Text/Chen Mo
Yamada Yoji, Family Pain
In Yoji Yamada's shots, it is women who tell him the traditional warmth and beauty.
The housewife Shiko played by Matsu Takako in "Little Home", the three generations of women in "Brother", and the housewives from young to old in the "Family Suffering" series all use their subtlety, tenacity, ironing and warmth to build homes for lazy and crazy men.
The third part of "Family Suffering" is called "The Wife Like a Rose", and the first two books have a good feeling for the women of the Hirata family, which is still expressed in ridicule of men, and this one encourages them to blossom and grow thorns in the bright autumn wind. The old lady withdrew the divorce papers, but told her husband not to bury with him, she would buy a cemetery with her new acquaintance and enjoy her freedom. Shi Zhi, a daughter-in-law who has been running the house for more than ten years and is accustomed to taking pocket money in her husband's hands, ran away from home after a big quarrel with her husband, leaving behind a stunned and helpless family. Hirata Konosuke, the head of his wife's family, asked his two sons sadly, "Can't you take two bananas to school for dinner at noon?" ”
I don't know if the real Japanese men have such poor self-care ability. But in the shot, Yoji Yamada mocks men who can't even use the washing machine without the housewives. Some housework, you can make three generations of men a mess, calling friends and companions is not enough, and finally simply the family sits together and talks about "If Shi Zhi does not come back, parents will go to live in a nursing home." On the emotional level, they are even weaker, old men who can't say a good word, and I heard that the old wife didn't want to be buried with him a hundred years later, looking at the empty sea, looking at the empty sea, with a decadent face. Hirata Konosuke is even more like a tiger and a wolf when quarreling, and his wife cried several times after she left home.
What does it mean to live a life with such a man who is crazy on the outside and weak on the inside? So Yoji Yamada was unfair to them, and he wanted to borrow the younger siblings of the younger generation who were equal in thought and modern times to say: "It is your sister-in-law's labor that supports this family." ”
But such comfort does not satisfy the full-time wife who cannot find a sense of value. They can't wait to get out of the house, to literature, to Flamengole, to the life of their old hometown before marriage, to find themselves outside the role of wife and mother.
Many people call Yoji Yamada the baton of Yasujiro Ozu, especially after he paid tribute to Ozu with "Tokyo Family", which is a remake of Tokyo Story.
But Yoji Yamada and Yasujiro Ozu have very different attitudes toward the conflict of the family system, and Ozu Yasujiro's shots, even if it is the internal life of the family, are full of a sense of orderly ritual, with serious warmth everywhere. But Yoji Yamada likes to use comedy to tease tradition. Although equally full of respect for the details of daily life, Yoji Yamada is more relaxed than director Ozu and warmer than Kore-eda and Warmer than the other person known as Ozu's successor.
At the end of the film, Hirata Konosuke finally rushed to apologize to his wife, and on a rainy night, the two had a long talk, and Hirata cried and said, "I can't do it without you." ”
So Yoji Yamada let Shi Zhi return home, and what he learned from Flamenco and what he went out to work did not mention.
Strangely, oriental women are easily hit by the sense of need, and then surrender their weapons and give their mothers love.
In the second season of the just-finished American drama "The Marvelous Madame Maisel", there is also a mother and daughter out of the marriage breath, the background of the story is still the middle of the last century, the mother ran away from home in Paris, rented back to the apartment when she was studying, smoked cigarettes again, raised a puppy to visit the Louvre, the daughter chased after her, said: "Mother I miss you." She replied coldly, "I miss myself too." The daughter who aspires to be a comedian is even more determined, and for the sake of good creation, she is determined to abandon even a happy marriage in the secular sense.
Therefore, the association between Yasujiro Ozu, Yoji Yamada, and Kore-eda is not just a manifestation of a folk drama, but a potential Japanese spiritual "material lament" - to accept the fait accompli stoically, the hard life must be lived.
At the end of the film, the more modern new daughter-in-law announces her pregnancy, setting the stage for the next Hirata family story. In Yoji Yamada's last feature film series, The Story of Injiro, Injiro's sister assumes the role of the prodigal son's watchman. And this time, how many family bitter medicines will the women of the Hirata family sugar coat?
Chen Mo
Chen Mo columnist and film critic. 【Editor: Yuan Yi】