What are the characteristics of middle-aged people? To put it non-derogatorily, it is calculation. This calculation is not entirely about calculating gains and losses, but also about worrying and cowering. As a simple example, the only sport I felt was hip-hop, but a few years ago I didn't dare to go into a hip-hop class, which was full of young people in their early twenties, as were the dance teachers. Standing there, am I calling someone a teacher? Or do people call me a teacher? Even if others didn't cast a strange look, I was like a thorn in my back, and I always felt that I was pretending to be tender. After 35 years old, I am still in love, and I will also worry about whether I am too dissatisfied with the old age.
Of all human behaviors, love is the least calculated and the most scarce thing for middle-aged people. In film and television dramas, there are often various crises of middle-aged people, professional, family, physiological, dignified... But it is rare to see them have appeals and crises about love. If we see two people over forty years old kissing intimately on the street, we will be inexplicably ashamed of them, and we can only accept them hand in hand to perform warm sunset red. But what about square dancing among young people? You'll think: Hey, weird cute.
Over the years, the pure middle-aged love line that I have been deeply impressed with (one of which is not counted by young people) is "Penultimate Love", the Japanese drama has taken a relatively large step, and the two protagonists are almost 50 years old. There are very few domestic dramas that focus on the emotions of this age group, and I can't think of examples for a while and a half.
"Xiao Min Family" is a relatively rare domestic drama with the main line on the love of middle-aged people, and the general domestic drama middle-aged people are running to the second marriage and the second child in their later years, but in this drama, Xiao Min and Xiao Min's mother clearly stated: It is good to talk about love, don't get married.
This is a small improvement in concept. Of course, there are still a lot of calculations in this sentence of don't get married. These calculations are the concerns that middle-aged people face if they want to fall in love. The first concern comes from parents, Liu Xiaomin's mother is a single mother, she does not want her daughter to divorce, and she has also done such a stupid thing as hiding the household registration book. It was said that she would expect her daughter to remarry, but she did not, because the second worry came from her hometown.
Its setting is That Xiao Min and her boyfriend Chen Zhuo (boyfriends in their 40s are a bit strange to call) are from the small place Jiujiang, Jiujiang is not small, almost the second largest city in Jiangxi, but compared to Beijing, it is still a closed human society, Liu Xiaomin in order to get out of the Jiujiang interpersonal circle, used ten years, but she happened to meet her hometown boyfriend again.
Chen Zhuo is her ex-husband of Xiao Li Ping, Li Ping's parents, her parents, her ex-husband's parents are all working in a factory, Li Ping and Xiao Min have some festivals, and then Xiao Min lost the custody of her son and left her hometown to work alone in Beijing. The two of them saw each other again later only with embarrassment.
At the beginning of the play, Liu Xiaomin delivered the baby for the mother, and several nurses chattered and gossiped that the mother was Xiao San, and Xiao Min reprimanded them for violating the nurse code with a straight face. Seeing the back, I know that she is also recognized by the old family as the third child, her son is bullied by children of the same age, and the mother with the same self-esteem as her does not want their family affairs to become a small place to talk about.
The perfect daughter of a small place: a civil servant (teacher, doctor), married to a husband of the same profession, a mother-in-law who is a local prominent family with connections, has a son, and has a mediocre and smooth life.
Liu Xiaomin almost became the perfect daughter in the eyes of the small local people: married to the son of the factory director, gave birth to a son, and worked in the hospital, but her husband was a drunkard, a rogue with low self-esteem, from glory to laughter, and her life had ups and downs.
There are two kinds of people who come out of small places: one is to live a secularized life that needs to be displayed (Li Ping), and especially loves Zhang Luo's fellow villagers to learn; the other is that in the past, such as dying yesterday, even the classmates are not included, and I am the latter like Liu Xiaomin, so I can understand her very well.
Usually we feel that divorced men can soon remarry, and that's because the children are with their mothers. Divorced people want to remarry, and it's easier for the one who doesn't have children, male or female. In "Penultimate Love", the heroine is an unmarried woman, who has spare money to buy a house in Kamakura, and in a place where no one knows her, she can have no parents, no children, no shackles, and talk with peace of mind.
The screenwriter cherishes Liu Xiaomin very much, in order to let her open up new feelings for her to set up an environment, she should be different from most single mothers: give birth to children at the age of 23, so that the child is 20 years old, she is still in menopause; grandma with children; she has independent living space, seeing children once a year, children are very sensible; from beginning to end, she is Wenqing.
In the surroundings that have been vacuumed, the biggest obstacle on Xiaomin's way to romance is actually her own heart disease. Liu Xiaomin should be as sensitive as her cleanliness, and need people who love her very much to tolerate it. Under the pressure of her surroundings and the guilt of her children, she is as frightened as an elk in the forest, desperately trying to cover up her love affair.
Mother and son suddenly visited, Liu Xiaomin hid condoms, one would stuff drawers, one would stuff mattresses, and finally he was caught in a bag, perhaps reminding many single people of their parents' informality, and they had to clean up the embarrassing scene for everyone.
Chen Zhuo pretended not to know each other at the children's sports meeting, while saying: You stay away from me, while sending WeChat to each other. But for men, it is actually quite exciting, as if they have been the ones who have got her, but they have not fully obtained her heart.
