01
After "Old Beast", director Zhou Ziyang continued a male story in "Wuhai".
If the story of "Old Beast" revolves around a man, it tells the loneliness and helplessness of a brilliant man in his twilight years, and discusses the male dignity and the distortion of human nature under the torrent of the times.
The focus of "Wuhai" is still on a male character whose career has failed.
Like Lao Yang, played by Tu In "Old Beasts", Yang Hua (Huang Xuan) in "Wuhai" faces a variety of economic, family, and social oppression: the debt problems faced by friends who call them brothers and brothers refuse to pay back, the rift in marriage, the contempt of his wife and family, and the bottleneck of his career.
The film uses the two main lines of marriage problems and debt to clearly outline how the protagonist Yang Hua has reached the bottom of despair after experiencing a series of difficulties.
The fading of anxiety and human feelings is the common emotion of "Old Beast" and "Wuhai", absurdity, depth and strength are their common temperament, and the similarity of the main characters makes people have to compare the two works together.
Despite this, "Wuhai" is not the same.
There is no doubt that "Wuhai" is more mature than "Old Beast", and it is more extreme in the pursuit of aesthetics, whether it is the original landform of Wuhai in Inner Mongolia or the huge dinosaur sculpture created by the director the day after tomorrow, the distance and distance of the lens express a kind of sadness beyond time and space.
The silent yoga performances of local villagers in "Wuhai", the burning moon in the desert, and the electronic sounds behind giant objects are reminiscent of religion and revelation.
Compared with the animals and white humanoids in "Old Beast", the use of these symbols with Zhou Ziyang's personal characteristics has been more fully reflected in "Wuhai".
The static body, the twisted villagers, the strangeness in the attributes of commercial society under the mask of grotesqueness;
The burning desert tent, the music, the bystanders who are outside the matter make you uneasy;
The shedding dinosaur eyeballs and the dried glue indicate that everything cannot be returned;
The cold is unbearable, hiding in the stomach of the dinosaur sculpture and being "eaten" by the dinosaur, which is a sub-body that subconsciously protects itself after being cornered but is heading for extinction.
At the same time, the film's depiction of social issues is also more intense and diverse than the conflict between Lao Yang and bus conductors, hospital nurses, and real estate sales in "Old Beast".
For example, the suicide tragedy after the naked loan, the debt collector with prosthetic limbs, the chaos of the tourist gimmick...
In addition, the intervention of the media runs through the entire film, making it a fuse in the tension between people.
The media such as the dashcam, the conversation of the chat software, the recording of photos and videos, and the videos of online delivery that appear in the film put the thinking of information on the table.
The emergence of these elements undoubtedly opens up a new situation of breadth and depth of "Wuhai" than "Old Beast".
But the multiple elements and grand symbols are so separate from the story text and the emotional core that they cannot be compared. The more the film progresses, the more the fatigue of the text of "Wuhai" cannot carry the director's ingenuity and ambition.
02
Through the dashcam, Yang Hua learns that his wife (Yang Zishan) is cheating, and through the nude loan photos in the WeChat message, the wife mistakenly believes that Yang Hua has done some shady activities, which triggers a key quarrel.
The fragility of the text of "Wuhai" has a clue after this fierce dispute between the male and female protagonists.
The intensification of a marital contradiction is always born after the accumulation of contradictions and the fall of principles, in this important scene with a bearing role, Huang Xuan handed over a stunning answer sheet, and the naked performance ——— a failed, statusless, and attacked by the two sides of life.
But the director seems to be obsessed with highlighting a marital tension with Chinese characteristics, the more deliberate and twisted, the more manipulated the more it loses its nature, this paragraph is barren in the setting of the lines, the confrontation between the actors is powerless, and the repetition and invalidity of the text information can't help but remind Noah of his presentation in "Marriage Story".
The suffocating, near-collapsing quarrel between Nicole and Charlie in the house Charlie rents in "Marriage Story" touches or can be said to be vivid about the love and hate in marriage, the underlying logic of the characters' emotions, and the cathartic needs, the release of information, and even the emotional core of the film.
In this scene, the richness of the text gives the actors room for tension.
The dialogue of the actors is no longer only to serve the plot, but also to strengthen and refine the internal factors of the characters' opposition, through the interlocking and pressing of the dialogue, the audience realizes that Nicole's self-awakening poses a threat to Charlie's consistent psychological state.
Surprisingly, off-screen, we are fully aware of the wonderful zero-sum game of the moment when "self-loathing" and "self-intoxication" collide in marriage.
Let's look at the display of "Wuhai".
After an argument, we get a reconfirmation of the male protagonist's low family status and career failure, and the wife's cheating and the photos of naked loan girls appear as a very pragmatic plot push, followed by the advancement of the tedious story and the accumulation of details.
Yang Hua came alone to the place where they had once made love to reminisce about the beauty of the past, looked back at a marriage proposal video recorded on his mobile phone in the cold wind, and returned home after a cold and long night to wait for him, but what was waiting for him was a debt collector and a cruel reality.
