Author: Gong Jinping, Associate Professor, Art Education Center, Fudan University, Doctor of Literature
"Birds in the Suburbs" is a slow-paced, scattered film, it is a careless, and seemingly aimless "wandering" way, placed a "idle" sign on the threshold of the movie, and arrogantly said that it would never promise a pleasant viewing experience. Its artistic core is wrapped in layers of imagery and multiple narrative spaces, only calling for people with hearts to ponder carefully with a leisurely and solemn mood, and to understand the poetry and philosophy with their hearts.
Understanding the entry point of this film is not a detailed analysis of a personal character. Because, the film mainly tells about two groups of characters, the main characters of the youth group are 5 people, and the junior group has 7 people. For any film, the juxtaposition of many characters without obvious primary and secondary divisions is a disaster. In a limited time, it is difficult for the audience to remember their names, let alone understand their backgrounds and personalities. Therefore, most of the characters in the film only have a vague sense of existence, the personality is not clear, and even the function of promoting the development of the plot is very weak.
However, a detail in the film provides a key to interpreting the film. Elementary school student Fang Ting once wrote a "love letter" to her classmate Xia Hao, saying that if Xia Hao could answer a riddle, they could be boyfriend and girlfriend. The riddle is: What is the longest and shortest thing in the world; the fastest and slower; a large piece but can be cut; important but often forgotten? How could Xia Hao, who was immersed in digging bird nests and playing gun battles every day, have the patience and ability to fight for IQ? He immediately dropped the letter and threw himself into the "great cause" of playing football. Later, the young Xia Hao saw this riddle again in an abandoned playground, and Chief Jiang pretended to try "LOVE", but was verified to answer incorrectly.
Fang Ting's riddle comes from the French thinker Voltaire, and the mystery is "time". In the film, the two groups of people cannot guess the mystery, not only because of their limited knowledge and superficial thinking, but also because of the special state of life, their sense of "time" is extremely dull. For elementary school students, their time is a rich mine. They went on expeditions up the mountain together, teamed up in toy shootouts, traveled long distances together to visit classmates who were about to drop out of school... For them, there is no urgent task to complete, there is no race against the clock under the pressure of life, they just need to focus on the happiness of the moment, enjoy the free stretch like the sun and white clouds, and live as freely as they like.
They have little awareness of "time", never realize that an accidental decision or choice of the present will have a fatal effect in the future, and certainly cannot imagine standing in the dimension of the future and being lost or heartbroken at some moment in the present.
Although the engineers in the youth group have a clear measurement task, they are basically free and loose from the perspective of the rhythm of work. They would throw down the tester and lie on the side of the road and fall asleep; they would drink beer in the small restaurant, pull things and pull, and then stagger back to the hotel; young Xia Hao would develop a dewy love affair because of the mystery and beauty of the swallows... Although the four engineers have their own troubles, they only focus on the "present", and do not have a particularly sharp and painful "time" experience, living without heart and lungs, and settling down with the encounter.
At this point, we finally understand why the rhythm of the film is so slow, and the plot will appear aimless, because the film tries to show the way time appears and exists in these two groups. These two groups have never had a sense of urgency and crisis in their respective studies and work, "time" has become a bargain that can be squandered at will, and the passage of time does not seem to bring about subversive changes or gratifying gains. So, what does "time" mean to them? When they stand in the present, how will this coordinate point continue to the future, and how will they look back at the past?
The film intends to create a calm appearance in the slow-paced life of the characters, and then let the audience fall into a state of separation due to the blandness of the plot conflict, feel the texture, pain and musicality of "time", and think about the thickness, strength and depth of "time". This seems to be an overly esoteric philosophical proposition, but the film tries to complete the touch and excavation of this proposition in a specific life segment of the two groups of characters, which is undoubtedly a thematic adventure and narrative challenge. The final artistic effect of the film is mixed. On the one hand, if the audience has the ultimate patience, it is indeed possible to enter the carefully constructed artistic temple of the film; on the other hand, the film's ambiguous characters and restrained plot conflicts are in fact difficult to withstand such unfathomable philosophical discussions, and prevent the audience's ability to empathize with the characters and plot.
