Recently, the movie "Love Myth", which is being screened in theaters, has become a dark horse for domestic films at the end of the year and the beginning of the year. It is directed by Shao Yihui, Xu Zheng, Ma Yili, Ni Hongjie and Wu Yue, and it announces the work of a low-key and newcomer director, which has aroused heated discussion and also triggered polarized discussions after its release.
Most fans have given affirmation to this film, believing that it accurately expresses "Shanghai sex" and is a rare domestic feminist masterpiece. Critics argue that the depiction of Shanghai in "Love Myth" is suspended and distorted, and it represents a kind of "castle in the air" style of Shanghai.
The author believes that in fact, the problem of "Love Myth" is not the distortion, but the excessive immersion of the creators. It chose to present the landscape of Shanghai's Bourgeois neighborhood, but it fully appreciated and invested in this landscape, losing the creator's prudent and questioning thinking. It was an immersion and appreciation of the clean, dust-free, and isolated bourgeois life of migrant workers. But it does exist, not false. When there are reviews that cite falsehood as a criticism of the film, it is not appropriate.
In the author's view, this is a rare film, especially under the "background" of peers, which shows its valuableness. But blindly praising and even saying that it is a benchmark for feminist films is a kind of praise. In this film review, the author starts from the two angles of the most popular "Shanghai sex" and "feminism", combined with relevant criticism, to talk about the specific advantages and disadvantages of this film.
"Love Myth" Douban rating page.
Written by | Zongcheng
01
"Love Myth" is a false restoration of Shanghai,
Or is it presented truthfully?
The first thing this movie is hotly discussed is its "Shanghaineseness". The film's presentation of the Shanghai landscape is worth mentioning, and it can be seen in the lines. The lines in the film "white phase", "thirteen o'clock", "spirit ah spirit", "Concubine this West man Ning" and "a woman must have a pair of jimmy hills in her life" are all familiar expressions of Shanghainese, such as white phase is the meaning of playing in Shanghainese, and thirteen o'clock is a brain disease. Not only that, the film is also mixed with some expressions of northern Or southern Jiangsu, such as "de-bottomed snake basket", which is the meaning of rotten people. The film was filmed in Shanghai, and haipai streets can be seen everywhere, and the seaweed peanuts that appear in the film are lao Dachang's, and the butterfly crisp that Xu Zheng said was bought on Tianyaoqiao Road.
Stills from "Love Myth".
The characters in the film also have a typical Shanghainese flavor. Teacher Bai, played by Xu Zheng, is a model of Shanghai's literary and artistic middle class. There are many such "literary and artistic middle-aged people" in Shanghai: the ideal has not yet come to fruition, and I always feel that I have no talent, a little money, a little idleness, but life is always missing something.
Stills of "Love Myth", pictured as Lao Wu.
Old U is the representative of old Keler. This kind of person belongs to old Shanghai, has money and leisure, has gentleman's taste, but does not have much ambition, and likes to live with taste and humanity. Old Wu usually seems to have no job, hanging around, helping good friends, Shinto, joyful pulling cylinder, he looks dashing, and he is a very lonely person, he sighs that the taste of old Shanghai is gradually fading, and how many girlfriends he has on his mouth. This character actually has his tragic side, he is an anachronistic kind of person today.
What the film reflects is actually not complicated, that is, the secular norm of middle-aged divorced men and women. Under lust and love, the taste of life is stirred. In contrast to Scarlett Johansson's "Marriage Story," which focuses on the process from marriage to divorce, "Love Myth" focuses on the state of middle-aged people after divorce. It is worth mentioning that there is a metaphor in "Love Myth". The film mentions: Lao Wu once went abroad in 1989, and this life-obsessed man boasted that he had many foreign girlfriends, the most important three of which were from the Soviet Union, Germany, and Sophia Roland, who he was reading. Rome has always been the Garden of Eden of Western romantic mythology, the Soviet Union was the grandest political experiment of the twentieth century, and the merger of the two Germanys marked the end of the Cold War, as did the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Lao Wu met Sophia Roland in Italy, and then he broke up with his Soviet girlfriend, ending his exotic drift and returning to Shanghai. This man always says that he is just making up stories, and his life and the house he has lived in for free since 1990 are also a mystery, but we may as well use the idea of making up stories to make a brain hole. If we compare it with "Suzhou Creek", which symbolizes the sentimentality and confusion of the 1990s, then "Love Myth" may be understood as an answer to how literary and artistic youth walked after "Suzhou Creek".
Stills from "Suzhou Creek".