But the thinness of the text makes the quarrel scene not enough to support the complex core of the emotions between the two people in the family and marriage relationship, such as love, human nature, resentment, and diaphragm, although the subsequent plot has been supplemented, the single person's recollection is not strong enough, and the director only provides practical clues for the audience to understand the whole picture of the story.
Perhaps in the follow-up Yang Hua on the anniversary of the custom to call his wife up the mountain can draw evidence of their love, perhaps the ingredient of deep love should not be controlled by the richness of language, but the scattered emotions have achieved a love relationship hanging in mid-air, it is difficult for people to identify with it, let alone empathize.
Although Huang Xuan's portrayal of the character has been so excellent.
Therefore, the character's hatred for killing his wife in the ending after the grip of the dilemma is logically reasonable, but emotionally does not have the power to occur naturally.
Love is deep and hateful, and love can produce hatred, but if love is not convincing, hate will come for no reason.
03
If you look around at the film as a whole, the story of "Wuhai" seems to have reached a Lou Ye-like strange affair on some level - a sudden death, chaotic and complex human nature, and a jaw-dropping ending.
However, unlike "Floating City Mystery" or "Storm Clouds", Lou Ye's strange feelings come from the common victory of text and image, the solidity of the text has shaped a convincing character, and the fit of the image and the text renders the emotion of the character, so the strangeness that happens to the characters in Lou Ye's film has just the right credibility.
Everything spreads smoothly, like a faucet in the night that has been forgotten, spilling out of the pool, spilling out of the cracks in the doors, extending to the bedroom, it is raining outside the window, the humidity in the air inside the house is eroding the mind, and your slightest suspicion will be transformed into a knife that is damp and rusty but deadly enough.
Lou Ye almost does not hesitate to integrate his stories, pictures, and voices into a seemingly natural integration to present, even if he abandons the consideration of social significance, he still does the extreme entanglement of strange feelings.
In terms of audiovisual feeling, "Wuhai" is reminiscent of Jia Zhangke's surrealist, but the surreal experience given by "Wuhai" comes from the general scenery of installation art.
Whether it is "Destined for Heaven" or "The World", or even the earliest "Xiao Wu", Jia Zhangke's surrealism does not lie in the setting of jingbei, but comes from a kind of detached, deep gaze.
Getting this kind of experience is the natural result of crossing the geography and the change of the times, the instinctive look back of the audience after the fate of the small people, the inner holiness of The Little Peach in front of Notre Dame de Paris in "The World" who opens the mobile phone in a raincoat, the moment of Zhao Tao's horizontal knife in "Destiny of Heaven", and the warmth of Mei Mei's singing of "Sky" in "Xiao Wu".
On the other hand, "Wuhai" tells the strange feelings but lacks desire, and the surreal experience brought by it is shocking but cold.
First of all, the strange feelings told in "Wuhai" cannot fill the lack of desire, the love of the husband and wife is handed over to the logical needs of the script to be processed, and Yang Hua's desire for money comes from being forced to submit.
Secondly, the grand scenery has created a modernist and even surrealist spectacle of "Wuhai", and the tulle of spectacle should be an inquiry with higher meaning and philosophical thinking, but "Wuhai" unexpectedly always takes a weak, individualistic, self-immersive, gloomy dilemma as all elements of the film, and finally comes to the end.
Due to the weakness of the text, while the scene is so grand, a sense of discord is growing, and here the director seems to have lost the ability to make the setting of the storyline practical and plunged into another void.
And this void becomes a kind of "unnecessary", as if a person wears an inappropriate pair of shoes, the wheezing in the hesitation replaces the flow of nature, the weakening of the text makes the depth unreachable, and the elaborate pictures return to meaninglessness after constituting some meaning.
The worship of those installation art giants may have something to do with Yang Hua's sigh and loneliness, but it has nothing to do with this superficial and incapable of going deeper.
The strangeness of "Wuhai" is that the scenery is magical, the communication of anxiety and social problems is based, and the director weaves them together to become a loose fishing net, the density of the fishing net and the core of the film cannot be matched, and the grand visual experience becomes a burden.
Throughout the film, we see the reflection of the geographical environment and the psychology of the characters:
Huang Xuan, who burrows into the belly of a dinosaur on the beach, the vastness and loneliness of the desert, and Yang Zishan, who hangs in a yoga belt in the dry woods of the loess land.
We see the specialness of the city of Wuhai:
On The Gander Mountain stands a huge statue of Genghis Khan that can be seen from all over the city, and the Wuhai Bridge, which crosses 6 kilometers from the city, is Ulan Bu and the desert hinterland, which is rich in mineral resources but sparsely populated.
However, the only thing that is not seen is the deeper thinking behind the embarrassment, such as naked loans, tourism projects and other social problems, the film's display of these problems is inevitably a little itchy suspicion, every place appears with great interest, every place is pointed out, but all this is ultimately due to the weakness of the text.
Once, "Old Beast" used a character to hold up the whole story, as the dark horse at the 54th Golden Horse Awards, won the "Best Original Screenplay" and "Best Actor" awards in one fell swoop.
Today, "Wuhai" can no longer continue this legend, the power of text is highlighted in this rout, the combination of reality and surreal is in urgent need of literary support, and your sigh and I always have to come from the truth.