Near the end of the movie "A River of Spring Water", there is a scene similar to "A River of Spring Water Flows East" directed by Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli: after saying goodbye to her sister Jinhua eating hot pot, the heroine Rong Jie passed a bridge on the way home, which is a rare moment in the film to show the depth of the picture, we witness Rong Sister walking into the depth of the screen and leaning on the railing by the bridge, and then occupying her point of view, gazing at the flowing water under the bridge with her in the night. Here the director created a moment of hesitation, making the audience feel sorry for the choices that Rong Jie might make. However, unlike the desperate disillusionment of "everything in vain" shown by the river in "A River of Spring Water Flows East", the river in "A River spring water" symbolizes some kind of saving power (the English title is River of Salvation), which can catch people who float down from the upstream, and also give Sister Rong the courage to finally face the escaped past.
The drifts of everyday life and the waves of melodrama
The protagonist of "A River of Spring Water", Rong Jie, is a technician at a foot massage shop in Shiyan, Hubei Province, and she is facing various problems in work and marriage and love when she raises her brother Xiaodong alone, and the whole film is organized around her work scene and living environment. The film begins with a real family interior scene, on the left side of the picture is a statue of Guanyin placed against the wall, Rong Jie enters the painting from the right side, pulls open the window, and the slightly chilly wind blows in from outside. It can be said that this scene sets the tone of the story, and the audience is invited into the world of Rong Jie, a highly limited, somewhat cramped and gushing space with vitality. Whether it's boiling wormwood in a pedicure shop, washing and drying towels, talking and laughing with sisters, or fighting with my brother at home, pounding my back and soaking my feet, it's all presented in a convincing, natural and fluid way.
In recent years, many films will adopt the Dane brothers' handheld follow-up to create an atmosphere of "breathing and sharing fate" with the characters, but "A River of Spring Water" has chosen fixed shots from beginning to end. Refusing to let the camera move may be to simulate the limitations of life itself, whether it is Rong Jie or the audience are forming their own life cognition in a kind of limitation. The whole film also deliberately uses a 4:3 frame, this narrow and thin frame can better frame the state of the character, with the help of some foreground occlusion and frame design, successfully simulated the limitation of life itself. And this prudent distance also makes it easier for the audience to recognize the concentration of Rong Jie, throw away the prejudices about class and profession, and be attracted by such an unconventional character. To make a metaphor, "A River of Spring Water" is exactly a string of water drifts on the flow of RongJie's life, not trying to give an all-knowing picture, but using a screenshot to imagine the complete flow of water. Through these fixed cross-sections of the jump, the audience can glimpse the life of an ordinary migrant woman in a small city.
Interestingly, however, the incomparable and everyday scenes of "A River of Spring Water" are actually full of extremely dramatic events. Soon after the beginning of the film, Sister Rong went to meet with brother Qiang's mother, who was the owner of the foot therapy shop and sister Rong's lover, and the marriage between the two was opposed by the mother-in-law on the spot, but soon after Sister Rong found that the old lady was just an extra hired by Brother Qiang, and it turned out that she was bent on helping her lover to see the store and trying to maintain the business, but she was betrayed by his calculations and betrayal. On the other hand, Xiaodong, who spent all her thoughts on raising Sister Rong, is no longer willing to go to cram school to enter the university, and she and his girlfriend Jing have a pregnancy storm. If these are just general "disasters", if you look back from the reveal at the end of the film, you will find that this is a typical female melodrama. Sister Rong was originally a northeast rural girl who studied drama at a drama school, fell in love with the son of the head of the town's drama troupe, was betrayed after pregnancy, mistakenly thought that she had killed the other party by mistake, fled and drifted to Hubei, raised her child as a sister in nineteen years, and after the child left home to work, decided to return to her hometown in the northeast to turn herself in, but found that the negative man did not die, and her tragic life was "not filed".
This practice of pouring all the sufferings in the whole world could have made the audience cry silently, but the special thing about "A River of Spring Water" is that it greatly restrains the sensationalism of the melodrama, and also reduces the suspense to the level of daily life, only because Sister Rong is not able to eat spicy and refuses to eat dumplings, she gives a little hint to her hometown. As a result, the revelation of the last few minutes of the film is not a rewrite of the meaning of the first paragraph of the film, but the melodrama waves it sets off, which just strengthens the power of the daily currents in front of it. There is no sad howl to the end, the thrill of revenge and cool drama, nor is it a traditional reunion, in the tears of sorrow and joy that Rong Jie finally shed, the audience experienced a more common fate and life situation.
The telling of women's stories is possible: the displacement from daughter-in-law to sister
The same is the melodrama, the protagonist has suffered the betrayal of the negative heart, "A River of Spring Water" and "A River of Spring Water Flowing East", in addition to the background of the times and the style of the image, but also in the position of the protagonist. Su Fen is the daughter-in-law (Zhang Zhongliang's wife, mother and child who takes care of him), while Sister Rong is always the older sister.
Starting with Orphans Saving Ancestors, the most important role in Chinese melodrama or bitter love drama is the daughter-in-law, a unique Chinese title that also contains the meaning of wife, daughter-in-law and even mother ("daughter-in-law who has been boiled into a wife for many years"), carrying all the shackles of the traditional patriarchal structure, so it can also evoke all the tears about misfortune. Compared with the daughter-in-law, the sister is a looser position. And this is also the education that Rong Jie has received imperceptibly since she was a child, and the "Liu Qiao'er" she sang tells the story of disobeying her father's orders and becoming married by herself. For Xiao Dong, Sister Rong performed her motherly duties in the name of her sister, but never gave him orders in her mother's position, and had the closeness of a sister and brother with him; for Jinhua, Sister Rong was the master who led her to the beginning, and the two were sisters who could entrust their lives. This position of Sister Rong allows "A River of Spring Water" to focus more on female friendship. Xiaodong's girlfriend Jing is a copy of Rongjie's own fate, but Xiaodong "did not deviate" under The guidance of Rongjie and took on his own responsibility to go to Shenzhen to find Jing. Although Aunt Gu Tian, the old owner of the foot therapy shop, is pregnant with the selfish desire to let Sister Rong take care of her paralyzed son, she also has the sincerity of treating her as a daughter. When Sister Rong finally returned to the northeast and reverted to her real name Wang Dan, it was another sister, Wang Yan, who came to the police station to pick her up. One of the most beautiful scenes in the film is when the sister leads her sister back to her long-lost home to feed the deer in the snow, and after the deer disperse, the last sister to appear sits on a bucket of brown rice and cries. In this sense, "A River of Spring Water" is indeed a "My Sister" with more complex clues and more sincere and delicate emotions. In a world where men are absent, women help each other through the difficulties.
Like the earlier release of "Love Myth", "A River of Spring Water" is a dialect film. The experience of life in the nearly two months before the start of filming is far beyond the rehearsal of ordinary commercial films, so that the actors have formed a special harmony and tacit understanding between each other, actors and environments. This also helps the film to represent the service providers of the foot spa shop in a realistic, natural and improvised way, rather than any curiosity, giving these characters dignity and depth. This may be an important reason why in the 2021 FIRST Youth Film Festival, Sister Rong's actor Lee Yeon-seok was able to win the Best Performance Award over a number of famous actors.
Such a film, failing to get enough opportunities in the film market, is not only a pity for the film. The most important meaning of the existence of cinema is to make us forget ourselves and see others, and this is exactly what "A River of Spring Water" and the different life it carries may bring.
Author: Wang Xin (Lecturer, School of Arts and Media, Beijing Normal University)
Editor: Guo Chaohao