If you put "Love Myth" in the context of the image history of Shanghai's urban story, you will find that it has become a watershed in shanghai's urban image. In the past, the Shanghai images that swept the country, such as "Evil Debts" and "Stock Madness" and other works, all used a long-term and emotional historical gaze to tell how the city of Shanghai stood at the head of the tide of the times, the difficulty of small citizens making a living by taking advantage of the city's special economic status, and the disillusionment and pain of ordinary people in this process. Shao Yihui's interpretation of Shanghai is completely new. On the big screen, the audience sees that Shanghai no longer has the struggle of small people in the historical trend, nor does it have anything to do with the big times, love is the theme, food and drink men and women appear in the appearance of a lifestyle blogger, and fireworks and grounding gas are the keywords of its praise. In this film about middle-class life, Shanghai becomes flawless and shiny like never before.
A history of the changing image of the city
Regarding how "Love Myth" became a representative of the image of new Shanghai, it actually came into being in a critical period from quantitative change to qualitative change. As a representative modern city, Shanghai is special in that the subject matter is open-ended and can be (and often) interpreted from multiple angles by non-Shanghainese creators. Xu Anhua's "Aunt's Postmodern Life" is a case in point. It can be seen that Shanghai's urban image is created by the joint efforts of internal and external eyes, and is constantly changing in the process of being viewed and projected. And this image was relatively negative for a long time. In the 1990s, the Impression of "Greater Shanghai" was prosperous, snobbish and ruthless, and Shanghainese people lived exquisitely but pretentiously, shrewdly calculated and cut doors. Shanghai men are even more ridiculed, accused of being feminine, afraid of their wives, doing housework and buying a burn, is a kind of "little man", the country's masculine depression. This impression was even interpreted by northern actors on the Spring Festival Gala stage, becoming the target of ridicule. Shanghai's urban image has been slow to reverse, but in the past decade, especially after entering the generation of smartphone-dominated new media life, the Chinese people's good feelings for Shanghai have greatly increased. In daily sharing, people increasingly recognize Shanghai's convenience, livability and advanced public facilities as a metropolis. This is the necessary foundation for a good life, and it is open and shared by the public, so that everyone who comes to Shanghai can perceive and spread it.
Another image reversal coincides with the development of feminism. Traditionally praised masculinity has become almost synonymous with machismo, often accompanied by violence in intimate relationships. On the contrary, the places where Shanghai men have been ridiculed have been transformed into admired virtues. When the camera in "Love Myth" tirelessly shoots the details of the male protagonist's life of buying vegetables for women, cooking, carefully laying out the dishes, repairing light bulbs, and picking up children from school, this gentle and practical, which is different from the masculine grandfathers, has won the audience's good feelings.
Finally, from the visual presentation of urban life, Shanghai has completed the ultimate creation of Internet celebrity, becoming the city with the largest number of cafes in the world (not only in China). The central area of Shanghai, represented by Julu Road, Fumin Road and Changle Road, has become like a studio dedicated to the Punch Card of Little Red Books, full of special cafes. They assume the function of public space and are also a testament to the foreignness and modernity of a city. Walking through the café-lined neighborhood, the atmosphere is like a boundary, carefully wrapping people in it. People drink coffee and red wine, and have great material prosperity, but the imitation of the Western way of life focuses only on the surface of the diet, not others. The limitations of culture determine that the more prosperous all this is, the more difficult it is to escape the fate of landscape. In Shanghai today, the crowd of people in the Wukang Building punch card Network red attractions is large enough to ask the police to maintain order, which is the embodiment of this kind of landscape. The small civic culture on the streets of Shanghai has been replaced by another ecology, just as in the past, a rice cooker was placed in front of the door of a small shop on the street, and tea eggs were sold while boiling. Now, the image circulating on social media is a small pot in front of a store on Fuxing Middle Road, boiling hot wine.
"Love Myth" is a work that came out of the big picture of this era, it was born at the highest point in the history of Shanghai's urban image, and fully visualized the most condensed essence of this Shanghai dream - how middle-class men and women living in punch-card blocks enjoy the civilization and tranquility brought by the city.