The difference is that "Suzhou Creek" portrays a tragic character who is forever stuck in the 1990s (even his personal spirit is the crystallization of the 1980s), while "Love Myth" gives a good solution to the quiet years. When reality has become a foregone conclusion, recalling the sorrows of the past that can only be reduced to nihilism or the next to the times, another group of literary and artistic young people with the brand of idle class have gone to "secular comfort" after middle age: a little money, a little idleness, and a little concrete sense of life.
This Yishu-style solution, although it will be ridiculed, is also a helpless act for individuals to heal their own bodies when the grand level of dilemma cannot be solved. The so-called "Love Myth" is also how people face a bleak spiritual situation. The blossoming golden sentences are intertwined, and the pile is like a life of cold and warm self-knowledge.
Some commentators pointed out that "Love Myth" is too distorted, but at least in terms of restoring the temperament of a city, it has done better than most of its domestic counterparts. This was originally the basic skill of the movie, but it was forgotten by people who were eager to make money. There are comments that shoemakers drink coffee and talk about philosophy is a very false treatment, how can a real shoemaker be like this? However, if we implement the perspective of specific analysis, in a city with the largest number of cafes in the world (according to the "Shanghai Coffee Consumption Index" released by Shanghai in 2021), drinking coffee has long been not a sign of the middle class, but can be seen everywhere regardless of class, and there are more than 50 cafes on Huaihai Middle Road alone. Drinking coffee and talking about philosophy is not uncommon in the group of migrant workers in Shanghai, and the "migrant workers reading Heidegger" staged in real life before is actually telling us that the understanding of a person should not be limited to symbolization, why can't shoemakers talk about philosophy? Why can't migrant workers read Heidegger? The superficial impression of a group reveals sloppiness and arrogance.
The whole shanghai language of the film can not be used as evidence of its distortion, which is actually an artistic treatment. A simple realist point of view, that the film should completely copy life, otherwise it is distorted, but throughout the ages, no film can meet the requirements of mechanical realism, as long as the film has a narrative, editing, it will inevitably not be a mechanical copy of reality, the purpose of the film is never to restore reality like a history book, but to penetrate the surface of reality, into the spiritual truth, the atmosphere of reality, and even the exploration of the essence of life. Wong Kar-wai's "Chongqing Forest" is full of Cantonese and handheld photography, and Proust's "Remembrance of The Age of Water" lingers in aristocratic life and the spiritual world of literati, can we say that they show all the truth? What they do is actually an artistic treatment of reality, trying to capture an eternal moment in the flow of time.
Therefore, whether it is from the perspective of "the whole Shanghainese language" to criticize "Love Myth", or from the perspective of the film only showing the idle class, it will fall into a routine criticism paradigm, and it is impossible to carry out a more accurate analysis of the film, this discourse can also be copied to the criticism of Zhang Ailing, Cao Xueqin, Wong Kar-wai, Buñuel, Proust and others, after all, in the 1940s, when Zhang Ailing's "Long Live the Wife" was staged, it was subject to collective bombardment, but afterwards it proved that "Long Live the Wife" was proved. It is a film that has stood the test of time.
02
The presentation of women's issues is not three-dimensional enough
Let's talk about the second hot point of this film - women's issues. When I walked out of the cinema, I initially recognized the director's interpretation of female characters. But after careful consideration these days, if we comb through the play carefully, we will find that the presentation of women's issues in "Love Myth" is flattering and simplified. It has a little cleverness and a little fun, but the director still has a long way to go to understand women's issues. For a newcomer, the rigorous and well-intentioned way is not to kill in a single way, but to specifically point out the advantages and disadvantages.
The film is ostensibly a narrative unfolding from a male perspective, but it is not short of ridicule for male gaze, and when the film progresses to the scene where Ma Yili, Ni Hongjie and Xu Zheng confront each other, the dramatic lines seem to be light and breezy, but they are full of rebellion against the male gaze. In the film, the three women starring Ma Yili, Ni Hongjie and Wu Yue are not the products of male perspectives, but three specific characters with distinct personalities, and they have not staged the drama of fighting for the wind and jealousy and pleasing men, but the old Bai played by Xu Zheng is no longer in front of them as a macho image, but a Shanghai man image that reveals a middle-aged and small depression.
The feminist intention can also be perceived from the speech of the creator. The film is from Shao Yihui's First Venture Capital, she wrote and directed herself, and the script won the love of Ma Yili, who then invited Xu Zheng, Ni Hongjie, Wu Yue and others to join. Ma Yili said of her role as a woman in the workplace: "It is still a bit difficult to recognize the precious status of housewives. So I still hope that the female audience will be careful to give up their position in the workplace. ...... What we interpret is only a kind of life, a relationship, but also want everyone to see positive things, and we can't escape because we don't want to manage emotions. ”
Coincidentally, Shao Yihui, Wu Yue and Ni Hongjie also talked about the weight of women's perspective in the film. For example, Wu Yue said: "In fact, we all want to try to break the stereotypical narrative and present a new image of women." "So, the female perspective is an element of this film that can't be ignored.
