"See You Again Nara": A Gentle Expression of a Cruel Life

Author: Song said

The film "See You Nara Again" was released nationwide on March 19, and was supervised and produced by Naomi Kawase and Jia Zhangke. In director Peng Fei's shots, the group of war orphans is sad but not sensational, the sadness and restraint of finding relatives, in the handling of cultural differences and language barriers, some appropriate sense of humor is added, leading the audience to gently approach the real life of war orphans.

Write about humanity with introspection

The movie "See You Again in Nara" focuses on the group of orphans left behind by the war, and the film tells a touching mother-daughter relationship spanning 60 years. In 1945, after Japan's defeat, Chen Huiming (Wu Yanshu) adopted a Japanese orphan named Chen Lihua. In 1994, Lihua returned to Japan to find her biological parents and maintained correspondence with Chen Huiming for nearly a decade. In 2005, Chan Wai Ming, who has not received a letter from Li Hua for a long time, travels to Japan alone and begins a long search for relatives with the help of the orphaned second generation Ozawa (Hidezawa) and the retired Japanese policeman (Kunimura Hayabusa).

For the depiction of the life of The Japanese orphans after returning to Japan, the part of "See Nara Again" that is not very sensational, through the subtleties of living habits and other aspects, makes an introverted display of this group.

Orphans who return to Japan experience double-sided suffering in their hearts. On the one hand, his familiar habits with Chinese culture, in the film, Grandma and Ozawa encounter Japanese orphans in the search process, all speak with Northeastern Chinese accents, watch Chinese TV programs with "cauldrons" equipped with satellite dishes, and sing Chinese folk songs to entertain guests. On the other hand, they are trying their best to adapt to the alienation of their hometown, and when the lead actor Ozawa and her boyfriend go to see the man's parents, the parents think that Ozawa is a Chinese and oppose the relationship between the two. After the Japanese orphans return to China, they have to call themselves Japanese when facing the Japanese, and when they face the Chinese, it is difficult to hide their cordial enthusiasm, the tearing in identity, and the cultural mezzanine, these details show the current situation of the orphans after the return of the orphans after the war.

In the film, whether the orphaned and adopted daughter has been found, the final way to deal with it is to leave blank, and the retired old policeman who helped find someone called to inform him that he was dead, but other northeast compatriots called and said, "There is a person who married into the next county, and the description is particularly similar." In the process of searching for relatives, the film never let Chen Lihua appear, and the audience expected to find her, and they could only see her life after returning to Japan from the only words of Chen Lihua's letters.

The film ends with a Japanese song sung by Teresa Teng, and the three of them walk silently on the streets of Nara at night. The helplessness and sadness in reality ended faintly, and the three formed a family in the process of searching for relatives, leaving a trace of warmth.

Peel away the sorrow with warmth

The theme of war orphans is very heavy, and "See Nara Again" uses a sense of lightness to express. At the beginning of the film, the background is not explained by real film and television materials, and a relatively relaxed animation method is adopted, which explains the background of the story in an easy-to-understand manner, and the audience's mood in the painting is relatively relaxed.

The long story of finding relatives is actually very sad, but after watching the movie, you will find that the tone of the movie is not lacking in warmth and humor. Grandma Chen went to the butcher's shop to buy something, and she and the clerk staged a funny "animal imitation". Since Grandma Chen does not understand Japanese, she can only express it through foley and body movements, buy lamb to learn sheep barking, and the clerk responds in the same way, these small designs make the movie easy and interesting. And after Ozawa bought the crab, Grandma sneakily took it and released it in the lake, but Ozawa told Grandma that it was a sea crab, which also hid a metaphorical meaning in humor.

"See You Again Nara" was not treated as a sad film, but the sad emotions were also expressed. A certain boss of her adopted daughter Chen Lihua still remembers that she used to work very tofu donuts, remembers that he misunderstood her embarrassing past of stealing things to drive away her, but he did not remember what her name was. The adoptive mother, Grandma Chen, also did not know what the Japanese name of the adopted daughter Chen Lihua was, and could only eat the donuts of the place where Chen Lihua had worked, and taste Chen Lihua's life after returning to Japan, in one of the shots, she learned that her adoptive daughter's blood identification failed to be driven away, and when her life was not satisfactory, her expression changed from grievances and sadness to concern and pain, there were no lines, only tears under her eyes and twitching corners of her mouth. The loneliness and forgotten sadness of the Japanese orphan Chen Lihua fainted in the introverted details.

Describing the group of war orphans, the previous documentary "A Japanese Orphan's Unrelenting Love for China" is a humanistic documentary to show the search process of the war orphans for their spiritual homeland and blood homeland, and the movie "Tang Detective 3" tells the injustice of the fate suffered by the orphans at the end, and in the hands of Peng Fei, the director of "See Nara Again", he uses the expression of anger to interpret the cruel life and the tragedy of the times in a restrained and plain semi-recorded way, and tells the current situation of the survival of the orphans after the war very gently.

Almost all of the various people depicted in "See You Again in Nara" have prototypes. In order to write the script, director and screenwriter Peng Fei lived in Nara for 8 months, and during this trip he gradually discovered many interesting details: the orphaned elderly would pickle sauerkraut to wrap sauerkraut dumplings by themselves; for example, walking in the countryside, if they found a person with a "cauldron" at the door, they could basically determine that they needed to watch Chinese TV station. The same scene of The old Chinese and Japanese dramas has also become an important point of view in the film, due to the language barrier, the on-site communication completely relies on actions and expressions, and the actors sometimes improvise even the director bluntly says that there are often unexpected surprises. (Song said)

Source: Qilu Evening News