The café of Duoyun Academy drama shop on Changle Road
Stratum suspended with collage
The creators almost use envious and immersive eyes to construct a complete, bright and highly purified Shanghai middle-class world, in which Lao Bai, played by Xu Zheng, has a set of detached bungalows with gardens, which are "handed down by grandpa", and the second floor is rented to Italians who speak Shanghainese and do not charge rent. Three urban mature women circle around him, including his tango-dancing ex-wife, a vague girlfriend in designer shoes and a rich woman who has had a one-night affair, plus his neighbor's friend, a fashionable old Keller, who forms the small world of love stories. Like the good men in Shanghai as the public knows, Lao Bai goes to the small supermarket in front of his home every day to buy vegetables, exchange cooking experience with his neighbors, gets up early to make breakfast for women, and picks up her children from school. Everyone in the story seems to have money and leisure, free from the rush of life, and have a lot of time to go out for coffee and drink red wine. Even the shoe repairer near the old White house is declaring his coffee time in English. In the appearance of everyone's money and leisure, the context of personal life history and the relationship with the city and the times are like being emptied with one click, leaving only a few words to explain.
The audience cannot delve into the reality that in Shanghai, after a century of storms, property rights have been divided into pieces, and often multiple families are crowded into one building, what kind of class shanghainese who can own a single garden house on Wuyuan Road and do not care about rent belong to. After the background is highly blurred, the image of Lao Bai is portrayed as a middle-aged divorced warm man, a frustrated citizen, who loves to buy vegetables and wears cheap old man pants. The shaping of his daily life and "fireworks" can not be described as unsuccessful, but it is always accompanied by a sense of suspense. On the other hand, Miss Li, who is ambiguous with him, is depicted as a divorced middle-aged woman huddled in an "old and broken" house with her mother and daughter, who can send her daughter to an international school in the city center despite experiencing the economic oppression caused by divorce. This split between the persona and the context makes it impossible to look at any of the characters in the play in an integrated way.
The most exaggerated and levitated figure is a street-side shoemaker. A laborer who repairs shoes in a small street shop, dressed like a returnee in France, with exquisite hairstyles and glasses, holding a cup of coffee, talking about the philosophy of love and world famous brands. The director's arrangement for this character may be to highlight the "deep-rooted romance" of Shanghainese, and she places this demeanor on the shoemaker, and when Lao Bai talks about women with him, the invisible gulf between the two seems to be completely smoothed out. But both the director and the audience know very well that no matter how much coffee he drinks, he will not appear in the old white liquor bureau, that is the real gully, the truth that cannot be blurred.
Interestingly, Ning Li, who plays a shoe repairman, starred in a TV series about the struggle of the people of Pudong, Shanghai, "The Legend of Little Pudong" in 1992. Pudong is a relatively late developed area in Shanghai, once a deserted beach, in the 1990s Shanghai population heard that "I would rather have a bed in Puxi than a room in Pudong". Thirty years later, "Little Pudong" became a shoemaker, sitting with the owner of the bungalow in the sunny streetscape, reminiscent of a famous saying on the Internet a few years ago, "I struggled for eighteen years to sit with you and drink coffee."
A shoe shop at the mouth of the alley
Shanghai's civic class is different from other cities. If Beijing's inner chain of contempt is a flat structure, the center is expensive, and the remote is cheap, then Shanghai is a vertical and three-dimensional sense of hierarchy, in the past people called some areas "lower corners", and the community where Lao Bai lived was "upper corner". When the director depicts these middle-class men and women in the upper corner, he must not only show their rich and leisurely foreign life, but also try to make them "grounded", resulting in a sense of unreality of cross-class collage. The narrative of the small citizen is robbed by the middle class, and then dressed up as a pseudo-middle class, sitting in the background to repair shoes. In the new media language of everything that is popular and filtered, it is even difficult for viewers to feel the separation.
Shanghainese: A Power Game in Dialects
The paradox about dialects is that the more we embrace openness and circulation, the more we need linguistic consistency. Under the erosion of the northern dialect and the language system dominated by Mandarin, the Shanghainese language is in an irresistible decline. Children in Shanghai are speaking less and less Shanghainese, or have forgotten many words, and have to mix Mandarin into the conversation. A film of all-dialect dialogue is a precious effort to revive dialects, and it is also a hedge against the northern central discourse system, which is cultural and related to language power. You can imagine what a surprise this is – it is rare to see a Shanghainese-speaking Shanghai story performed by Shanghainese actors on the big screen, a strong export of local culture.
