丨This article was first published in the Pippi movie
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Recently, "Sister Riding the Wind and Waves" has been broadcast, which has made younger siblings shout "sister slay" at the same time, but also let the audience see countless possibilities for middle-aged female stars.
Age is not a restriction, looks are not a defect, and gender is not a threshold.
But!
Compared with the dazzling female stars on the stage, the middle-aged women in reality have no spotlight, no fans call,
What is their real life like, and can they have the above beautiful words?
Singaporean director Chen Zheyi's "Tropical Rain" directed last year, using the encounter of the heroine Ah Ling, took us to peek at the real side of middle-aged women who were covered up.
Without the "illusion" of prosperity in the show, their lives are still cruel to the point of speechlessness.
"Tropical Rain" is a film that focuses on the real situation of middle-aged women, which became a zero-negative hit at last year's Pingyao Film Festival, winning awards such as Best Picture, Best Actress, and Fan Choice Honors.
The film tells the story of a middle-aged woman Ailing, who is about 40 years old.
Husband cheating, career bottlenecks, teacher-student love, the director uses objective and real lenses to spy on a middle-aged woman, a secret and unbearable story, witnessing her bad and finding a way out of the bad relief.
Ah Ling (Yang Yanyan) is a Malaysian who married her Singaporean husband and stayed in a Singapore school as a Chinese teacher.
She and her husband had always wanted children, and eight years of ovulation injections had failed.
The film opens with the scene where Ah Ling injects herself in the car.
I saw that she was unusually skilled in taking out the needle tube and plunging the long needle into her abdomen, which was already bruised.
At this time, the wind and rain outside the window are fierce, and the torrential rain is also a portrayal of Ah Ling's situation.
As a middle-aged woman, Ah Ling is surrounded by "unsound" men.
Husband – irresponsible, cheating.
Although the film does not give the specific job of Ah Ling's husband, from the details of talking and driving a BMW, we can infer that he should be engaged in an industry such as finance, and the income is not cheap.
But every time he appears on camera, he is gloomy and hurried.
Ah Ling calculated the ovulation day at home waiting for him to share the great harmony of mankind, but he drank until late, taking the process of giving birth to a child as a task, and was reluctant.
His sister gave birth and asked him to celebrate, but he pushed and shoved, and finally ran away with only a bare head.
Ah Ling went to the hospital and returned home after artificial conception, wanting him to lie down with her for a while, and he also casually found an excuse to slip away.
Giving birth to a child is obviously a matter of two people, but Ah Ling's husband has pushed it all to one person to solve, and even artificial conception uses his frozen sperm.
If you are so indifferent to your only wife, it must be a dog outside.
Ah Ling confirmed her suspicions after a follow-up.
Father-in-law – stroke in bed.
Until the film gave relevant information, I always thought it was Ah Ling's own father.
Although she has an aunt to take care of her during the day, Ah Ling will rush home to cook for her father-in-law as long as she gets off work.
During the meal, he chewed up the meal and fed him, scrubbed his body, and then helped him to the bed and let him watch TV for a while before going to sleep.
Interestingly, the father-in-law who has been paralyzed in bed likes to watch martial arts movies, so Hu Jinquan's "Chivalrous Girl" and "Drunken Man" have always been played on TV.
If you are not careful, this detail will be ignored by the audience.
The contrast between the agile and flowing martial arts and the old man who cannot move, the exuberance and thinness of the vitality, is so sentimental.
And the film shows this collision of life force more than once.
Father-in-law and granddaughter, father-in-law and Wei Lun, Ah Ling and Wei Lun, Ah Ling's husband and Wei Lun.
All four groups make up a contrast.
And Wei Lun is the third male in the film.
He was a student of Ah Ling, a small piece of fresh meat in popular terms, and his parents had been doing business abroad for many years, and he was the only one in the family.
This brings us to Ah Ling's profession, a Chinese teacher at a Singapore school.
We all know that the common language used in Singapore is English.
Since the 1970s, the Singapore government has successively converted schools into British schools, retaining only two Chinese classes per week.
In director Chen Zheyi's self-description, he also mentioned this background: "The young generation of Chinese in Singapore hardly talks about Chinese. Because Singapore is a very practical society, after secondary school, you may never have the opportunity to use Chinese, and everyone does not pay attention to it. ”
In connection with the content of the film, we can also find that in Singapore, the status of Chinese classes is even higher than that of physical education classes in secondary schools in the mainland.
At this point, Ah Ling's situation in school is also obvious.
Students do not do homework and speak English in Chinese classes, which are routine operations.
