The opening statement is clear that the Pingyao International Film Festival has recently become popular on the Douban book video and audio hot search, and the hard-to-find "Yong'an Town Story Collection" is a good movie.
Director Wei Shujun has used two feature films in succession (the last one is "Wild Horse Mane") to prove his strength and gradually construct a personal style. In just two or three years, Wei Shujun's short film "Yanbian Boy" and the feature film "Wild Horse Mane" and "Yong'an Town Story Collection" have all won the honor of being shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festival.
Wei Shujun in Cannes
In 2020, with its unique humorous style, "Wild Horse Mane" stood out from the "stuffy films" of the Pingyao International Film Festival and won the Best Actor Award. This film, featuring college students who are about to enter the society, has added a large number of fans and has the personal growth experience of director Wei Shujun.
For fans, the story of "Mustang Mane" is particularly intimate and resonant, but for ordinary audiences, it is like scratching the itch of a boot. As a result, word of mouth is slightly polarized. However, as a debut feature film, it is enough to reflect the talent of the director, a blockbuster, and arouse the expectations and attention of fans.
Poster of "Wild Horse Mane"
With the honor of being shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Bi-Weekly Unit and Wei Shujun's accumulated personal aura, "Yong'an Town Story Collection" has become one of the most anticipated Chinese films by audiences before the start of the Fifth Pingyao International Film Festival.
Poster of "Yong'an Town Story Collection"
The audience's expectations are often a "danger" factor, and it is easy to appear that the higher the expectations, the greater the disappointment, but the "Yong'an Town Story Collection" is stable, and everyone is looking forward to it, riding on the dust. The screenings in both the media and the audience were well received, with applause and laughter. Especially when the film satirizes the film critics who took three thousand yuan and gave five-star praise, they were not soft, and the film critics in the movie hall laughed.
But we also need to look at this response objectively. The main audience of the film festival is film practitioners and fans, the film's irony of the director, screenwriter, actor, producer, film critic, etc. (or more importantly, the director's own self-deprecation of the process of filming), can provoke their emotions, considering that most of the film shown in the film festival is a "stuffy film" that reflects reality, this film is thriving, very pleasing, relaxed, funny, mocking reality, not only to save the audience from "unhappiness", but also to ridicule a life and film and television industry atmosphere.
But for those who are unfamiliar with the film industry, can they appreciate this self-deprecating humor? Let's wait for more feedback from fans and audiences after the follow-up theater release of "Yong'an Town Story Collection".
What happened in Yong'an?
"Yong'an Town Story Collection" is the inspiration of director Wei Shujun and screenwriter Kang Chunlei in the long and tangled script revision process.
They quickly seized on this aura, overturned the film that had previously entered the filming site, prepared for 17 days, started from scratch, wrote a new script in only three days, and then made this exciting humorous and ironic "Yong'an Town Story Collection" with a bang. This "unexpected work" is the chemical reaction of the talent and personality of the director and screenwriter.
Set photos of "Yong'an Town Story Collection"
The film consists of three stories:
The young mother in a small town restaurant is attracted to the film crew and gradually ignites a desire to break through the original boring life;
The heroine who returns to her hometown to make a film wants to recover some lost past, but because of her status as a big star, she is warmly welcomed by her childhood playmate, and everything changes;
The film is about to start, the director and screenwriter are still arguing about the script revision, the more noisy the more intense, the collision of the two creative views, not only reflects the dilemma of the creator, but also highlights the core of the previous two stories.
Stills from "Yong'an Town Story Collection"
In the first two stories, women are caught up in the collision of two lives. The young mother of the small town restaurant, while taking care of the young children, while running the restaurant choress, will be the restaurant owner's wife - the daughter-in-law to become a wife.
Compared to those around her, the young mother was slightly dressed in a slightly more flamboyant manner, slightly out of place from her environment, but it is conceivable that it will not be long before her difference will be erased. The crew who came to the town to shoot the film asked her to help try on makeup, releasing her desire to escape from her current life. It was at this time that the female star entered the group - she was just a "template" for the female star to experience life.
As the screenwriter in the film said, people in Yong'an Town, nothing happened, had to live according to inertia.
The female star grew up in this town, and she got rid of the inertia of life here, but seemed to be wandering in another inertia. She ventured to work with young directors as if desperately hoping to turn her career around. She met her childhood best friend in the town, but the pure friendship was gone.
When she was a pawn, they pushed her to cut the ribbon, pulled her into the liquor board, and begged her to help her through the back door. Exhausted, she returned to the hotel and found that the waiter who cleaned the room was her best classmate. In this situation, the other party did not want to recognize her and kept dodging. She is a success in the eyes of the townspeople, but a loser in her own life.