When "time" seems to stand still in the two groups of characters, the film presents a sense of change in the background. The place where these elementary school students live is facing demolition and will be transformed into a new suburb. In the vicissitudes of this era, the characters in it are slow to react, or even unconscious, which is probably a feature of "time": "the fastest, also very slow." The film thus sends a heavy question to the audience: Since the change of "time" can be staged in such an intuitive and even shocking way in the outside world, can we really "leave the leaves without sticking" when we cross the long river of "time"? Moreover, the film projects the individual's dull sense of "time" into a larger time and space, is it to amplify this blunt feeling, or to use the incomparably magnificent change between heaven and earth to stimulate the individual's sharp perception of "time"?
When the children walked in a ruined and hot construction site, when the fox looked at the demolition of the building in the distance on the balcony, when Fang Ting proudly pointed to the new home on the other side, when the black charcoal saw the light rail in the new district in a trance, they all really touched "time". "Time" appears in their world in a way that replaces the old with a new look. However, people's growth cannot be as heroic and relaxed as the construction of new districts, but will be in a hurry in the entanglement of nostalgia and past pain.
In fact, the film does not have a vision for "growth", because it is a process of gradual "loss". Just as when 7 friends in their youth visited the fat man, 4 people walked and disappeared, and finally only 3 people were inexplicably sad under the bridge. Isn't this a vivid portrayal of "half-zero knowledge" in adulthood? The alienation and confrontation between several engineers in adulthood is self-evident, and compared with the enthusiastic, innocent, and affectionate time of the teenagers, the reality seems to be endlessly pale and boring.
When the art teacher asked the teenagers to use crayons to draw the new area in their hearts, except for the fat man who drew a cluster of abstract color blocks that did not know what to do, the other students' imaginations of the future were related to technology, industry, and the environment. The film specially emphasizes the paintings of 6 students, reflecting their personalities, hobbies and life positioning. Just as the fat man has no concept of the new district, his life plan seems to be chaotic. There is also Xia Hao, whose paintings are also vague, and can only faintly see the grass and trees. This seems to imply that when other students revel in worldly happiness and satisfaction, or in the romantic imagination of technology and modernization, the fat man is lost and carefree, and Xia Hao has a pastoral and retreating mentality. If we interpret the juvenile group and the youth group in an intertextual manner, and imagine the youth as the teenagers grow up, we will realize that the life of adulthood has buried the grass snake gray line as early as the juvenile age.
The title of the film is "Birds of the Suburbs", which seems far-fetched to the content. However, both groups of characters actually have a significant connection to the "birds of the suburbs". The young Xia Hao once went to the woods to dig a bird's nest and heard birdsong on different occasions. Young Xia Hao also heard noisy birdsong outside the window in the morning after sneaking up with the swallows. In particular, xia Hao, feeling deeply disappointed by Han Gong's perfunctory work, persuaded Swallow to go with him to find a blue nightingale, but Swallow was not interested. It can be seen that the teenager has no pity for the "birds in the suburbs" and does not care about the birdsong; the young Xia Hao misses the quiet and loneliness of the "birdsong and mountains are more quiet" in the noise of the city. Therefore, the "bird of the suburbs" is an excellent bearer of "growth": the things that I did not care about in my youth (happiness, friendship, love) became scarce treasures in adulthood, and even Sought after them.
The film sets up two groups of characters and creates wonderful hooks and bonds between them, which is indeed an interesting way of conceiving the plot. In an intertextual manner, the film allows the two groups of characters to form a synchronic presentation at different stages of life, effectively expanding the film's performance space. Moreover, the film has a unique presentation of the dullness and pain of "time" at different stages of life, and takes the change of the times as the large time background, calling on the audience to experience the subtlety of "time" in a calm way, and then enter the depths of life.
The film is ambitious in the expression of the theme, extremely complex in the character setting, and wants to form a very contrasting reflection with the scattered plot, and then deal with an extremely heavy and profound philosophical proposition in a weight-lifting way. This artistic attempt and courage is admirable, but the actual effect is that the force is not heartfelt, and the deeper thinking about "time" is finally tasted.
The film is sometimes overly self-absorbed in the heap of images, such as birds, bird eggs, dogs, sunken ground, telescopes, walls, boys climbing towers, abandoned buses, tunnels, etc. When the film believes that these images can grow new meanings on the branches of the plot and form a rich expression of ideas, it does not take into account the role of these images in the development of the plot and the shaping of the characters, and does not consider the possible mutual dissolution of meaning between these images, or the ambiguity in the interpretation of the connotation. In the final analysis, relying on imagery, rather than three-dimensional and perceptible characters and plots with clear veins, to highlight the theme is somewhat misguided, and even makes these images become a fig leaf to cover up the empty plot, pale characters, and ambiguous theme expression. (Gong Jinping)
Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel