Tearing and fighting fiercely, hysterical revenge, the sinister-looking little three... This is most people's impression of the theme of infidelity; will the righteousness of life and death, family warmth, understanding and reconciliation occur in the story of infidelity?
Back in time to the end of 2018, let's take a look at what kind of story the Golden Horse Award-winning hit movie "Who Fell in Love with Him First" tells people.
Why are same-sex stories getting hotter and hotter? Why are more and more people willing to listen to such stories? To understand these questions, we must first think about how warmth and righteousness coexist in a story from a derailment film to a closet film.
Later in life, my father changed the beneficiary of the insurance to a junior three — a story of infidelity.
Xiao San is a man, and the original match is to let Xiao San's mother know that her son is gay - this is a story that came out.
In order to return to normal life, the father was separated from homosexuals, and after living with his wife for fourteen years and not much time in life, he wanted to live for himself, abandoning his wife and son to return to homosexuals - this is a story about poor gay wives.
Gay people wait in desperation for fourteen years after being abandoned, depleting their savings for their lover when he returns—a story of desperate waiting.
This story is a combination of dog blood, same sex, triviality, obsessiveness, so desperate, so real, so pitiful, and so gentle, this story is - "Who Fell in Love with Him First".
01. Tell the perspective
The author's perspective of storytelling determines the perspective of the audience to see the story, you can hide, deceive, leave suspense, you can also be straightforward, frank, give all the information to the audience, let them judge for themselves.
"Who Comes First" adopts a personalized perspective, and in the transformation of different perspectives, the plot curve is perfect and tortuous, so that the controversy of the gay theme gives way to love and artistic beauty.
When watching the story, the reader's attention is actually subject to the author's arrangement, and those popular works often make the selling point more prominent through the law of attraction, and the audience is satisfied with it, and naturally pays for their own preferences. The story begins with the narration of his son Song Chengxi and a psychiatrist, during which the son has a non-absolutely objective perspective on God.
Observing the entanglement of love and family money disputes from the perspective of the child, the child's simple and straightforward sense of justice and the simple black-and-white world view meet the intricate love-hate entanglement, showing an impotent but hopeful expressiveness.
In terms of character building, Song Chengxi is a child who is in a rebellious period, and he believes that his mother is vulgar, full of resentment, shrewd and loves money, trivial and nagging.
He asked the psychiatrist who would win between "Xiao San"'s mother and "Xiao Wang", believing that his mother's encounter was "the punishment of an adult who did something wrong", and after arguing with his mother, he lived in "Xiao Wang's" house with gambling and curiosity, observed the fight between the two, and had a small careful opportunity to "steal the insurance money".
The plot creates an image, and the image is subordinate to the plot, and the storyteller must always pay attention to maintaining the harmonious coexistence relationship between the two.
As already mentioned above, "Who Comes First" is a multi-perspective story, so there is more than one narrative line. The first line, the story observes the struggle between "Xiao San" and "Xiao Wang" from the perspective of a child, and in Song Chengxi's perspective, "Xiao Wang" gradually changes from a bad person who is absolutely addicted to destroying other people's families and robbing insurance money into a lover who exhausts all his energy for love.
In writing, there will always be people who ask, the role is too flat, there is no way to make him three-dimensional in the plot, the authors need to pay attention to the fact that the shaping of a character is not only by his own actions can be successful, try to make your role vivid in the narration of other characters, the layers are rich, the characters in the story are in the same time and space of the same world view, and the evaluation between the characters is more useful than the author standing outside the work and saying a hundred sentences.
"Who First" successfully uses this creative technique, in the eyes of Song Chengxi, "Little King" Gao Yujie is bohemian, but has a sincere and romantic soul. Later, he used his own way to canvass for Ajay's plays, and anxiously asked his mother for help after Ajay was beaten by the people in the underground money house and broke his leg.
In this line, the author buried the question that he could not understand, in this emotional dispute, who did wrong. He complained countless times about Liu Sanlian's hysteria about fate, but he also understood that his boredom came from the powerlessness of the ego.