The characters in the film are almost all Shanghainese, even the Italian tenants speak fluently, only two outsiders do not speak Shanghainese, the son's northern girlfriend, as a representative of the literary youth Shanghai drift, speaks Mandarin with a northern accent; the other character only appears for a few minutes, is a security guard who speaks Northern Jiangsu outside the café door.
In the composition of Shanghai immigrants, "Northern Jiangsu people" is a group that is despised, which has historical roots, and the early northern Jiangsu immigrants who came to Shanghai were mainly poor people. In the Context of Shanghai, "Northern Jiangsu Dialect" is a laughing point that has been ridiculed for many years. The burlesque of the nineties always had a clown character who spoke Northern Su dialect and was in charge of gags. In this context, there is an unspeakable irony to look at the security role designed by the director. A young security guard full of Northern Su dialect, when Lao Wu was in a café with friends, he went forward to reprimand Lao Wu for parking randomly, triggering a dialogue between the protagonists about the identity of Shanghainese. Lao Wu complained that outsiders were mainly anti-guests, and Lao Bai persuaded that "the upper two generations are guests." The director's use of this scene may be intended to show the openness of the city of Shanghai, but it constitutes a satire on the story itself. The urban middle class took the British daughter to sit in the café, facing the poor's "looking for stubble" to explain themselves: "We can't forget our original intention." The British and Italians in the film are speaking Shanghainese, and the security guards are speaking Northern Jiangsu. The northern Su dialect as the identity symbol of this small character is highlighted and interpreted comically, once again reinforcing the exclusion of foreign laborers in a Middle-class narrative in the center of Shanghainese.
The security guard is like a game NPC character in it, he exists only to elicit the confessions of Lao Bai and Lao Wu about the identity politics of "Shanghai", Lao Wu is arrogant and nostalgic for glory, and Lao Bai is gentle. The superficial intention of this scene is to tell the open mobility of the city of Shanghai, and by the way, to add glory to the old white character. But under the opposition of the characters whose identity barriers are as solid as a rock, the Shanghainese language has become a class certification, which makes the meaning of the film's all-Shanghainese language discounted.
Castle in the Air: Middle-class feminism
Another very important identity issue in this film is feminism. Director Shao Yihui, as a post-90s female creator, wrote and directed herself, presenting a feminism that is rare on the big screen in China and has a clear stance. In an interview, Shao Yihui said that he admired Zhang Guimei and Ginsburg, and hoped that the heroine would first have the concept (female consciousness) that she identified with. In the shaping of the three female characters, the audience sees a new model - a group portrait of middle-aged actresses, no heavy moral shackles on marriage and infidelity, an active attitude towards sex, and even in the face of the same male object, let go of female competition and become a relaxed girlfriend-style communication. This is indeed refreshing for the long-term poor portrayal of women in domestic films.
On the other hand, the portrayal of feminism in this film has a serious theme avoidance, resulting in the new life appearance presented in the film, which basically belongs to a small number of lucky people in the middle class. Common dilemmas faced by urban women, such as gender discrimination in the workplace, sexual harassment, unpaid labor in marriage, maternal punishment, violence in intimate relationships, PUA, etc., disappeared from the movie. Miss Li is sad about the destination of romantic love, Gloria and Bei Bei yearn for unfettered fun, and the women seem to have collected a bunch of golden sentences in the feminist topic of Weibo, throwing them out one by one as proof of women's consciousness. "I just made the mistake that a man would make", "I am in the best state now, rich and idle, my husband is missing", these lines have a comedic effect, but because the character lives in a gender vacuum, he can only stay in the function of playful paragraphs.
