Text: Overnight flowers
The feature film "Juvenile Offenders" launched by Shenzhen Film Company is a blockbuster domestic film classic in the 1980s, in which all juvenile offenders are starred by juvenile delinquents detained by the Shanghai Juvenile Offender Correctional Office. The film is directed by Zhang Liang, written by Wang Jingzhu and Zhang Liang, and co-starring Zhu Manfang, Lu Bin, Jiang Jian and Zhao Ruping. The film won the 1985 China Radio, Film and Television Ministry Outstanding Film Award, and the 9th Popular Film "Hundred Flowers Award" Best Feature Film Award (along with "Sunrise" and "Our Veterans").
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Zhang Liang, the director of the movie "Juvenile Delinquent", became a well-known actor with the movie "Dong Cunrui" as early as the 1950s, and in the 1960s, he won the Best Actor Award at the 2nd Popular Film Hundred Flowers Awards for his role as Big Tiger and Erhu in the film "Brothers Are Good" directed by Yan Jizhou. In addition to achieving high achievements in performing arts, Zhang Liang's "Yamaha Fish File" has become a representative of the documentary aesthetics of domestic films in the 1980s by virtue of its primary color presentation of Guangzhou's well life and Lingnan humanistic customs in the new era, opening a new chapter in southern cinema. Director Zhang Liang and his wife, Wang Jingzhu, the screenwriter of the film "Juvenile Offender", have successfully collaborated on the film "Plum Blossom Scarf" (which won the Honorary Award of the Cairo International Film Festival).
Born in the mid-1980s, the tone of the film is different from the extreme simplicity, crispness, idealism and romanticism of the early 1980s. It focuses its perspective on the metropolis with the most developed information and the most modern lifestyle at that time.
In the unprecedented open cultural form of the 1980s, a large number of European and American culture, Hong Kong and Taiwan cultural products flowed in, for example, the urban entertainment venues in the film appeared in "Moon River" (Oscar-winning song, Audrey Hepburn starring in the "Breakfast of Tiffany's Breakfast" interlude), and the video tape screened by the family was accompanied by Zhang Guorong's "Monica".
In the process of continuous development of commercial society, people's spiritual life and value pursuit have undergone subtle changes, and many young people are confused and confused in the face of modern cities, and their spiritual dilemmas cannot be guided.
Zhang Liang, the director of this film, summarized the theme of the film as "saving children and cultivating talents" (see the director of "Juvenile Delinquents"). It can be seen that this film reflects the director's thinking on the education of young people as a filmmaker at that time.
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The style of this film as a whole is a documentary drama, although it has a strong sense of design in individual plots and details, but on the whole it is to express the real and complex real life and the social reality and life philosophy embodied in these realities.
In the "Sand Gull" directed by Zhang Nunxin in the early 1980s, Zhang Nunxin boldly used non-professional actors, and in this film, the method of "juvenile offenders playing juvenile offenders" was adopted to highlight the authenticity of the image.
Among the juvenile offenders in the film, there are two main portrayals, Fang Gang and Xiao Fo. And they did not randomly become the protagonists of the movie, but these two characters reflected a certain typicality and universality.
Fang Gang was born into a family of intellectuals, and his father and mother were both teachers, which in the common sense view, his family education did not have an educational tragedy due to the limitation of knowledge level. The realism of the film is reflected here, he is in a specific era of the story, each character has a sense of historical depth.
Although Fang Gang's growth experience is diluted in the movie, it is not difficult to find out that he lacks love in his heart because his parents failed to educate him in the cadre school in his childhood, and when he used to using strength to prevent himself, he became fierce and competitive. Instead of being guided and comforted, the parents were ashamed of it, which was the first layer that made Fang Gang's personality violent. When he enters the correctional facility, he sees that there is a distorted environment of oppression and bullying among juvenile offenders, and when he wants to repent, he finds that people's stereotypes about juvenile delinquents are deeply rooted. The film presents a very layered psychological change to his self-abandonment.
Xiao Fo is another image with typical significance. His parents were the kind of parents who valued practical interests and despised feelings, who married casually and divorced without scruples, and who saw their children as superfluous. Xiao Fo is lively and clever, smart and lovely, and the jianghu qi in him comes from the tragic experience of no one raising in his childhood, and his heart needs to be recognized, so when his hard work is praised, he realizes his own value for the first time.
