Watching movies, learning about the culture of the city of Shanghai.
▲ Stills from the movie "Love Myth".
Text | Yu Li
"Love Myth", which takes Shanghai as the background and shows shanghai style, has become a dark horse at the box office of the current film market, with a rating of 8.3 points on a certain platform.
The popularity of the film allows us to see the possibility of visual presentation of the city. The controversy caused by the "middle-class taste" of the film also inspires us to think: is the visual presentation of the city just an "urban propaganda film"? How to show the richness of the city?
▲Shanghai Lujiazui night aerial photography. Figure/IC photo
Possibilities for visual representation of the city
One side feeds the other. Different cities have different material cultures and spiritual cultures, as well as different customs, traditional cultures and living habits.
For example, as an important carrier of urban culture, different cities have different dialects: Beijing's "Beijing Tablets" have the characteristics of poverty, simplicity and arbitrariness, Shanghai dialect is "Wu Nong soft language", Wuhan dialect is spicy and straightforward...
For a long time, many filmmakers have paid attention to the differences in urban culture and formed "regional films" with their own characteristics.
For example, when it comes to "Beijing-style movies", the audience thinks of "Old Things in The South of the City", Ning Ying's "Beijing Trilogy", Feng Xiaogang's Beijing citizen comedy at the beginning of the new century; Wuhan's regional films, such as "Jiangcheng Summer" and "Ten Thousand Arrows Through the Heart"; Chongqing has "Crazy Stone", "Hotpot Hero", "Rizhao Chongqing"; Jia Zhangke's "Xiaowu", "Platform", "Mountains and Rivers Old Man" continues to focus on Fenyang, Shanxi; Bi Gan's "Roadside Picnic" and "The Last Night of the Earth", allowing many viewers to hear the Kaili dialect on the big screen for the first time...
For domestic films, the visual presentation of different cities is of great significance. Globalization has erased the differences between different cities, resulting in "homogenization" between cities, and the existence of urban films has enriched the diversity of films, broken the monopoly of Hollywood's spatial narrative, and also promoted the inheritance and development of regional culture. In particular, China's land is vast and the cultural differences between different cities are very large, which is a treasure trove of themes for regional film creation.
The primary significance of "Love Myth" this time is that it effectively conveys one of the urban cultures of Shanghai. The surface narrative of the film is a middle-aged love story of a man and three women, in fact, Shanghainese, Shanghainese, and Shanghainese are the real protagonists of this movie.
Much of the dialogue in the film uses Shanghainese. The attitude of several protagonists to the world, their attitude towards emotions and life, but also revealed a kind of "Shanghai style": it is elegant, there is a sense of ceremony; it is face-oriented, no matter how it is the same thing, the face must always be done well; it has the tacky atmosphere of a small citizen, and it is sentient and righteous; it is "indulgent", drunken and obsessed, indulging in eroticism, but also longing for true feelings, loving the fireworks world...
It is no wonder that the movie exploded in the "free mail area" of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, especially in Shanghai, where at least 1 out of 20 people living in Shanghai has seen "Love Myth". As a rare Shanghainese film for more than 20 years, "Love Myth" shows the vitality of urban films.
The visual representation of the city can be more abundant
However, from the third-party ticketing platform, it can be intuitively seen that "Love Myth" is hot in first- and second-tier cities, and the response in third- and fourth-tier cities is relatively flat.
This is related to the temperament presented in the film, and the life paradigm of the protagonist in the film is the ideal life template for the middle class. This is also the source of the controversy of "Love Myth", and some viewers pointed out that this is the "style" of Shanghai's housing class, which has little to do with ordinary people.
Indeed it is. "Love Myth" has no metaphysical troubles. In the movie, Lao Bai, played by Xu Zheng, has a two-story shanghai single courtyard left by his ancestors, netizens calculated it, the market value is about 50 million yuan; three middle-aged women, economically independent, spiritually independent, dare to pursue desire; even ordinary little cobblers, have their own "coffee time", open mouth and shut up Armstrong or various life mottos; not to mention Zhou Yemang played by Lao Wu, he can't forget his own relationship with the legendary Italian actress Sophia. Roland's true and false affair is indistinguishable.
Obviously, the Shanghai style in "Love Myth" is not the only face of Shanghai. For example, in Lou Ye's movie "Suzhou Creek" and In Zhao Dayong's documentary "Nanjing Road", we see another Shanghai. There are broken downs, there are rich and poor gaps, there are young people who are crushed by high housing prices, there are marginal people who are difficult to integrate into the city...
This reminds us that "promotional films" can certainly be one of the visual representations of the city, but not the only one. So we also see in the films of many directors that they focus on the marginalized people in the city, pay attention to the lives of ordinary people, and explore the universal survival dilemma of human beings.
Therefore, Fenyang in Jia Zhangke's film is also the epitome of China's small county towns; from "Seventeen-year-old bicycle" and "Old Cannon" to "Looking for Han Ji" released last year, the audience can also see another richer face in addition to Beijing's identity as an "international metropolis"...