Commentary on "Seven Days after the Father"
Written by | Liao Weitang
Moving to Taiwan for a temporary residence, settling down in a good house, Zhang Luohao projector, the first movie I watched should be a Taiwanese movie. Therefore, I re-watched my good friend and Taiwanese novelist Liu Zijie's self-written and self-directed famous work "Seven Days after the Father".
The first time I watched it was almost eight years ago, when I was still a carefree "little child" identity like Zijie, in eight years, I had a son and daughter, and then watched this movie about the love between father and daughter, I became a viewer of Zijie as a son and a father at the same time, and of course my heart was full of taste.
Poster of "Seven Days after the Father"
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Some people say that this film, which has a particularly strong taste of Taiwan's local culture, can at least be seen as an anthropological research film. I know this means that the film presents the funeral rites of the Minnan people in the Changhua region of Taiwan almost completely, but it is too unsympathetic to simply say that it is an anthropological fieldwork. Just like the cousin Ah Zhuang in the movie, he has been holding up the camera to shoot all kinds of uncle's funeral, in order to go to the university to hand over his homework in the future, while maintaining a strong sense of curiosity about the profession of the Taoist "Brother Ayi" - but in the end, it was the Taoist who touched him and made him have a new thinking about life and death, and his role in this movie and this funeral became different.
Stills from "Seven Days after the Father"
So the corresponding two scenes seem so touching. First, the Taoist priest Ah Yi and his cousin Ah Zhuang talked again and again, and while walking on the edge of a farmland, Ah Yi suddenly said, "Do you know what my real profession is?" Then he took out a manuscript of poetry and said, "I am a poet." Such a role setting reminds me of The underworld leader Liang Chaowei in Chen Ying's "Tricycle Driver", who is also a poet, a Taoist/poet, a triad/poet, and the seemingly extremely contradictory identity is not a gimmick to make the audience laugh, this is precisely the arrangement that Zi Jie who understands poetry can make. After saying this conversation, the two people recited the Taoist poem "Dry heaven and dry earth, dry society, you are not my father, you manage me so much" into the depths of the field, disappearing among the faint and continuous night lights, is the most poetic paragraph.
Liang Chaowei in "The Tricycle Driver" The poet he plays
Complex, gloomy personality, but also full of fragile and elegant poet temperament; both a car shop thug, a fan of the boss lady, a prostitute pimp, a gangster and other identities.
He bleeds from the nose when he feels pain, and he falls in love with the tricycle driver's sister, but is able to arrange for her to be with various prostitutes, and later he sets fire to the underground brothel he runs because he hates this life.
Correspondingly, at the end of the film, Ah Yi and Ah Zhuang went to the train station together to wait for the train, Ah Yi talked about his new business: to collect the soul of a villager who died on the road to Taitung, suddenly sighed, and read out a poem "In the clock of the broken platform, in the train error, life comes to the end", Ah Zhuang quickly took out a notebook to write it down, but Ah Yi paid attention to saying, "You also have your own (poem manuscript)?" This poem is undoubtedly the best written poem by Ah Yi, that is, the natural emergence of a Taoist monk who has experienced the death of many people and suddenly encounters a scene of "reverse travel". At the same time, Ah Yi did not pass on the Taoist secret to Ah Zhuang as joked at the beginning of the movie, but instead passed on the poet's secret to him subtly. This is a bit like what father and son do.
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Between the Taoist priest Ah Yi and his cousin Ah Zhuang, there is actually another pair of father-son relationships hidden in the movie, which forms a parallel universe with the relationship between the Amei brothers and sisters and the father in the main line, and is even more delicate than the father-son relationship that the latter rarely inks. Because Ah Yi was once in love with Ah Zhuang's mother, and from the scene where Ah Yi deliberately mentioned his relationship with Zhuang's mother to Ah Zhuang and the long-distance phone call with her, Ah Yi is still unforgettable. So in the seven days against the backdrop of Ah Mei's father's death, Ah Yi acted as Ah Zhuang's temporary father, much more competent than the latter's unseen father who ran a business in Shanghai and Paris.
This reminds me of Kore-eda's "Thief Family", where the thief's father Aji, under the interrogation of the police, muttered: "I have nothing to teach him except stealing." "I think the audience, like me, loudly retorted in their hearts: No, you taught him a lot of things, taught him how to face growth, face fate.
Thief Family poster
The same is true of Ah Yi in The Seven Days of the Father. Ah Yi was originally a character that was not in the original prose of "Seven Days after the Father", Zi Jie added in the screenwriter, in fact, a shadow character portrayal of his father, Ah Yi filled many gaps outside of Tai Bao's daughter's memories, and the two became one to some extent.
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The power of another director, Wang Yulin, is also revealed here: black humor, which is a powerful glue that makes the "scattering" of the original prose linger, weaving into an extremely "grounded" web, and the emotional outburst that comes and goes between the meshes is so real and precious - that is something that some abusive movies or small lucky movies can't achieve by rendering desperately.
In addition to Ah Yi's story, what I can't bear to write is the father-daughter relationship between Ah Mei and her father, who has no chance to continue to love, which is the pain in the Chinese tradition, we blindly restrain ourselves, blindly use laughter to prevaricate sadness, when we think of the words "Don't be afraid, Abba is there", Abba is no longer there.
Of course, as a good friend, while watching the movie, I also recalled my past with Zijie, and corresponded some of the current situations and experiences she had not had with me to the movie. So I also regretted it: more than ten years ago, before reading "Seven Days after the Father", I heard Zijie talk about the moment when my father died, and I failed to give her a hug.