In addition, Shen Jinming's excellent grades and good tutoring, but because of the impulse of adolescence, it is also a typical example at that time. At that time, the information developed rapidly, teenagers had a broader vision, and their own behavior needed to be better guided.
There are many problems behind these juvenile offenders that deserve deep consideration: original family education, popularization of legal awareness, and guidance of correct life values.
The film shows a realistic picture of the game between juvenile offenders in the prison, but this is different from the scenes in Hong Kong movies. In the Hong Kong films of the 1980s, there were also many films that deeply portrayed prison life, such as "Prison Storm" starring Chow Yun Fat and "Women's Prison" starring Zheng Yuling, which used a more dramatic way and a more star-like expression in line with market tastes to present the audience with a variety of human nature full of good, evil, beauty and ugliness.
In contrast, the philosophical rationality of "juvenile delinquents playing juvenile delinquents" in this film strives to truly reflect real life itself, which embodies the pursuit of documentary aesthetics.
The pursuit of documentary is not a completely unskilled record of reality, and directors in the 80s generally emphasized the modernization of film language, that is, to use more cinematic means to express. The use of tone in this film highlights the visuality, such as the oppression of the cramped space in the prison window, and the film uses gray and dark tones, which is also the main color of the whole film. When showing the entertainment life of modern cities, the film presents a strange urban image with a noisy soundtrack and noisy colors.
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The film's ingenious structural conception is a highlight that is not easy to spot. The main line of the film is the story of the reporter's correctional office and the story of the juvenile offender, and a side line in the film is that the son of the female reporter embarks on the criminal path in the absence of her parents and the doting of her grandmother. Here, the film takes a cross-montage approach, a story of interconnectedness that takes place at the same time and in different spaces, and finally intersects at the moment when the reporter returns home to witness his son being taken away. In the narrative of the two lines, there are details and omissions, light and heavy, which reflects the creator's excellent sense of proportion.
Xie Jiexin, a reporter from "Society and Family" magazine played by Zhu Manfang, is a character with a strong sense of design, and she is the embodiment of social conscience and correct educational concepts. She went deep into the correctional facility alone to observe juvenile offenders, and also showed meticulous care and compassion for them, showing an extremely accessible and highly inclusive educational concept. The character is often perceived as overly idealistic and unreal. On the one hand, the role is considered to be too deliberately placed, and her speech style is slightly blunt; on the other hand, her posture is considered by some film critics to be a lofty sympathy and pity, lacking deep emotional identity and humanistic care.
When we think about the role of the characters in the film as a whole, we may be better able to look at the characters outside the character labels themselves. In the international film world in the early years, there is no shortage of similar highly functional heroines as narrative threads, such as the representative works of Oscar-winning film queens: Jian Fangda in "China Syndrome", Sally Field in "No Malice", their identities are also journalists, their character shaping is not a focus in the film, their roles themselves only provide a narrative perspective.
Xie Jiexin in this film is exactly like this, she herself as a journalist, a bystander of juvenile delinquents, this is her identity, in this heavy identity, she is a bystander, but also an explorer, she opened the curtain of juvenile offenders and parents. At the same time, she is also the mother of the teenagers - guardian and educator, which is another story line of the film.
At the beginning of the movie, the child asks for pocket money, but she gives the child a lot of pocket money. However, she knows the doting love of her grandmother in her heart but does not try to think of other ways to better educate and guide the child, which shows from the side that her subconscious is also doting and conniving with the child. While an education specialist educates and guides juvenile offenders and their irresponsible parents, her own children embark on the path of crime because of their own negligence.
This is undoubtedly extremely ironic and enhances the reflective nature of the film. What's even more interesting is that at the end of the film, after the two lines cross, the film takes a downward shot from the perspective of God.
In the story of juvenile delinquent Fang Gang and Xiao Fo, journalist Xie Jiexin is a bystander, but she is also trapped in the puzzle of her own family; the story of the movie "Juvenile Offender", the audience is a bystander, can the audience reflect on their own responsibilities after being shocked by it? This is the percussion of the film. The authorities are fans, which is also the enlightening significance of the film to the audience.
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