city.
He has a deep-rooted patriarchal mentality and machismo, domineering, arbitrary, and inedible to the advice of his children, and eventually he is violently bound and signed by his children. When he resorted to the law, he only wanted to return the color, but it eventually led to irreconcilable tragedy and an unbridgeable intergenerational rift.
The success of the "old beast" image is naturally inseparable from the wonderful interpretation of Tu. TuMen, who put on sunglasses, rode on an ordinary battery car, with a strong and fierce temperament, as if riding a Harley motorcycle. This kind of inner fierceness that does not accept defeat and is not domesticated by modern urban laws is naturally the essence of the "old beast". It can be said that "the scenery is no longer there, and the trapped beasts are still fighting".
Tu Men: "The pursuit of material will hurt your maintenance of the spiritual level, Lao Yang is a typical pursuit of material and money in the process of ignoring cultural and spiritual inheritance, in how to be a father and husband has a problem." ”
Whether it is "simplifying complexity" or "zero degree performance", the performance of Tu is wonderful without a trace. Different from Feng Xiaogang's "Old Cannon", which is based on the natural fit of a high degree of conformity with their own temperament, Tu has got rid of the image of the khan-style princes and nobles who have always been in mainstream film and television works, and pays attention to the interpretation of the inner world of the little people in the cracks of Lao Yang's era. Tu's performance does not emphasize the characters from the outside, but crying and laughing, sadness and joy, are all characters.
When his queen mother-in-law sold melon-style boasting that "all he ate was organic grass, and all he drank was mineral water", his unique sense of humor showed the unique vitality of the dialect. This sense of humor is not only a philosophy of small people in the world, but also a kind of self-deprecation and dissolution in helplessness. When he was beaten to the head and bloodied by the young junior's power uniform, after hearing that his wife's surgery was about to begin, he still faced it with a smile, both relieved and self-ironic to resolve the sentimentality of the passing of the years.
Zhou Ziyang: "I think that the rapid economic development of the society has caused more and more problems, the social value of the gold standard has been formed, ignoring human sophistication and morality, and the relationship between the two closest generations has been broken. ”
The film also shows the most intimate intergenerational relationship between fathers and children and the transmutation of the Chinese family structure. The "nuclear family" in the modern city has replaced the "backbone family" of the traditional patriarchal society, so Lao Yang cannot appreciate the family warmth in the traditional ethics and the joy and harmony of children and grandchildren, and even cannot do his best to love his grandson.
The valuable thing about the film is that it does not fall into a simple indictment of conservative values, does not bury the world, the people's hearts are not ancient, and the morality is lost, but shows the root cause of lifestyle change from the inevitability of the development of urban civilization.
The absence of Lao Yang's fatherhood (the way of love is arbitrary and incorrect) and the dereliction of duty of the husband's identity have made it impossible for him to obtain the recognition of his children, and what is more profound is that the values and behaviors under the traditional ethics and morality he pursues cannot be understood by the children under the laws of modern cities.
The beautiful picture of fatherly kindness and filial piety that he desires is irreconcilablely in conflict with the modern family relationship of equality and freedom in the hearts of his children. Therefore, when he taught his nephew as a patriarch: "The level of being a human being does not mean that you can decide how much money you earn", although there is no lack of depth, it is difficult to convince him, behind which is a kind of identity aphasia. The profit-seeking nature of modern society and the deconstruction of traditional ethics and morality have undoubtedly exacerbated Lao Yang's dilemma, and his "old man has no one to rely on" and "the battle of the trapped beasts" is more profound.
02
In addition to the richness of the theme and the portrayal of the real and powerful characters, the film reflects reality with a calm and restrained tone, and the image language also highlights the creativity of the new director.
When Lao Yang and his friend Lubson routinely and conveniently, a concise metaphorical composition will contain the changes in the world and the ups and downs of life. The magical Ordos has experienced a brilliant plunge into a bubble economy; the old Yang, the former tidemaker, is facing the doom of being abandoned.
