When I read "Long Hate Song", my favorite passage was not Wang Qiyao's entanglement with several men, but her sneaking parties and making food during the Cultural Revolution.
It's not the cuisine, it's the way of life, the most glorious part of a city, except for people, is the life it represents.
"Love Myth" is a movie that makes you want to live in Shanghai, but I didn't expect it to end this year, and I can see the domestic films that I think have been shortlisted for the top three of the year. I rarely see movies that don't have a strong plot, and it's an exception.
The pulling of a Shanghai uncle and three beautiful flower-like women, interspersed with the exotic history of another uncle and two dinners, did not have a minute to call a fierce scene, but also did not fall down for a second.
The Shanghai in "Love Myth" is cheerful and leisurely, like a coral piece in a kaleidoscope, with a mischievous, brilliant light. Teacher Bai, played by Xu Zheng, has just had a spring supper with the unfamiliar Miss Li (Ma Yili), and he has prepared a love poached egg and plans to eat breakfast together. Miss Li was afraid that he would come to this, and crept away, escaping too quickly and unscrewing the heel of a Jimmy Choo.
An unconventional start. Teacher Bai is a chartered public who is sought after in the park blind date corner, teaching a group of elderly people to paint in his own yard, there are several properties for rent, the son of the front house is old enough to work, the most comfortable property and leisure class in the big city, do not be too sought-after.
Miss Li lost two houses in her last foreign-related marriage (marrying a foreigner was the most preferred local choice), and lived with her young daughter in her mother's house to listen to her nagging in order to throw a bowl of overnight braised pork.
The two of them lived very close together, and at first glance it was the Shikumen house in the upper corner, and after entering, they were very different. Xu Zheng's house is my dream love house, the big cities in Europe are full of this kind of old house, there is a small yard to isolate the noise of the street market, the house is a narrow and distinguishable wooden staircase, the white wall hangs the master's painting, the window has a curtain, the table has a window cloth, usually there is a bottle of flowers, warm and comfortable, and there is an open roof to watch the sunset.
Ma Yili's mother's outside the house is also very beautiful, white exterior wall, but after entering the door, dust drifts in the air, the lights flicker on and off like a ghost film, the stairs are also narrow, not narrow with emotion, but narrow to the size of the person can not turn around.
It's all Shanghai, it's all Puxi. Even if she is in the Burrow, it does not prevent Miss Li from being an orchid, she will shed tears when she watches a drama, wear high heels of more than 10,000 yuan, and send her daughter to an international school.
She laughed at herself that she was always going downhill, and even if she was downhill, she was still self-effacing and unyielding. When Teacher Bai lost her shoes with broken heels, gave her a new pair of shoes, and wanted to lend the second floor to her mother and daughter. She immediately said: The shoes were bought on Taobao, more than two hundred. Also, we are not suitable.
From the perspective of the blind date angle, Miss Li should chase after Teacher Bai, but on the contrary, the audience's feeling is also that Teacher Bai should lick it.
This movie has three interesting women.
Ni Hongjie plays a rich woman, after sleeping with Teacher Bai - may not sleep, men can't do things after getting drunk - she teases him like the Red Rose King Jiaorui, and learns a skill that is not willing to be wasted. Then she transferred it to him for twenty-five thousand to buy paintings, and the night before she cried that her husband had been kidnapped in Turkey, and the kidnappers wanted twenty-five thousand ransom and refused to pay it.
In the KTV, a group of small milk dogs sang bitter love songs around Ni Hongjie like love beans, listening to Teacher Bai clear the relationship between the two people, the moment the door was closed, Ni Hongjie had a lost expression, so that you could not tell whether this woman was sincere or false.
Teacher Bai's ex-wife, Wu Yue, who looks like an intellectual, loves to dance tango, and the reason for the divorce is that the red apricot is out of the wall, "I just made the mistake that men in the world will make, you can't forgive me once?" "You've cooked me for more than ten years and you don't like to cook", as if watching a sexual transcription of male frequency texts.
The film also features two interesting single men. Zhou Ye mang plays the old Kra Lao Wu, riding a bicycle in a well-dressed manner, and often talks about returning to his hometown of Europe.
