Author: Green Stream
The original name of "A Piece of The North is Vast" was "Little Widow Chengxian", which carried the joy of the two people turning, and the theatrical release version was renamed "A Piece of The North is Vast", literary and artistic and sad. The two names of one joy and one sadness are very appropriate, and it is the wonderful look and feel brought by this film.
The story that takes place in the northern countryside, the quiet village is drifting with white snow, and people walking in the vast birch forest under the hazy sky, and every step makes the snow click. As soon as the northeastern ballast-flavored dialogue appeared, it broke the depression of the environment. The director's control of the emotions in the whole film is very accurate and stable, neither selling misery and sensationalism, nor making jokes, and everything in the film is truly and calmly presented.
Overall, this is a tragedy, after the unexpected death of the third husband of the little widow Wang Erhao, she has become the mourning star of Lian Ke Sanfu in people's eyes. After her husband's death, Wang Erhao was helpless, took the underage dumb uncle and begged for someone to take him in. The story takes Wang Erhao's help from his neighbors as a clue, bringing out the difficult scriptures of every household in this village. Each of the characters can't see what they look like, wrapped tightly in winter clothes, and even the protagonist Little Widow can rarely see the real thing, so that the audience has to focus on the fate of the characters.
Wang Erhao's path to help is divided into two stages, the first stage is that she is a mourning star and a widow who is humiliated. Due to a series of accidental events around her, coupled with the superstition of the villagers, she became a living immortal and became the object of everyone's favor. The ups and downs of the experience allowed Wang Erhao to observe the surrounding personnel more objectively, and the audience was also able to see many dark corners of the northern countryside through her perspective: there were relatives and village cadres who took advantage of the danger of people and took advantage of widows; there were old lai friends who did not pay their debts; there were village women who fell into the well and shouted to catch adulterers; and there were entrepreneurs who repeatedly failed to start a business and owed usurious loans. There are also some people with tragic fates: single old people, girls who have been sold, underage girls who have been raped by their elders... Speaking of these people are all supporting characters, are the protagonist Wang Erhao's passers-by in life, but each of them has left a deep impression on the audience, which is like in Lu Xun's novel, by writing about what "Xun Ge'er" saw and heard in LuZhen, let the reader see Yan Tu, Yang Erjie, Kong Yiji and Ah Q...
It can be seen that the ambition of "A Piece of the North" is to shoot group dramas and analyze the changing sentient beings in the times, because the director restrained his personal feelings and let the camera look at it coldly, so that the viewer will not only mourn its misfortune when facing the bleak life in the film, but also think about more things. These typical characters in the film are horribly real, and we have seen them in the social news, and we may have seen them all around us. The film presents them all in the same picture scroll, and the impact is no less than a big explosion in the snow.
The similarity between this film and Lu Xun's novel is that it blends the strokes of black humor on top of the deep sadness, adding to its sadness. There are also many such techniques in the film industry, "Dancer in the Dark", "The Life of the Abandoned Pine Nuts" in the front, "A Piece of the North" on the basis of the first two, and the use of black and white and color metaphors, filmed their own style. In the winter of the north, the black soil and white snow, the original color is monotonous, the director went along with the trend, directly made the film into black and white, and occasionally appeared a little color. Black and white is the real black and white in the ice and snow, and the color is a faint spot of light such as charcoal, small colored lights, and fireworks, just like the fate of Wang Erhao, from the black of the "death star" to the white of the "living immortal", it seems that the change of cloud and mud has occurred, but in fact, it is still the black and white background of sadness, and there are occasional stars and half of color, fleeting. This color combination reminds me of the final chapter of "Dream of the Red Chamber": Jia Baoyu is dressed in a big red orangutan felt standing in the snow, surrounded by a white expanse of land is really clean.
I don't know whether it is intentional or unintentional, "A Vast North" and "Dream of the Red Chamber" are quite similar. Jia Baoyu's wearer, the psychic Baoyu, traveled to the human world and became a monk after witnessing the rise and fall of the family, and Bai Xianyong interpreted it in a dialogue with Xu Zhiyuan as Baoyu carrying all the sins for everyone. Wang Erhao in "A Vast North" is also a shamanic dance of exorcism in the snow under the cold sun after seeing the darkness of people's hearts.
Mirrors appear many times in the film, the mirror is a symbol of fantasy, can also be seen as a projection of people's inner world, can also be seen as a bystander eye that looks at the characters in the film, which is also similar to the Wind moon treasure book in "Dream of the Red Chamber", fake is true and false, for a time, so that the audience can not distinguish between what they see is true and false, can not distinguish which paragraph is reality which paragraph is the protagonist's imagination, leaving a lot of room worth recalling.
As a newcomer director's work, "The North is Vast" has revealed its talent that is not lost to its predecessors, and the many thoughts brought by the film to the audience also show that this is an excellent work with content worthy of ambition. The film initially received attention at the 2017 Xining FIRST Youth Film Festival and was eventually released in theaters. Art films created by young directors can win awards at film festivals and be released in theaters, hoping that this means that a new generation of filmmakers has stood up.
(This article is an exclusive manuscript of Litchi Network and its "Litchi News" client, and has been authorized to reprint.) ）