Miss Li in "Love Myth"
Lao Bai filed for divorce after discovering that Bei Bei had cheated on him. The divorce story of middle-class couples can lead to a lot of issues related to women's situation, such as the "mistake" of cheating actually only punishes the woman in the marriage, and is often unharmed for men; for example, the distribution of property in marriage cannot compensate for women's reproductive strain. After being divorced, Bebe leaves the house where they once lived together, happily indulges in tango dancing, and returns as a guest almost without hesitation in the story, pushing cups and cups with her ex-husband's other girlfriends, jealous and snorting. She withdrew so easily in her marriage, as a wife and mother, what she gained and lost could not withstand scrutiny and thought. She controls her son to go on a blind date and opposes her son's association with a northerner girlfriend, this kind of issue of women taking from their children after losing power in marriage, also dragonflies like water, in the later stage, the audience sees her son and girlfriend happily join the dinner, can you still feel Bei Bei's struggle? The appearance of her new woman is precisely the "lightness" created after avoiding the conflict of reality.
Gloria's relationship with Lao Bai is even worse. The "rich and idle" Gloria is protected from insults and damage in the relationship, not from the modern sense of female awakening, but from the gender replacement of consumer identity. She spent money on Lao Bai's paintings after a night of affair, causing Lao Bai to exclaim "I was prostituted", not a new, modern relationship between the sexes, but a conservative and antiquated, inverted purchase behavior brought about by economic inequality between the sexes. And in the real society's perception of both sexes, this purchase is ultimately still the highlight of male charisma.
The "freedom" produced after the gender reversal also exists in another character, Lao Wu. Lao Wu has been talking about his past with Hollywood actresses when he was young. This was originally half-true, but after Lao Wu's death, the director used the appearance of the mysterious person to tell that he was given the lifelong free residency of the bungalow, almost making the truth of the story clear. The image of Lao Wu is reminiscent of the entrepreneur Li Chunping, who in his own legendary life, met a Hollywood movie star in his twilight years when he was young, was taken to the United States to enjoy his happiness, and was given a huge fortune after the death of the "old lady". The same unconventional model of gender, in which women buy male color in a strong economic position, the director uses a more frivolous narrative to conform to the romance of Shanghai mythology - small town encounters, unknown names, one night, unforgettable. The two male characters in the film have received resources from women because of their sexual relationships, and they can still stay in the male center without wavering. If this is feminism, it obviously does not produce strong persuasion.
Rather, it is the rise of women in the hypothetical consumerism of women, where women become buyers of sex and acquire "false subjectivity". The real subject is the old white who looks passive, even if he puts on a warm male appearance in Shanghai, buys vegetables and cooks and serves, in the story, only three women can be circumvented with him as a man, and cannot be reversed. This kind of role setting is the unbreakable conservatism in the relationship between the sexes, and it is also the aerial pavilion created by this film in feminism.
"Shanghai Myth"
This sweet, light-hearted comedy is different from reality — no one in it wears a mask. In the special period of repeated outbreaks, it may be a consolation. The criticism of it has triggered unprecedented rebuttal language, for example, there is no need for the film to be bitter, there is no obligation to show all classes in all aspects, and the middle class has its own story. The director himself responded: there is no film that is not one-sided, limited, and only presents an imagination, and the volume of 2 hours determines its scope. These rebuttals are actually acknowledging that "Love Myth" does have a lack of class perspective.
In the class narrative, "seeking truth" and "seeking perfection" are not the same thing. It is unrealistic to ask for the auction of all classes in Shanghai, and Zhang Ailing's middle and upper class does not write about the poor, but it does not hinder the authenticity of her works. "Truth-seeking" means that when the camera is only aimed at the affluent class, the viewer can accurately understand from the director's lens language their true relationship with the cross-class other (even if they are not present), as well as their true position in the big society. "Love Myth" has a lot of room for discussion at this level.
But criticizing a film's class narrative has never ushered in such a "true feeling" of disgust. This seems to confirm another logic of the popularity of the film, when the creator hides the dullness of the times in the image and bathes the characters in the stable sunshine of the world, the image will automatically overlap with the grand narrative and connect to the spiritual community. Identities that used to be confined to Shanghainese have been pushed the boundaries of this film like never before. The change of Shanghai's urban image, from being disgusted and ridiculed to finally being envied, has experienced more than a decade of social transformation from the post-Olympic era to the post-epidemic era, and "Love Myth" has completed the final process for this Shanghai myth.