The other is the cobbler played by "Lee Toyota". Eyes so poisonous that he could recognize the true and false of Jimmy Choo, he opened his mouth to the English version of the aphorisms, had a fixed coffee time every day, and a woman next door played the piano stormily.
It reminds me of Wang Qiyao's meticulousness and chest when preparing dishes: "A chicken, the chicken breast meat under the slice is hotly fried, half stewed soup, half white chopped, together with brine shrimp, peeled eggs, roasted bran, counts four cold pots." "The sky is collapsing, and it can't stop Shanghainese from living a life."
They had two meals, the first sparks splashing, the second tears rippled. The first time was when Miss Li hinted that she would go to Teacher Bai at night and make a good dish for Lao Bai, Ni Hongjie broke in and told her husband about being kidnapped, and her ex-wife Wu Yue happened to come. The three women had a verbal confrontation about the wild cat eating wild food, but they did not feel that the female was competing and jealous. Because they didn't care much about the man, just whether they had fallen behind in the mouth.
The second dinner was to listen to Lao Wu talk about the myth of love encounters in foreign countries, telling the women to wipe their tears, and he hahaha said that it was deceitful. The story does not know whether it is true or not, he loves one is true.
This is a movie with a threshold for watching movies, and it is almost all Shanghainese. Nearly thirty years ago, "Stock Madness" and "The History of the Demise of Romanticism" used some Shanghainese, but never so bold, dare to tell from beginning to end. Of course, the taste of Shanghai has been there, Chinese films were born in Shanghai, and most of the movie stars of the Ten Mile Ocean Field era talk about the taste of Shanghai Chinese.
After liberation, there were many film and television dramas set in Shanghai, "Shanghai Family", "A Hundred Years of Vicissitudes", "Evil Debts", "Mother-in-law and Daughter-in-law", "Red Pink", "Red Moon", "Shake, Shake, Shake to Grandma Bridge"... There is a sense of hardship and urgency outside of The General Energy, and Shanghai has become very tired.
But Shanghai (specifically Puxi) is actually a very comfortable place, and every time I go to Shanghai for business, I will live near Nanjing Road and Huaihai Road. Walk along the giant deer road when you are fine, small bungalows, open doors, you can see the floating ash mahogany stairs. Ten steps can walk across the road, and the road in Beijing is by car.
Shanghai is more suitable for life than Beijing, Shanghainese people because they love to live a life, often become the object of ridicule of the people of the whole country, joke in which two Shanghai men on the bus will discuss what small dishes to cook tonight. Xu Tian in "Red", when planning to fight against the Japanese, has been holding a dripping live fish in his hand.
This kind of small bourgeois aesthetic pursuit is rare in today's Chinese cities. "Love Myth" shows that Shanghai's new is old, old is new, and it has a confrontation between new and old Shanghainese. Lao Wu parked his bicycle at the door of the café where he had gone for ten years, and the new Northern Jiangsu security guard asked him to park the car in the distance. He and Lao Bai lamented that Shanghai was becoming more and more uninteresting, and these uninteresting people came. Lao Bai said: Counting up the two generations and three generations, who is not a foreigner?
Most of the stars of this movie are Shanghainese, but the director is a little girl from Shanxi. Her aesthetic is very good, Xu Zheng, Ma Yili, Ni Hongjie in the art museum about men and women in the dialogue, Ma and Ni's black shadow flashed on the red background, even if there is no line, can be absorbed by light and shadow.
After watching it, some friends compared this film with "Waiting Alone" 16 years ago, which is a Beijing youth among foreign directors. Is it that people from other places have such a clear and precise feeling? Just like the foreigner He Wei's China.
When I went to Shanghai ten years ago, I was surprised by the longevity of the city's residents, many old men and women in the studio who are still active in social occasions in their eighties and nineties, Qin Yi is not a guest without makeup. "Love Myth" gives me the same feeling, they are a group of people in the metropolis who used to be slow, and they don't need to plunge into the torrent of inner volume. Miss Li taught her daughter to declare that she was 38 years old, not 44 years old, but you feel that she did not hide six years old for the sake of marrying someone, but felt that she was thirty-eight.
A movie makes people yearn for a city for a long time.