Father's Day is coming, there are many movies about the theme of family affection in China, but some movies are exquisite and moving, but they are not commercial enough and no one cares about it in the early days.
For example, 21 years ago, a treasure movie about father and son —
"That Mountain, That Man, That Dog"
The film is directed by Huo Jianqi and starring Teng Rujun, Liu Ye, Zhao Xiuli and Chen Hao.
Among them, Teng Rujun and Liu Ye starred in the film as father and son, and this film is also Liu Ye's film debut.
The film won the Best Feature Film at the 19th Golden Rooster Awards for Chinese Cinema, and starring Teng Rujun also won the Best Actor Award at the 6th Beijing University Student Film Festival.
However, after the film "That Mountain That Man And That Dog" was made, no one in the domestic market was interested, and no film company was willing to release it.
Instead, the film became popular in Japan, receiving widespread popularity, achieving good box office results and winning the first place in the 2001 Mainichi Film Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
True classics have never been buried in time, and now more and more people have discovered this movie, and the film has a high score of 8.6 under the evaluation of more than 80,000 people on Douban.
The film tells the story of the son who failed the college entrance examination in the 1980s on the first day of his job as a postman's father, and his father took him on a mountain post road.
The mountains are high and the water is far away, and this road has been walked for three days. After this journey, the son slowly understood the hard work and significance of the postman's father's work, and the father gradually realized his debt to the family for more than twenty years. Between the green mountains and rivers, the gap between father and son for many years was eliminated.
The length of the film for an hour and a half is fleeting, but it is not boring at all, and it only feels unfinished. In addition to the father-son main line of the film, most of it is due to the film's narrative technique and the use of camera language.
The film has a unique charm of oriental culture, and in the bland narrative, it presents a beautiful style.
Let's start with the title of the film.
The first is the filming location of the film, and the camera of the film is aimed at the mountains of western Hunan Province. Except for the simple people, the whole film is crowded with a good blue color.
In the midst of green mountains and rivers, the father took his son, neither hurriedly nor slowly, and delivered each letter to the recipient's hand properly.
This kind of unhurried aesthetic is easily reminiscent of Shen Congwen's prose.
Shen Congwen, who calls himself a "countryman", uses xiangxi as the background of his story in many of his creations, which is where he grew up.
He wrote of the Xiangxi Phoenix in the "Xiangxi Sanji": "Beauty lies in the beauty of mountains and clear waters, beauty lies in the spirit of people, and beauty lies in the unity of heaven and man." When mentioning people, he also said, "Live up to the virtues of heaven and earth."
The Xiangxi in the movie is such a long Xiangxi with high mountains and rivers, the carriages and horses are very slow, and the villagers are simple. It is the Xiangxi where dogs bark in the deep alleys and chickens sing mulberry trees.
The director of the film, Huo Jianqi, is an artist, so it is not difficult to understand why the camera can package the mountain scenery of Xiangxi so vividly.
The second is the Father and the Son and the people of the world.
The profession of father and son is a postman, and the profession of postman is almost extinct now with the rapid development of science and technology.
Just like the classic line of Jiang Wen in "Evil Does Not Pressure Righteousness", "Who writes a diary of a serious person?" "Who writes letters to a decent person?
Today, few people take the time to write a letter and wait a few days for it to arrive.
But in the 1980s, when the film was set, letters were the only means of conveying messages to people who separated the two places, so postmanships became an essential profession.
"Messenger of emotions" sounds like a beautiful profession. "See the words as a meeting", the letter is special in the end, the film is quoted by sending letters, giving the father decades of trekking through the mountains and rivers with a sacred sense of mission.
Father and Son walked on such a large mountain post road in western Hunan Province, passing by one household after another.
The father nagged, took his son to recognize the road and cut a short way, and also took him to know people to find the land, taught him to inherit the profession of postman, but also inherited goodwill, and also introduced him to the girl he saw in his eyes.
Some people say that "the girl in Xiangxi is called Cuicui, and the daughter-in-law in the northeast is called Cuihua, gentle and bold, just one word away", and the girls in Xiangxi are also part of the moving landscape.
In 1998, Chen Hao had not yet opened the "Ten Thousand Charms" mode, and he was agile and lively like the "small beasts" that ran out of "Border City", intelligent and cunning.
The postal road is long, the long pavilion is short, and gradually there is no letter, the father sees the way he came from his son, sees that for decades, the people who go out are not hurt, but the bridesmaids are often worried, and the wife just stands at the head of the bridge, waiting again and again.
In the father's Dun Dun teaching, the son gradually understood the father, eliminating the barriers caused by the father's often absent presence from childhood to adulthood.
"If you can move your father," a line, a memory, from sitting on his father's shoulder when he was young to carrying his father across the river when he grew up, the son officially took over the mailbox in his father's hand and became a messenger shuttling through the mountains.
The way the film explains fathers and sons doesn't have too special angles.
The son is a tidemaker in the new era, who wants to prove his own strength and has his own heartfelt heart, while the father is traditionally generous and tolerant, silently following, leading by example, and nagging and urging everything.
"That Mountain, That Man, That Dog" imitates the long-standing status quo of Chinese family relations, in the film, the father-son relationship from relatively wordless to smoke and chat, contradictions intertwined and balanced, this simple realistic way has won the hearts of the people.
The father's love of the East is a fabrication in the heart, and there is no word in the mouth.
We always say that the Japanese "axis", but the advantage of the "axis" is that it can wash away the lead and explore the essence of things, which is probably the reason why this movie has become a hit in Japan.
Finally, there is another character in the title - the second son, the dog.
Although the movie is called "That Mountain That Man That Dog", the dog also refers to the progression of the father-son relationship as a coordinate, but the film has less rendering of it, and finally just falls out like a dragon set with good acting skills.
Overall, "That Mountain Man That Dog" is one of the few movies that can make people calm down in this fast-paced life.
From beginning to end, the film reveals the thick earthy atmosphere of mountains and rivers and grasses, which is simple and plain but can give people a great touch.
Nowadays, it is probably difficult to make such a movie, not only because it is difficult to have a good script, but also because Xiangxi in the last century cannot go back, just as our childhood can only sink into memory.
At the end of the film, the son who sleeps in the same bed hugs his father, in a dream. The sober father had great satisfaction in the corners of his mouth.
See a short comment:
"It turns out that every man wants to hug his father."
Chinese are not like the West, and they are always timid about words.
Young people fall in love with the upper floor and are not willing to show weakness to the world, but in fact, because they have a family, they can be more vulnerable, which is a rare luxury.
You will have to play with your feelings for yourself so that you will not cover your face and sink.
Bluestone Film Editorial Office | v7
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