Because it was Zhou Xun who played, the role of the mother was played so clumsily and lightly. Because of his cleanliness habits, he would be uncomfortable sharing a toilet with his son and make the kitchen look like an explosion scene.
In the play, Zhou Xun often reveals the attitude of the little daughter, and there is a detail that she and her mother quarreled and went out in anger, Huang Lei asked her to eat, and she cried all over the table with blown nose paper. Huang Lei asked a question about the past that she did not want to answer, and she squeezed the crumpled paper in her hand and squeezed it into a ball.
A small action, but very moving, embarrassed, helpless, when he is concerned about the left and right, the human hand will do an unconscious action, that pinch can be an escape, can be a determination, is an adult's punctuality.
I just think that some of the demeanor and action belong only to Zhou Xun, and some viewers will feel that she is not like the mother of such a big child, because she plays a mother who is not used to being a mother.
To put it a crude analogy, Huang Lei and Hai Qing are like the old husbands and wives who can smell each other after farting. And Zhou Xun is a woman who is unlikely to fart in front of her, so she can neutralize the fireworks on Huang Lei's body, making the pair look leisurely and relaxed.
Tv dramas have always been ashamed to show the sexual needs of middle-aged people, and their other needs are particularly large. The need for children's grades, the need for money, the need for promotions, the need for various kinds of needs that can be included in the comparison system... But people in their forties and fifties just have a long cycle of desire, and they have not disappeared! And not only forty or fifty years old, as long as they are married, they are all treated as such.
From time to time, "Little Min's Family" will let us look at the life of middle-aged people. The two of them opened the room, Chen Zhuo warmed up while doing push-ups, while vowing to drink strong tea and not sleep all night, Zhou Xun was afraid that he would flash his waist. As a result, you can check out in about ten minutes.
Chen Zhuo advised Liu Xiaomin, this age together, frankly meet each other, open and honest is not important, but temporarily escape, timely fun is still very precious. Indeed, if you have a child who wants to catch your breath, you can only sit in the car for 5 minutes, not one more minute. Just against the forehead of the greasy crooked for a while, Chen Zhuo's daughter sent a WeChat message to ask him when he would return home.
It is rare that the realistic middle-aged people can wander and covet pleasure, which is also in line with the words of Xiaomin's mother in front of him: It is good to talk about love.
20 years ago, Huang Lei and Zhou Xun were a pair of CPs who only talked about love. They had only played lovers three times, either underground or unruly. In "April Day on Earth", Xu Zhimo has a family that is still stubbornly pursuing the young girl Lin Huiyin, and he is not a positive character no matter how he looks at him.
"Oranges are red", Xiuhe is the concubine of the big old man, Yao Hui is the younger brother of the big old man, they not only have love, but also have children.
Compared with the past, the relationship between Liu Xiaomin and Chen Zhuo is really reasonable, legal and reasonable, and there is no gap. It's just that in the past they didn't eat human fireworks, and now they smoke and burn.
Millennial audiences are not so strict, and the beautiful faces of the male and female protagonists make people temporarily forget the ethics and morality, and now it is not. Xiao Min only had a correspondence with a pen pal to talk about poetry during her marriage, and the bullet screen said that she was mentally derailed, and cheating was cheating.
In fact, far from that, pen pals were very common in that era, and it was not necessarily all dark songs. The so-called "catching adultery" is that she borrowed books from her pen pal Teacher Su and was blocked by the other party's wife and made a big fuss. Who knew that the next day Teacher Su disappeared, did not know life and death, leaving his wife and children to live alone.
This is the real reason why Liu Xiaomin left her hometown and left her son, she felt that she had done something wrong and caused harm to Teacher Su's family. This incident has become a difficult condition that she has never been able to pass, and she feels guilty to this day.
Some people say that it is not right to talk to married men about useless poetry, not to mention whether poetry is useful or not, and partners cannot carry all their emotional and social functions. People always have to have friends and talk about topics that their partners don't like. Marriages that can only be talked to with partners can only be seen by Zhu Yaqiong and Lao Wang to see how suffocating.
And in long and bad marriages, isn't it also allowed to have friends of the opposite sex? Such a strict standard, even the viewers can not do, but use it to demand the people in the play. It is no wonder that whether it is in reality or in film and television, middle-aged people talk about love to give people a very tired feeling, really like teenagers who are spoiled and happy will be laughed to death!
Since ancient times, Chinese have held a sarcastic attitude towards middle-aged and elderly people in love, and in recent years they have been slightly tolerant, provided that the parties should look young and beautiful and slim. Therefore, Zhou Xun's love is better than Huang Lei's love, and the audience's acceptance is a little higher.
When I watched this play, I thought: Can people only face appetite and materialism after forty years of age? Love is more suppressed than suppressed sexual desire. But modern people can easily live to eighty or ninety, the remaining more than half of life in addition to accepting health retirement tourism with grandchildren square dance these conventions, there are middle-aged and elderly people dare to shout out: I just want to talk about a love that is not for the purpose of marriage?
▲ Stills from "I Chose not to Get Married"
There's an old lady writer in Massacre on the Nile who has been writing erotic novels (not talking about herself), and her daughter is deeply ashamed of her, even if she dies. As intelligent as Agatha, she also stands for her daughter. But even the author himself could not help but marry a 26-year-old youth at the age of forty and enjoy the sweetness of the second spring.
Nearly a hundred years have passed, the development of science and technology is rapid, but the emotional concept is standing still.