Compared with the films unfolded by male narrators such as "Blossoms" and "The History of the Demise of Romanticism", the female perspective of "Love Myth" may be more appropriate to Zhang Ailing's "Long Live the Wife". This masterpiece from half a century ago also deals with middle-aged life. In 1947, Zhang Ailing published the "Inscription" in the Ta Kung Pao Drama and Film:
Chinese women have always changed from young girls to middle-aged people as soon as they get married, skipping the stage of young women. Chen Sizhen already has the temperament of a middle-aged person. She finally got a happy ending and was not very happy; the so-called 'mournful middle age', presumably means that their joy is always mixed with a trace of bitterness, and their sorrow is not completely without comfort.
"Long Live the Wife" is a story about "mourning middle age", and its follow-up work is also suspected that Zhang Ailing's "Mourning Middle Age" has further exploration of middle age. "Mourning Middle Age" sharply explores a question, that is, why are Chinese people prone to "aging before aging", and why young people who have just given birth to calves can be as sophisticated, sleek and even more conservative as the elderly in a short time?
Stills from "Long Live the Wife".
Stills from "Mourning Middle Age".
"Long Live the Wife" and "Mourning Middle Age" are tragedies under the shell of comedy, in contrast, the regret of "Love Myth" is not that it does not solve the problem, but that it is a superficial taste of the problem. After Lao Wu tells the sublimation point of "love myth", the film slips to a simple narrative that dissolves the problem with a lump of harmony. The protagonist's real crisis is actually resolved by the premise of "money and leisure", and the film's presentation of their spiritual crisis is so far. It's a good sketch movie, a light comedy that will laugh at the heart, but if it is raised to the benchmark of feminism, it is a kind of killing.
"Love Myth" does a good job in its presentation of Shanghai's middle-class temperament, the reversal of male gaze, the golden sentences in the dinner table, and the allegorical story of Lao Wu and Sophia Roland, but the accumulation of golden sentences cannot hide its loose structure, and the abuse of lyrical music for narrative stitching exposes the limitations of the director. As the main character in the film, Lao Wu's death is scrawled with only two or three shots; as a model of feminism that the film focuses on, we can only see Miss Li's flashy workplace life, gloria's drunken fan's dashing and helplessness, and the functional appearance of the ex-wife played by Wu Yue. But what about more specifically? In the movie, either it is not said, or it is skipped like a dragonfly, drowning in the spirit of the spirit and the spirit of idle money.
The director and the creator talked about Justice Ginsburg and Beauvoir, the reason why Ginsburg can inspire people is that she has taken solid actions step by step to defend women's rights and interests, but in "Love Myth", the presentation of feminism only stays in the dimension of golden sentences, even if the viewer does not harshly criticize the film's lack of presentation of poor women, cross-referencing women of other classes in Shanghai, even if it focuses on Miss Li, Gloria, and Bei Bei, the presentation of their women's plight can only be said to be scratched by the shoe.
In the deep digging of women's issues, the documentary "Female Justice", the book "Tokyo Poor Woman" by Japanese journalist Junhiko Nakamura, and the American drama "Married Life" adapted from Ingmar Bergman's film are all good examples, looking at The country, it is only the Shanghai theme film this way, "Long Live the Wife", "Mourning Middle-aged" for the discussion of married life and the premature aging of middle-aged people, and the metaphor of the young girl Peony played by Zhou Xun in "Suzhou Creek" for an idealistic disillusionment can also provide inspiration for the latter. Comparing the two, the viewer can find that "Love Myth" does not pay much attention to the presentation of women's issues, in fact, it still focuses on creating a plump male image, while the three women are more abstract. Their lives are often circumvented in golden terms where depth is needed.
03
Laughter is the anesthetic of life
As for the landscape around Wuyuan Road, Changshu Road, Julu Road, and Huaihai Middle Road, it is what the film looks like, and when some critics evaluate the landscape of the film by suspending, distorting, and being constructed, they ignore that the real nature of Shanghai is done in suspension and construction, or that the Bourgeois neighborhood, which actually accounts for less than one-third of Shanghai, the "exceptional part" that keeps itself out of the matter and suspends itself from the heavy history, has existed in the blood of Shanghai since the 20th century.
