"All of my characters are probably doing the same thing, which is an exploration of their selves. In "Teenage Nezha", what I want to express is how I felt at that time: I felt unhappy, but I didn't know why." ——Cai Mingliang
When revisiting Cai Liangliang's debut work, I found that in the nearly thirty-year time difference, the streets of Taipei in "Teenage Nezha" have long been human: the Internet café of the video game machine station is no longer there, and the mobile phone in each hand replaces the telephone booth on the street.
However, the exploration of themselves by urbanites in different eras has not stopped. People's unhappiness and melancholy, which cannot find an exit, still seep out of the ground without a source, drowning in life, and there are always those moments when tears and anger gush, but they cannot find the source and cannot be stopped.
Li Kangsheng and Chen Zhaorong played the restlessness of the youth in the 90s, the unexplained boredom and confusion, and after watching it repeatedly many years later, they could still feel the dampness and darkness of the room across the screen, smell the sweat, bodily fluids, and the mildew mixed with the rain, and glimpse the surging feelings of the characters under the eyes, Cai Liang's photography was empty but there was no lack of content. Shooting is boring but does not make people yawn, all senses are through the screen and time and space, reproduced in the loneliness and rebellion of every "teenager".
As Cai Liangming's debut work, "Teenager Nezha" did not form the "Cai Liangming" gaze that we know today, and the long-shot performance was immature, but I privately thought that the gaze that occasionally switched perspectives (objective to subjective) and direction was so in line with the restlessness of this group of teenagers.
We sometimes "observe" them purely as objects, sometimes enter their hearts, become subjects, and "feel" the relationship between the individual and society. There is less pure and constant gaze here, and more of a constantly changing, elusive emotion that escapes into the air.
The imagery of all kinds of water in the film is clear, and the ankle-deep sewage in Aze's room has nowhere to vent and is unstoppable, spreading from the kitchen to the living room, beer cans, cigarette butts, and slippers are scattered and floating, they drag their feet through the sewage one by one, unintentionally unclogging the water pipe, or drawing water to clean the room, so they live in symbiosis with chaos, lying down or standing in the dirt. It is both helplessness for the environment and a vague manifestation of a certain depression with will, a kind of unhappiness at a loss.
Before God created all things in Genesis, the world was full of evil water and chaos, and the water in the world was originally conceived as a chaotic and disorderly evil existence. Eliot's "Wasteland" connects damp water with death, catharsis and violence, etc., referring to people who are floating and sinking in the water, that is, life in the wasteland, on the edge of death, waiting for rebirth.
These images are cleverly embodied in Cai Liangliang's "Young Nezha". The sewage that continues to emerge from the drainage hole is the bad water, the disorderly and wandering life of the youth, and the torrential rain is full of meaningless violent evils and desires; so Xiao Kang, Aze, Ah Bin, and Ah Gui have become people who have nowhere to escape in the wasteland, just like the two people who hug each other in the water at the end of the film, they want to leave here, but they don't know where to go, and they can't go anywhere.
The water in Aze's house could even be refracted in the light and sprinkled on the teenagers by the door, like some residual light and hope, and they still had a moment of warmth in snuggling up to each other before they were completely submerged; for example, after sneaking evil in a rainy night, there was still an indescribable, jumping ecstasy.
The predecessor of the miserable youth is still the god "Ne Da", rebellious and uninhibited, crazy resistance, mostly still passively resisting, resisting Cai Mingming's "unhappiness without knowing why", which is an attitude of the rebellious youth who "don't know why" filmed by "Young Nezha".
Through comparison with a number of films, examine the theme that Cai Liang wants to express in "Young Nezha".
Released in 1991, "Juvenile Murder Incident on Muling Street" was the year before "Juvenile Nezha", both of which dealt with the problem of juvenile delinquency and disorder, but with a completely different mood, story, and narrative.
If "Muling Street" has opened up the social acne covered by the dust of the times and recreated the bloody "sunshine summer", then "Youth Nezha" focuses the lens from the times and history to the individuals in it, reshaping the dark, damp, sewage-flowing streets of Taipei.
At the end of "Muling Street", Xiao Si was serving a sentence in prison, a year had passed, the sun and moon wandered back to a sunny summer afternoon, the radio reported the college admission list, Zhang Mother hung her clothes, picked up the Jianzhong school uniform of Xiaosi, she faced the sun, but was backlit under Yang Dechang's lens, only the gray back, the summer light year, they were always backlit, wet and helpless.
Therefore, I often feel that "Youth Nezha" is the continuation of the life of the teenagers in "Muling Street", and it is also their "backlit side" in the "sunny summer", that even if they resort to violence, even if things seem to be "over", the knots in the hearts of the teenagers have never been truly responded to and understood.
The delicacy, nakedness, and unpretentious modification of "Teenager Nezha" seem to re-scratch the scars of teenagers, just as the well-off in the film inserted a compass into the abdomen of a cockroach is as uncomfortable and resistant, but it can make people focus on retrial.
"Muling Street" photographs the collective anxiety of a generation of young people based on the era, while "Youth Nezha" presents their individual frustration and rebellion based on life.
"I later found that he (Chu Fu) didn't seem to fit in with his world, and he was very selfish in talking about his own youth experiences and emotions; he sometimes adapted novels, but he was always very "Zhang Ailing-style" private and emotional. I also unconsciously became such a person, feeling that I and Chu Fu smelled the same."
Chu Fu's "Four Hundred Blows" is a deep film memory that Cai Liangming mentioned, so it is not difficult to feel that "Young Nezha" is inspired and influenced by "Four Hundred Blows", the protagonist's discordant family relationship; the eyes flash with ageless precocious puberty; the evil deeds caused by unexplained anger in life; the departure (skipping class) of passive resistance to reality
Eventually, they all lead them to an even greater escape, with Xiao Kang and Aze wandering the streets on motorcycles in Teen Nezha, and Antoine leaving the correctional center and running to the beach in "Four Hundred Blows". These are the private and emotional representations of Cai Liang's so-called "Zhang Ailing style", a seemingly absurd and meaningless, but containing the manic depression of youth, and the self-consciousness of teenagers who are gradually growing and agitating, and their selfish desires also embody a universal but rarely understood and expressed growth experience.
From the streets of Paris to the streets of Taipei, young people wander and run wildly, day by day bored, day by day sad and angry.