He hated Ajay because he was the most sincere and affectionate lover who gave everything for love. So who is wrong? The dead father could not answer him.
Going back to the beginning of the question, why does a topic that seems a bit serious and heavy attract more and more people to listen to the story behind it? What good ways can we find in creating works of the same sex?
The film adds graffiti full of children's emotions to Song Chengxi's perspective, more intuitively showing Song Chengxi's ideas, children's perspective abandons the inherent prejudice and criticism of the same-sex problem in society, gives the story a gentle breakthrough point with forgiveness and understanding, and the graffiti dissolves the seriousness and despair of same-sex topics, with a light comedy style.
Ease does not represent contempt and ridicule, but symbolizes abandoning stereotypes and returning to the original state of talking about a problem. On the other hand, Ajie's intimate picture with his father is always covered up by chaotic lines, which also represents Song Chengxi's confusion and swaying about it.
He is the result of the combination of form and marriage, but also by the influence and harm brought about by the shape of the parents, so the film reflects on some objective negative consequences caused by the prejudice of society against homosexual love to a certain extent, beyond the narrative field of the general similar theme.
In the past, same-sex films generally focused on emphasizing the gender identity of the same-sex self and the normalization of same-sex relationships, such as "Lan Yu" and "Spring Break", all of which highlighted the dilemma of same-sex love with moving and struggling stories.
The film's children's perspective goes beyond the previous narrative mode, placing the caring eye on the family, revealing the hidden pain of the middle-aged same-sex group in the family - the indelible harm to the wife and the next generation brought about by the shape of marriage, showing a unique social thinking.
02. Maternal care
In this story, there are three mothers: Liu Sanlian, Gao Mu, and Ajie, a gay man.
Liu Sanlian is a traditional oriental mother, she is stoic and kind, she sincerely loves her son and husband, and for her mother, she bears all the pain of her husband's betrayal and death.
The first half of the film has been emphasizing the identity of Liu Sanlian's mother, which prevails in contrast to Ajie's pure and passionate love, appearing vulgar, shrewd and rude.
In order for her son to be a man, she studied well, and was unwilling to expose Song Zhengyuan's cheating on the same sex to the outside world, and she was also willing to seek perfection and not divorce Song Zhengyuan to maintain a superficial marital relationship.
After her son gambled and lived in Ajay's house, she came to Ajay's simple house to clean up, just to give her son a better living environment, and even at the end, Liu Sanlian understood and helped Ajie with motherhood.
This kind of maternal love is real to the point of having a rough feeling, but also with a painful sense of fatalism, both trivial to appear warm, but also hidden to appear sad.
The second maternal character is Gao Mu, who has been worried that her son will not have a girlfriend, and shows a cute and inclusive side after thinking that Liu Sanlian is her son's girlfriend.
She was originally the one who was most worried that her children were gay, but after Liu Sanlian told her this cruel truth, the film only gave her a vague background perspective. The middle journey is omitted, and the stage play at the end of the mother holding flowers to celebrate Ajay shows the strength of a mother who always embraces everything with love.
The third character with motherhood is Ajay, who is a man. He is rough and rough, and his mouth is thick, but he shows a gentle and delicate maternal trait in terms of love.
He accompanied Song Zhengyuan with a delicate heart to cut his hair with Song Zhengyuan when he was self-loathing to make him happy; he understood Liu Sanlian's complaints and pain, and helped Liu Sanlian discipline Song Chengxi together; he even called himself "stepfather" and "stepmother" to Song Chengxi, and he loved the child of this old lover and invisibly assumed the role of mother.
There is a very intriguing little detail in the movie, and when Song Chengxi shows absolute resistance to Liu Sanlian's desire to take him home, a car comes in the middle of the road and divides Liu Sanlian and Ajie to the same side, which may have a certain suggestive significance.
"Who Fell in Love with Him First" is different from the narrative focused on men in traditional same-sex films, but focuses on characters with maternal temperament, conveying understanding and tolerance through soft motherhood.
