◎ Yu Lu
Who can refuse Chekhov? In particular, Uncle Vanya. The reason why "Driving My Car" recently won the Oscar for Best International Film, in my opinion, is related to the strong sacrifice of "Uncle Vanya".
Let's see what Uncle Vanya says—Vanya has worked and lived hard for twenty-five years for the professor he once recognized, and as a result, when he returns from a vacation with the professor, he sees the truth about his vulgarity and selfishness, and thus falls into a mental crisis. Vanya finally attempted to shoot the professor, and attempted suicide, although she continued to live, but her heart was already a broken string, and it had collapsed.
Let's talk about the story of "Driving My Car": the male protagonist Jiafu, who is the director of the stage play, and his wife, who is the screenwriter, have a deep affection for each other, until one day they bump into the sound derailment, but he hides the door and continues everything without doing anything. With the sudden death of Yin, Jiafu fell into the end of the spirit, and then became acquainted with the female driver Who drove for himself during the rehearsal of "Uncle Vanya", and after the two drove to Hokkaido to review the past, the male protagonist overcame obstacles and took to the stage and played the role of Vanya.
Obviously, director Ryusuke Hamaguchi wants to be on a par with Chekhov. When I first read "Uncle Vanya" at the age of nineteen, it was like I was hit by a heavy hammer in ignorance, and I burst into tears - and then look at "Driving My Car", well, this conclusion can be placed here first: Sacrifice Uncle Vanya, no problem, but too much force, it must be to lining Dong Shi's heart.
But Dong Shi is also Shi, and it also shows that she absolutely admires the beauty of Xi Shi, but I privately think that I don't have to talk about the award or the original Novel's Haruki Murakami, but I can talk about how the director understands "Uncle Vanya". Yes, these three hours can be seen as Ryusuke Hamaguchi's version of "Uncle Vanya's Feeling After Reading".
"Discovery" versus resistance to discovery
"Driving My Car" begins by describing the protagonist's family's rich husband and wife relationship - the wife yin, as a writer, can only find creative inspiration after being intimate with her husband, and when they are naked, the sound unfolds a thousand and one nights of endless story imagination. In short, the two of them are like dancing a dance of two people. But what touched director Ryusuke Hamaguchi was definitely not the above, but the door that Iefuku turned away and gently closed after seeing his wife's voice derailed.
However, this "collision" is a kind of life "discovery" for Jiafu?
It should be known that the core of "Uncle Vanya" is a kind of "rediscovery" of man's self and destiny - the kind of "discovery" that awakens people in dreams: to say it well is to "listen to thunder in the silent place", to say that it is ugly is to restore the blind man's understanding, and as for the main criterion for evaluating this "discovery", the first is that the inner world is drawn from the bottom of the pot.
For example, this "discovery" of Uncle Vanya seems to be extremely small- it is nothing more than a professor who has spent more than twenty years to provide for himself is just a "nameless person": "He, for twenty-five years, has been teaching art, has been writing art papers, but what art is, he does not even understand a bit... This is tantamount to saying that he has been talking nonsense for twenty-five years. ”
In fact, the professor is not a liar: for twenty-five years, he has never been mediocre and nagging, narrow-minded and selfish, changing the environment and conditions, vanya himself. It was as if he had closed his beauty to others for a long time, and found that he had actually stumbled with such a vulgar ugly monster to have so many youths, how could he not jump to his feet and scream?!
I think this is also the reason why Chekhov called his work a "comedy" - in the eyes of the professor, in addition to his own self-hatred and self-pity, everything in the holiday villa was originally peaceful, but the former brother-in-law suddenly roared and chased and shot at him all over the house. And in the eyes of the Creator, looking at the little dolls he made up by himself, on the one hand, he is waking up, and on the other hand, he is up and down and there is no way out, how can there not be a kind of mischievous desolation and funny?
But in "Drive My Car", frankly speaking, the male protagonist Jiafu does not have any real sense of life "discovery".
Because from the last Hokkaido line, the male protagonist Jiafu has always known that Yin is cheating with the male protagonist of each of his plays - in other words, he has long discovered the dark room in his life, and he has chosen to "not find" this discovery. Therefore, the witnessing plot of Jiafu's secret love for his wife is more of an explanation and illustration for the audience: as for Jiafu himself, he does not want to find out, he resists discovery, to conceal forbearance, to silence, to be plausible.
Yes, he is a man who is drowning in the pain of his own game and his own competition, the "quirk" in life.
What to do after "discovery"
What do people do after they "discover"? Or rather, it's from this moment that the story really unfolds, which is why "Uncle Vanya" already sees the professor's face from the beginning of the scene, rather than "Drive My Car". As a result, the twist of "Drive My Car" is even more lazy - on the night that his wife Yin and Jiafu said they wanted to talk, the wife suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage. From this moment on, the story is like a direct drive away: from a story that should be about how to face the truth of life, it has regressed into a bowl of chicken soup to talk about "whether to face life or not".
For example, fearing that it would be difficult to ride a tiger, director Ryusuke Hamaguchi let the hero choose the lightest road to walk - whether it is rehearsing with a stage play in Hiroshima, or the painful Chen family history of the female driver Tori, plus the former love enemy who came to the crew to confront, it is like a group of Zen masters constantly chanting a cheap and simple sentence to the protagonist: let go. Live.
This is an operation that can be completed by taking a few chicken soup pictures from the circle of friends, and it is not good, one or two times the psychology clinic has no head and no brain, and it can also be rich.