It is worth mentioning that most people in Shanghai are not people in the city center or Internet celebrity attractions, but migrant workers around the city center, shanghai is constructed to be clean, dust-free, middle-class, and most people in Shanghai live with dust and labor class. Shanghai's self-stage can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty, the Song Dynasty, and more distant times, while today's Shanghai is to kill the body in the reproduction of mixed races and give birth to the heirs of new modernity. The essence of Shanghai died out as early as infancy, and it passively became the image of the other after the modern era, becoming a heavy mirror of the European, American and Japanese bourgeois landscape in the East, these mirrors were not originally Shanghai, but in modern times they have shaped the appearance of Shanghai, a Shanghai atmosphere that people can easily identify and cannot be specifically summarized.
"Love Myth" chooses to present only the part of the Bourgeois neighborhood, but its problem is that it fully appreciates and invests in the landscape, and loses the creator's prudent and questioning thinking. It was an immersion and appreciation of the clean, dust-free, and isolated bourgeois life of migrant workers. I think it does exist, not false, and it is not appropriate when left-wing commentators use falsehood as a critique of the film, the real problem is that The Myth of Love presents a partial truth, but it is incapable of digging the truth deeper into the panorama, nor does it offer any kind of serious examination of the highly homogeneous reality of this landscape, but only enviably portrays it, longing, enjoying, the years are quiet, all problems are suspended.
Does this bourgeois neighborhood represent Shanghai? Is this life of idle money and all problems hanging in the air the end of our search for the truth of life? A serious creator, she is staring at this clean, dust-free bourgeois landscape, can she make a more difficult and profound search besides the Yishu-style solution, "Little Times" or Zhang Jiajia-style solution?
If not, if we block all the questions in "you can't be too picky about the movie" and "she is not easy", then we should not see a more artistic or ideological value on the big screen, and can only be fed by the bad movies that fool the audience again and again. Abandoning the quest for complexity and indulging in golden sentences, suspensions, fragments and the quiet of time is a contemporary quality, but existence itself does not mean that we should recognize existence.
"Love Myth" is a work of "but ask for a laugh", its desolation and sadness are drowned in simple reconciliation, and it is not difficult for us to find that the reason why Teacher Bai and others can reconcile with life and choose such a dashing and tasteful life posture is that in the end it is inseparable from his economic foundation of "having money and leisure, and having a house in Shanghai". This big premise alone has already distinguished most people from Teacher Bai's path of relief, so it does not have guiding significance for ordinary people.
At the end of the day, "Love Myth" is not bad, but it is not good enough, it is a 6.5 to 7 point movie, set off by peers, scored 8 points. The audience was fed up with bad movies again and again, and when they saw a poor movie, they could laugh and relieve their boredom, and they gladly gave them five stars. Some people will ask, "Why be so harsh on movies?" Figure a happy oh no. ”
But perhaps, the most important thing in contemporary times is lehe. This reminds me of a spin-off show "So-and-So and Me" in which actor HuLan said: "We said before that laughter is the antidote to life, not necessarily, I think laughter is the anesthetic of life." ”
At the end of the day, "Love Myth" is a beautiful anesthetic in the era of the new crown epidemic. There is no shortage of anesthesia on the screen today, on the contrary, we live in an era where anesthesia is everywhere, but the kind of images that dare to pierce the anesthesia are becoming more and more scarce. Therefore, I am happy to see such a humorous Bourgeois comedy as "Love Myth", but if one day, we have not only a Bourgeois tragicomedy on the screen, but also a "Love Myth" that belongs to the proletarian, perhaps even more precious.
After all, the works on the screen that we see too many princes and generals and the life of the leisure class, but that truly belong to the majority of the people, reflect ordinary laborers, and are not cheap lyrical and symbolic presentations are very few. Further, however, it points to the big question of contemporary life – can proletarians still believe in The Myth of Love today? When the burden of life is on our shoulders, do we still dream of our "love myths" from the heart.
References for this article:
1, Mr. Manufacturing: "How do we explain this crazy year";
2. Shao Yihui: "Words";
3. Deep Focus Art Wenzhi: "Director Shao Yihui: A "Myth" Exclusive to Shanghai";
4. Deep Focus Art Literature: "The Spectacle of the Middle Class in the Bright City, Capturing the Hearts of everyone";
5. Li Nanxin: "Shanghai Pavilion in the Sky", The Paper's Thought Market;
6. Cheng Yuqi: "Rui Commentary Collection";
7. Wang Lu: "The Myth";
8. Zhang Junxiang, "Preface to the New Chinese Literature Department (1937-1949, Episode 49, Film Volume 2")," Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 1990 edition, page 331, which contains the script of "Mourning Middle Age";
9. Su Weizhen, "Zhang Ailing in a Long Lens: Images, Letters, Publishing", Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2012;
10. Zhang Chu and Chen Jie: "Zhang Ailing's Screenwriting Film Research", Nanjing Academy of the Arts, 2013;
11. Zhang Zijing, Ji Ji: "My Sister Zhang Ailing", Wenhui Publishing House, 2003;