Ah Ling took the initiative to leave students who failed the exam to make up for tuition, and as a result, they often ran almost as soon as they turned around.
Wei Lun was one of the students who was left by Ah Ling to study. But unlike the others, Wei Lun was the only one who took tuition seriously.
On the surface, the reason he gave was that he would go to China to do business in the future, and Chinese his parents would beat him to death if he did not study well.
In fact, Wei Lun has a crush on Ah Ling.
Wei Lun's crush on Ah Ling, at first, was just a variety of sneak photos, and slowly developed to rub the teacher's car home, and then to the teacher's house to eat.
This is one of the few warm parts of the film.
Ah Ling was cooking, Wei Lun was writing his homework at the living room table, and his father-in-law was sitting next to him watching him write.
When Wei Lun wrote in Chinese, could not write "gang", and was ready to use pinyin instead, the father-in-law slowly and tremblingly stretched out his finger and drew a stroke of the word "gang" on his arm, teaching him how to write this word.
After finishing their homework, the three of them sat together and ate dinner.
Between Ah Ling and Wei Lun, there has been an undercurrent.
Ah Ling's life was crammed with family and work, and the only body she touched was her father-in-law's aging body, and her husband was not even willing to give her a hug.
Wei Lun also did not have a normal family. He was often the only one in the house, the refrigerator empty, only two cans of Coke.
Ah Ling and Wei Lun, from the beginning of the teacher and student, to like mother and son, and then to the unrequited love, this process is actually a process of both sides looking for warmth.
As the real protagonist of the film, Ah Ling has a traditional Confucian femininity.
She looks gentle, serves her father-in-law at home without complaint, sincerely faces students at school, and says things like "respect Chinese".
"No filial piety has three, no queen is greater", Ah Ling is willing to bear years of physical and mental pressure for the sake of her heirs.
As for her husband, when she found out that her husband and Xiao SanQingqing and I were talking and laughing, she did not shout and make a fuss, but just a person silently shed tears.
It wasn't until the end that the phrase "I thought you wanted a daughter" was used to break the husband's private feelings.
And such a gentle and virtuous woman, but in the predicament of heavy rain Tuotuo.
Fortunately, the death of the father-in-law broke the dilemma.
After the only bond between feelings disappeared, Ah Ling officially divorced her husband.
After being euphemistically dismissed from school because of her unrequited love affair, Ah Ling returned to her mother's house in Malaysia.
At that time, my mother was washing the sheets in the backyard, and the sun was shining, as if Ah Ling had just left the door an hour ago.
The two men wrung out the sheets together and hung them up.
Ah Ling raised her head in the midst of the light and smiled.
The tropical rains have finally stopped.
The film uses a quiet approach to show the growth of a middle-aged woman.
The cultural dilemma, the broken family, the unrequited love, all of which make Ah Ling stronger.
Although the film does not indicate, Ah Ling should give birth to the child with Wei Lun and start a new life in the sun.
This has nothing to do with morality or not, it is just a choice, in Pigo's view, Ah Ling is undoubtedly the sister who really "rides the wind and waves" in Pigo's mind.
In 2013, Chen Zheyi made his debut film "Mom and Dad Are Not At Home", which won the "Best Feature Film" award at the Taiwan Film Festival that year, beating won won by Wong Kar-wai's "A Generation of Grandmasters" and Cai Mingliang's "Outing" and other famous director masterpieces.
Six years later, he made his second feature film, which is still first-class.
Both films are family films, with the immersion of Yasujiro Ozu's films, the warmth of Kore-eda's films, and the cultural collision of Ang Lee's films.
The heroines of the two films are the same person - Yang Yanyan, born in 1977, who is like Ah Ling in life, a sister who rides the wind and waves.
In "Parents Are Not At Home", the pregnant Yang Yanyan insisted on acting, showing the entanglement of a mother who neglected to take care of her son because of her work.
In "Tropical Rain", in order to play Ah Ling, who "played eight years of induction injections" in the film, Yang Yanyan rejected the director's suggestion to use a stand-in, but practiced using a large syringe to inject herself with saline every day, and played for a month before she had the skillful action at the beginning of the film.
The collaboration between Chen Zheyi and Yang Yanyan has great educational significance for mainland films.
We have to see not only young girls, but also middle-aged women, older women, and see what they experience in life.
We don't need to see deliberate pretense, but we want real and natural performances.
This is the director, actor, screenwriter, producer's thing, but also the audience's business, in life we need "Sister Riding the Wind and Waves" such a program is pleasant, but also need "Tropical Rain" such a movie, let us face the reality, because only in the face of reality, there will be some changes, will really "ride the wind and waves".
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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