Wen Shu Sairen
On August 1, 1994, the 51st Venice Film Festival was very lively, and most of the shortlisted films were must-haves for fans.
Best Screenplay "Breasts and moon" is a childlike, very Spanish erotic film.
Breasts and the Moon
Peter Jackson, with his not-so-sweet childishness, concocts a real mother-killing case into an imaginative and bizarre fairy tale, Angel of Sin. It was Kate Winslet's debut, but flashy enough. It was a pair of Laras who were committing the crime.
Angel of Sin
Another film about the male and female thieves uses the rhythm of punk and metal to make the whole surface of Venice shake. That's Oliver Stone's genius, Born Killer.
Born Killer
The most exciting thing for this year's Venice Film Festival is the Chinese people. No one on both sides of the strait and three places should be less, and all of them were crowned. Xia Yu, who has no acting experience, has become the youngest film emperor at the Venice Film Festival because of "Sunny Days".
"Sunny Days"
Du Kefeng, Liu Weiqiang and Chen Yuanjia won the Best Cinematography Award for their outstanding light and shadow treatment in "East Evil and West Poison".
"East Evil West Poison"
The Golden Lion Award was awarded to "Long Live Love", alongside "The Rainstorm is Coming" from Macedonia.
"Long Live Love"
In the 1990s, European and American films in the cultural highlands, internally, presented their new round of division in the form of segmented films. Externally, it is to look to the East, and to establish cultural compatibility in the way of quasi-roots.
Abbas and Hou Xiaoxian became the last darlings of the world film industry at the end of the century, and many of their films inevitably had the intention of pandering, but they soon returned to the life they were most familiar with. Just like Tadao Sato said in his evaluation of Yasujiro Ozu, he said that in his movies, he can't see the real Japan. In Hou Xiaoxian's films, what floats around is a wider field than Taiwan.
What about Cai Mingliang, the most authorial film director after Taiwan's new film movement. Is he depicting Taiwan? At least compared with Yang Dechang's works, he does not have such a strong local nature. For more than 20 years, there have been very few films that confront Taiwan's current situation, which almost forced Yang Dechang to be great.
Many Taiwanese directors' voices about reality are not possible. Cai Liangliang, yes and no. "Long Live Love" is about a state of sojourn, Li Kangsheng, Chen Zhaorong and Yang Guimei really have a home and do not return, or like a huge wealth that loves to steal, the itch is difficult to control. These red dust men and women are uncontrollable, and the film is not pressed.
Spatially, they realize the loss of subjects in the form of objects. In this film with a rather bleak plot, the most glorious thing about the sitcom is that Li Kangsheng and Chen Zhaorong compete who admits first and who is the sojourner. Every time you are present in action, you must repeatedly prove your absence by another behavior. It is even possible to see several passages of this kind of farce similar to the American situation as one after another of dragging mud and water, breaking bones and connecting tendons.
This is space, and to objects, specifically to the projection of food. Such as Li Kangsheng's play with watermelon, Yang Guimei walked all the way to eat all the way. It can be understood as a supply of spiritual emptiness, but the deeper theme is a kind of rebound from the materialization of itself.
Simply put, they want to be like food, giving people energy and fun. Judging from the picture presentation, Yang Guimei's every appetizer is just for the sake of food. Li Kangsheng threw away the watermelon that had once become a bowling ball as garbage, implying that he himself would become a garbage. Neither Li Kangsheng nor Yang Guimei fell in love with the food on their lips. It is said that this is a highly materialized world.
The hero and heroine of "Long Live Love" have lost even the possibility of materialization. The occupation of the two men, the female is to sell the house, the male is to sell the house, the name is "Na Bone Tower". Life and death need to be inhabited and placed. They all have to live somewhere, they all need real matter to maintain. The root hopes for the destination, and what Cai Liangming has repeatedly stated is that the destination is only a concept, and the destination itself does not exist.
How to understand this sentence? The soul, to a lesser extent, the mind, it cannot dwell in the entity, the house does not work, the ticket still does not work, it needs to be wrapped around it and accepted by something similar to the soul. It's like if you buy a bed, but you don't necessarily buy sleep, the reason is so simple, only material is not enough.
Regarding the films that show sojourn, we may be most familiar with Wong Kar-wai's "Chongqing Forest", Jiang Wen's "Sunny Days" and Kim Ki-duk's "Empty Room", all of which regard other people's homes as their own homes, and by the way, take other people's love as their own love, and "Long Live Love" also has this meaning.
Wong Kar-wai, Kang Wen, and Kim Ki-duk's sojourn narratives are all empty, a panic of growth, a suspicion of memory, and a rebellion against reality. But it also brings out some self-satisfaction and pride, and exudes an intoxicating fragrance. The places where they entered and left have left traces of residence. They are stepping into the concrete lives of others, and for this purpose they are spreading the wings of imagination.