The same wife, the betrayed lover, the mother, they can be said to be trinity, mutual understanding and mutual understanding, bringing a unique pulse warmth to the film.
03. Topics after the theme
The movie poster says: Love first win
Ajay also declares himself in the movie: love is the greatest
The film uses the motif of same-sex love to convey the profound values and methodology hidden behind it: love and forgiveness
In order to convey such an idea to the audience, the storyteller must strike at the heart with a plot that evokes empathy to the greatest extent. To achieve this effect, the authors can choose to tell something that spans a long time, but the characters have not changed, and achieve the story effect through the breadth of time and the persistence of the characters.
For example, Ajay smokes a cigarette on the balcony and stares at Song Chengxi, explaining his definition of ten thousand years to Song Chengxi.
For example, looking back on her fourteen years of married life, Liu Sanlian, after telling the psychologist about her experience, choked up and asked her: Is it all fake? Without a little love? A little bit...... None of them?
The story forms a closed loop here. The elaborate structure and the meticulous and perfect plot conception play the most useful role here. At first, it seems to be the story of a wife who angrily rebukes Xiao San for insurance money, and later, the story seems to become a game between two people, who falls in love with him first as a chip to defend the justice of their love.
The screenwriter's good intentions seem to be more than just setting up a foreshadowing, where all foreshadowings want to play a role must be triggered by the emotions of the characters.
But the story tells us that they met Song Zhengyuan on the same day and fell in love with Song Zhengyuan on the same day.
So in the end, love becomes the solution to these entanglements and the completion of self-redemption.
At the end of the movie, when Ajie sat in a wheelchair and endured the pain to complete the stage play that Song Zhengyuan was responsible for music seventeen years ago, the camera was interspersed, telling the scene of Liu Sanlian and Ajie's first encounter with Song Zhengyuan, and the two people looked at their lovers with the same gaze. And Ajie sat on the motorcycle, watching Song Zhengyuan light firecrackers, marry Liu Sanlian, and return to society to be a normal man.
Regardless of the process, love is eternal. At this time, Liu Sanlian seemed to understand that no matter whether it was true or false, what gender was, Ajie was just like himself, a man who loved his husband. Ajie also completed the commemoration of Song Zhengyuan, and finally could let go of the obsession and continue to move forward.
In addition, the ending also tells song Zhengyuan's love for his son and Gao's understanding of his son.
This is the final answer this movie gives us.
The story does not have to set the theme, but a good story will always let the audience find the theme in their hearts, and in the context of "Who Comes First", it should be the sentence "Love is the greatest". In the movie, Ajay asks his lover in the memory of the virtual reality: Why can't he tell the truth? Song Zhengyuan touched his head and said: It is our responsibility to let them not worry and be sad.
Movies are not simply coming out.
It focuses on the understanding of children, same-wife, persistent love and motherhood, tells us about the sad consequences of society's repression of same-sex love, and also calls for tolerance and understanding of homosexuals in society.
Only love and forgiveness can face everything. This is the warmth in the core of the movie, and it is also the general meaning that the movie conveys to us.
In recent years, with the increasingly diversified public concept, same-sex topics have gradually received more attention, and same-sex themes have also shown a trend of change from small to large, from shallow to deep: from individual to social, from romantic style to realism.
For example, the previous "Blue Gate" and "Tattoo" are films with romantic style of youth themes, in which same-sex love is placed in a youthful and romantic freehand atmosphere, becoming a branch of youth love culture.
In recent years, whether it is the movie "Who Fell in Love with Him First", or the documentary "Rainbow With My Heart", etc., it will focus on the perspective of social family, more realistic and more profound, and the values of love and forgiveness in "Who First" are therefore more moving and full of humanistic care, which may be an important factor for the film to be widely recognized.
(Author of this issue: Read a little story every day VIP editor Lan Yun)
Today's topic
Do you have favorite gay movie recommendations? Looking forward to your sharing~