The film uses gray and dark cool tones as the main tone of the film in color, which is integrated with the northwest and the dilapidated "ghost town". The rare bright colors of the film are used on the coat that Lao Yang gave to his lover, and the big red that is full of energy and vitality is a kind of catharsis in the heart of the aging and sleepy Old Yang; at this time, the sunlight projects a bracelet-like halo on the lover's hand through the window, which is undoubtedly a bright color in the depressed life of Old Yang.
The handheld photography and long shots in the film do not render the character's wandering loss by creating a sense of dizziness through shaking as in ordinary literary films, but through the continuous follow-up of the characters by handheld photography, the intensive use of medium and close-ups and close-ups, to create a sense of coercion in visual space, which makes people under the lens have nowhere to escape.
The use of visual image modeling is a major feature of the film. The film has a multi-layered visual imagery: a reinforced concrete jungle symbolizing the fruits of urban modernization, representing the Gobi plants that characterize the dry natural climate of the northwest. These rich visual symbols are not only a condensation of the natural environment and humanistic characteristics of the northwest, but also a portrayal of the ups and downs of the "ghost town".
In particular, through animal imagery, Lao Yang's situation of struggling like a trapped beast is full of surreal meaning.
The red-billed pigeon trapped in the wall, the white horse god foal in the dream, the white "zombie" in the forest.
According to the director, the most difficult to understand white monster is actually a hunter unique to Ordos after the snow, wearing a white cloth to catch pheasants. The red-billed pigeon that can't fly out is like the shackles that Old Yang can't break free of, and the white colt crossing the gap is a metaphor for the decadence of Old Yang's youth, and the game under the law of the natural jungle between man and beast is a portrayal of the interests of Old Yang and his children in the contemporary reality.
The fly in the ointment is that some of the imagery is too obscure and slightly stacked. However, the flaws do not hide that "surreal" is not detached from reality, but an irony and criticism based on deep reflection on reality. The use of absurdity, stream of consciousness, symbolism, and metaphor gives the film a distinctly magical reality. Director Zhou Ziyang has said that he is influenced by his appreciation of the director, yugoslav magic realism film master Kusturica (who has won many awards at the Cannes Film Festival with "Song of the Wanderer" and "Underground").
Zhou Ziyang: "I think that if a director becomes a person who can be replaced by anyone, it will be the end for me." Cinema is an artistic creation rather than a product for me. ”
While Zhou Ziyang, like the sixth generation of directors or Western authors, insists on stylized images, he also uses films to trigger the audience's thinking about cultural inheritance, spiritual life, and ways of living.
At the end of the movie, the children get into the car, and the children who are integrated into the laws of the new era regard Lao Yang as a vassal and obstacle, and resolutely leave; the older generation of herders represented by camels cannot make a living can not win the favor of their grandchildren, but instead are obsessed with modern cultural products such as Transformers.
Is it stubbornness or keeping up with the times? Is it to persevere or repent of redemption? For the dying old Yang, it seems that loss and helplessness are doomed to be unable to break free. At the end of Michael Haneke's "Love", Lao Yang finally revealed vulnerability and helplessness in front of his wife. Therefore, the end of the film has been criticized as too abrupt, in fact, for Lao Yang, returning to the most private and strongest harbor in the traditional ethical world of family and marriage is his way of finally healing the wounds.
The film is not only an elegy of the father's generation, there is no helplessness, wandering, confusion in the emotions of unable to extricate themselves, but presents a variety of phenomena that deserve the attention of contemporary young people, which is of strong practical significance. Regarding the transmutation of the Chinese-style family, the balance of intergenerational parent-child relationship, the dilemma of traditional ethics and morality, and the complexity and diversity of human nature, it is worth thinking about with a more dialectical thinking.
© The copyright of this article belongs to Su Ye Hua, please contact the author for any form of reproduction.