Put it down?! Wouldn't it be better to call people immortals directly? Don't you just have to talk about it when you can't put it down? The so-called fear is to wake up but there is no way to go, then it is worth talking about is not to see how to go without a way? The reason why "Driving My Car" has a kind of temperament throughout the article is actually because the theme drifts and he is always talking about some digressions.
Chekhov's reflections on Vanya are much more frank – after discovering the truth of life, Vanya goes through several processes: he first hates his "mortal enemy", the mediocre who stole his years and possibilities: "You ruined my life!" I haven't lived! I sacrificed my own best years because of your fault! You are my most hated enemy! He hated himself equally: "I ruined my life!" I have talent, I have knowledge, I am bold... If my life had been normal, I would have been a Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky... Cough, how did I talk about off-topic! ”
As for the village doctor Astroff, he felt that the way he could barely save him was to exchange love with the beauty Yelena, although Yelena was not someone who could pull him out of the swamp: she needed a better life than the real life, and as she fled, Astrov asked us all the real questions — even if the truth of life was discovered, what?
"Let's go." If the horse is already set, let's go. ”
Astroff chose to leave, with the problem, and the house man chose to leave, with "solving".
"Don't fool yourself"
If you can't enjoy the happiness of the fool, then at least "don't fool yourself", this is Chekhov's words engraved in the human sky word for word with Uncle Vanya. Don't fool yourself! Because facing the pain directly is already the greatest self-esteem of people in the face of the fate of constantly fiddling with right and wrong.
"I'm forty-seven now, so suppose I can live to be sixty, and I'll have to live for thirteen years." How long is that! These thirteen long years, how can I go down? There is nothing to fill my life! Do you understand...... I wish I could change my life! ...... Tell me, how can I do it? Where to start? ”
Yeah, even if you don't want to fool yourself, how do you start? Maybe it can start with love, because love is not just love, but an outstretched hand—it's just that Yelena doesn't want to reach out to Astroff, just as Astrop doesn't want to reach out to poor Sonia.
Back to "Driving My Car", in fact, there is such a "reach out", which is in the form of the female driver Duli - Duli talked about his well-behaved mother, and also told his past of not rescuing his mother after the landslide, and finally, Duli drove the male protagonist Jiafu to the original site of "Killing Mother", stood on the snow slope, and dismissed Jiafu. However, when this clone of Sonia said "we must live", it seemed so deliberate, why?
Because Jiafu and Duli are facing a kind of dramatic "trauma".
Yeah, what's more terrifying? Or what are we, as eating men and women, more generally escaping? Is it the wife who cheats, dies suddenly, and kills his mother? And the dilemma that Chekhov shows through Vanya and Astrov and others is not some kind of life and death suffering, but vulgar, meaningless: vulgar and numb people, vulgar and meaningless daily life.
Yes, where Vanya found was the truth of the professor, but the truth of life - these who opened their eyes and saw the truth of life were really unlucky people who drew the limited edition of the blind box of fate! With a wry smile, Chekhov poured out infinite compassion and said, "Those who live in the next one or two hundred years from us, those who look down on us because we have foolishly and needlessly wasted our lives, may find a way to be happy..."
Not only two hundred years, thousands of years later, someone will "discover" such a life, like a sleepwalker, not waking up is good, waking up to find that he is blind and blind, has reached the cliff, how to adjust GPS? The answer is that there is no beginning and no end, life has no beginning and no end, generation after generation, the former servants and successors, the words are still in the ears, what can be done?
At the end of "Driving My Car", Hamaguchi Ryusuke also gave his answer, and the man took the stage to play Vanya, which seemed to be healing, seemed to be reconciliation, but in other words, it was also called self-deception - the more he played Vanya, the farther away he was from the real Vanya.
So when the last Tori embraces Jiafu and says a sentence of "we want to live", it is better to add a sentence, "We must live indiscriminately, self-persuasion to live" - because thinking is fruitless, feeling and understanding, if it is difficult to do without even deceiving yourself, it is just the director let Jiafu play a bigger cocoon, with a new isolation to replace the previous blindness, and this trick needs the most vigilance, because the cunning of people lies in the fact that The best at using logical self-consistency to beautify ourselves: for example, we are always unable to distinguish between numbness and loneliness, the difference between loneliness and silence, which is why morphine is always more terrible than poison.
Seeing the "Lunar Eclipse"
Finally, there is always a "lunar eclipse" day in life, but there are always people who see the tengu eating the moon, and "Driving My Car" this article "Uncle Vanya's Feeling After Reading" is written a bit like facing the "lunar eclipse", covering the tengu's mouth and making it not bark at the moon.
Although I can't understand Ryusuke Hamaguchi's reading, it is inevitable that he wants to clarify again when he compares Uncle Vanya: Facing pain is already the greatest self-esteem of people in the face of fate, otherwise? Otherwise, he is either a fool born lucky, such as a professor who complains incessantly and feels that he is the most unfortunate under the heavens, or he becomes a family blessing – let "live" become a slogan and continue to suffer in vain until he is completely disordered and numb.
As for what is the eclipse of life, it is nothing more than the alternation of light and dark, and it is nothing more than life revealing to us the true face of the junction line. Yes, every time we "discover" life, we must be in a dilemma. If you're in a dilemma, anyway, then go in — as for "Driving My Car," you just drove backwards.
And being able to be a human being at the moment of death, saying that being a person in this life is not deceitful, it is the most perfect ending, only because it is true that there is no answer, which is Chekhov's greatest reward for people who open their eyes as if they were born - if life is absurd itself, then not deceiving itself is already meaning itself.