In the third story, the director and screenwriter of the crew began to argue about the core question of the script - did anything happen in Yong'an Town? The focus is on whether the restaurateur lady leaving town is a female consciousness awakening, or just for the money. Two big men from the film theory, creative practice, personal views, around the women's issues to win the face. Finally, the producer representing the investor inserted another foot, adding chaos to chaos, and it was more difficult to unify opinions.
The issue they argue about, in the first two stories, the audience may have formed their own judgment - art comes from life, but there is a huge dislocation with life.
Towards the end of the film, a puddle of dog urine is spilled on the script that the director and the screenwriter have been arguing for a year, and the irony or self-deprecation is obvious. For film and television practitioners or people who think of themselves as engineers of the human soul, watching this film may have a sense of thorns in the back.
As well as the film's ridicule of the awakening of women in different lifestyles and literary and artistic works, it is also well integrated into the contradiction between reality and the creator.
The genius that Wei Shujun shows in this film is to integrate the most flooded words of current movies and reviews- daily life, female awakening, and personality creation- into the satirical narrative very naturally.
This natural manifestation is the relaxation of the image, laying the layer of conflict in dialogue and everyday scenes, bringing together the power of narrative. Hou Mai, Woody Allen, and Hong Changxiu are all masters of shooting such films.
Many young directors like to emulate their approach, trying to capture the state of life or characters in this way, but only capture boredom and boredom, or appear old-fashioned. In view of this, Wei Shujun, who is less than 30 years old, can be called the star of tomorrow.
The good words are said, and then...
Although I am willing to give all the praise words to the "Yong'an Town Story Collection", after relaxing, I should still look at this film and its significance to Wei Shujun more soberly.
Director Wei Shujun
Whether you like "Yong'an Town Story Collection" and "Wild Horse Mane" in the end, you will have to admit Wei Shujun's directing skills and throw away most of the current young Chinese directors. He is able to conceive interesting stories from personal experience. The language of the shot is fluent, and the actors are scheduled naturally, which many fledgling directors can't do, but Wei Shujun has done it. He dissolves the grand themes (women's consciousness awakening, creative dilemmas, what life is) in the conflict of the characters, rather than using the elusive "state/everyday" sexual lens to express it.
Judging from the "Yong'an Town Story Collection", Wei Shujun is like the kind of director who "makes a movie while playing", deconstructing seriously and releasing creative passion.
This "play" does not mean that it is effortless, but that he does not screw up, is less entangled, and can quickly grasp a certain idea and interest and put it into practice. The film is able to reflect the personality of the author. Of course, the premise of this is to have excellent shooting ability.
Many directors like to combine their personality, fun and film. Quentin Tarantino, Takeshi Kitano, Wes Anderson, Anderson Jiang Are all such directors, here are just examples to make everyone better understand, I am not going to juxtapose Wei Shujun with them now, but to say that Chinese films are very short of this type of director, especially if they can continue to exert the heavy-handed creative spirituality to a higher level.
Even though Yong'an Town Storybook is a surprising and unexpected creation, it should not be exaggerated too much (although this article has been exaggerated a lot), especially with the word "genius". After all, it stems heavily from chance and passion, an explosion of the talent of directors and screenwriters. Objectively speaking, this kind of film first reflects the director's talent (or more or less can feel the director's personality) rather than intellectual, in order to continue high-quality creation, it is more necessary to have a stable aesthetic concept and creative mode.
For another example, Peng Haoxiang's film "Buy Murder shoots people" (the story is also based on filming jokes about life) completed in 2001, which also made people exclaim the birth of a ghost talent/genius. However, judging from the works behind it, he has never surpassed himself or reached the height of genius when he was "Buying Murder and Shooting People", and has always relied on personal interest to create.
Poster of "Buy Murder Shoot Man"
Therefore, when we praise the "Yong'an Town Story Collection", we must also note that Wei Shujun's creation has just started, and some problems objectively exist. For example, his first two works have a strong personal shadow and are related to filmmaking, not beyond personal experience.
Just as Jia Zhangke's creation will eventually have to leave his hometown of Fenyang geographically (although the core has always stayed there), Wei Shujun will inevitably have to step out of his personal shadow/experience and look for a wider range of narrative methods and themes. That's when he really tested his creative prowess and aesthetic concepts.
Perhaps it will not take long for us to see a more mature Wei Shujun in the new film "White Crane Bright Wings" (still self-written and self-directed) that he has already begun to shoot.
Poster of "White Crane Bright Wings"
Compared with "Yong'an Town Story Collection", I guess "White Crane Bright Wings" should belong to a film without a director's personal shadow or a personal shadow hidden deeply, so it is more testing of his directing ability.
In any case, Wei Shujun has proved himself to be a director who deserves to be remembered by Chinese film fans and continues to look forward to it with two works, and it is not appropriate to kill, let us wait for the good news.