"Long Live Love" is not so specific, so it does not provide illusions, and it is also more cold. The three characters seem to be filling in the suspended space, while their own inner space is becoming more and more empty. It's like a mental loss, a loss of soul, and their imagination is like that broken watermelon, destined to hit a wall.
In other words, the two films of Wong Kar-wai, Kang Wen and Kim Ki-duk, let those uninvited guests get imaginary anti-guests, which is a reaction force exerted by imagination on the material world. Cai Mingliang is not so romantic, at least not in his internationally famous film. He wasn't so romantic, and what he was saying was that once the room was empty and there were more people staying, it would still be unfulfilled. It is nothing more than one stranger to another, from one emptiness to another.
Cai Mingliang also started from his second feature film, becoming the director who can use space the most in Taiwan after Hou Xiaoxian and Yang Dechang, and naturally the third most international director in Taiwan, followed by Ang Lee. Although Cai Mingming himself has repeatedly stated that his most admired director is François Truffaut, his spatial treatment is actually closer to Antonioni. In general, movies are not about what kind of people have what kind of environment, or vice versa.
Antonioni assimilates man from the environment, man himself is an environment, a type of architecture, and all human emotions are a self-righteous blind certainty. Cai Liangming's leaking room in "The Hole" behind him, and the rotten building in "Black Eye". They are all externalizations of the human form. Cai Liang's spatial language system allows his films to break through the limitations of geography and have an extremely rare pan-linguistic communication ability.
Cai Liangliang naturally wants to write about people, as far as the relationship between the characters is concerned, "Long Live Love" seems to be splicing a triangular relationship, but it is not structured into a biological chain of one thing and one thing. It is difficult to define whether Chen Zhaorong and Yang Guimei's joy of fish and water is due to loneliness or physical needs. We can only feel from the famous crying scene at the end of the film that neither food nor color can solve the real dilemma in Yang Guimei's heart. What is really related to love is Li Kangsheng's affection for Chen Zhaorong.
In this film of less than a hundred sentences of dialogue, only in the dialogue between Li Kangsheng and Chen Zhaorong, we can capture the breath of life and the warmth brought by it. The subtle laying out of everyday scenes such as borrowing money, borrowing cigarettes, and carrying people at least allows Li Kangsheng to enter a living, human world from busy and empty work, from the self-elimination of an exclusive room.
For Yang Guimei, Chen Zhaorong, who is still handsome, is a temptation that she has repeatedly refused, and in Li Kangsheng's view, it is a love that faces up and wants to be included in the life body. I have to mention the most important bed scene in the whole film, the bed is Chen Zhaorong and Yang Guimei are having substantial intercourse, and under the bed is Li Kangsheng's imaginative "deep" or "accommodating" through masturbation.
This is accidental and imaginary in the completion of the 3 P's, which is more thought and behavior in each other drinking and quenching thirst. More importantly, in the sexual acts that belong to joy, the camera is finally left to Li Kangsheng under the bed, a poor bystander, reduced to a humble participant. It also says quietly: The more you want to be happy, the less you can get happy. Cai Liangliang's perspective is forced, as if he is weeping pity, and he is spreading the infinite sigh of "animal sentimentality after making love".
Also pay attention to the seasons described in "Long Live Love", which should be a wet and cold winter. Winter in Taiwan rarely appears on screen. I remember "Winter Warmth", "Spring Cold", "Starry Sky". The reason why Tsai Mingliang chose Taiwan's shortest season is also an irony of the title "Long Live Love". Love comes and goes, or it never comes. If you want to rely on this for warmth, in the end, it will only add to the coolness.
As a result, we see Yang Guimei's last cry, as if the whole of Taiwan was in tears.
This is a bit big, but it may also be small, and it can be more bold to think that this is the whole world crying.
In this era when more and more houses are getting more and more expensive, completely breaking the economic law of scarce things. Too many people want to be material slaves (we call them house slaves here) and grieve for having to ask for slaves. We don't know whether we should be sad or why we should be sad, but tears, like other bodily fluids, will flow uncontrollably all over our faces.
Rather than saying that Yang Guimei performed that inexplicable and huge sadness. Rather, Cai Liangming photographed the insanity that life is difficult to avoid. When filming this scene, Cai Liangming let Yang Guimei walk non-stop and returned NG many times. When Yang Guimei's anger rose from her heart, Cai Liangming made her sit down and began to cry. After crying for six minutes in one breath, when Cai Liangming shouted to stop, her tears had not yet finished.
When she left the group, Yang Guimei complained to the producer that the film did not know what it was shooting, and expressed doubts about the quality of the film. Until the Premiere in Venice, sitting in the theater, she finally understood what the film was about, and cried on the spot until she spent all her makeup.
Very few people will cry twice like this, which in itself can become a movie.