Last weekend, the Xining FIRST Youth Film Festival opened, and young filmmakers from all over the country gathered together again.
In recent years, the first film festival has gradually gained fame, and there is a hidden trend of "Golden Horse Award Reserve Army". Because from here, I have stepped out of high-quality domestic films such as "Labyrinth of Hearts", "Happy Funeral", "Old Beast" and a number of excellent young filmmakers.
Also last weekend, the movie "A Piece of the North" was quietly released in theaters, and at this time a year ago, it won the best feature film award at FIRST, but at that time it was still called "Little Widow Becomes Immortal".
Since then, "A Vast North" has traveled to the Rotterdam International Film Festival, where the world's cutting-edge directors are gathered, and the highest prize has been won.
And it is the debut of director Cai Chengjie.
The debut work that has won such an honor should be generally recognized by filmmakers, and [Ijo Film] as a film public name should also be encouraged without hesitation, right?
But the fact made Yi Ge hesitate: the score of 6.9 was really too low on the douban that was popular in literary and art films.
More critical is the filmmaker's disapproval of it.
Director Xie Fei, the leader of China's fourth generation of directors, can be said to be the highest score netizen in the whole Douban generation. He rarely evaluates the films of young domestic directors, but he rarely speaks out about "A Vast North":
Mr. Xie lao is still polite, and the famous film critics of the middle generation, "Big Strange" and "Europa", even gave a bad review of one or two stars to "A Piece of the North":
A group of people who should have supported it, but relentlessly criticized, what happened to this film?
And listen to me in detail.
Like many domestic literary and art films, director Cai Chengjie, who first directed the tube, pointed the camera at rural China and told a "rural magic story":
Wang Erhao is a rural widow who has died three times and is hated and oppressed everywhere in the village. She and her little uncle ran into walls everywhere, almost sleeping in the wind.
By chance, Niyoshi performed a "miracle" and was treated as a "fairy" by the villagers. The villagers changed their previous indifferent attitude and congratulated each other. In order to make a living, Erhao also began the business of a jianghu warlock.
However, people's hearts are sinister, ignorance and greed are stubborn diseases that have plagued her for thousands of years, and the "divine power" of the two good ones has not brought her a comfortable life, and she has not been able to change the suffering of the villagers, and can only follow the villagers to the destruction one by one...
In fact, in domestic literary and art films, attacking the ugly ignorance of the countryside has long been not new.
Far from it, the movie "Wasteland Chronicles", which was just released in May this year, also tells the story of a rural widow who is arbitrarily manipulated by the villagers as a tool for profit.
However, "A Vast North" has its own uniqueness, that is, it does not grasp a certain aspect of the problem in the countryside, but shows a contemporary countryside that has completely collapsed.
In the movie, the official who is the parent of one party only cares about playing with power on his own acre and three points of land, bullying the soft and afraid of the hard, symbolizing the government's inaction.
The older generation, like the deaf fourth master, has become a left-behind old man, and the old values they follow are dying with them in the pile of and urine, which is the disappearance of traditional culture.
The greasy middle-aged man who has nothing to do, staring at the little widows in the village all day long, even the young girls among the left-behind children, show their lazy and ugly side.
Young and strong men either died like the husband of the second best, or like their old classmate Xu Wei, they became unscrupulous businessmen, and in reality, the loss of rural labor is more serious.
Women are still harassing each other in the gossip, obeying men's words, and women's consciousness has no awakening trend.
Girls have fallen prey to patriarchy, boys are about to grow up in overdose, and the future is moving towards an even more terrible imbalance.
Just like its title: above the snowfield, under the dead branches, it is indeed a vast expanse, lifeless.
This is the valuable thing about "A Vast North": we needed the film to focus on the social ills, and it did.
In other words, the subject matter is the biggest advantage of "A Piece of the North".
But we also have to understand that no film can be a good movie just by its subject matter.
Here Brother Yi dares to question the fact that "A Piece of the North" won first best film – this film is not qualified, because it fully exposes the common problem with young Chinese directors:
There are ideas, no technology.
In the words of director Xie Fei, it is "amateur".
For example, "Middle Evil" thought of using a pseudo-documentary way to make a horror film, which is really a good idea of individual creativity, but the stiff lens language and the old-fashioned thriller bridge make this film lose a lot of ornamentality.
Like the vivid and beautiful presentation of young girls in "My Heart Is Excited", it is absolutely eye-catching, but the focus of the narrative is unbalanced, making the film eventually become a false and disease-free moan.
The "amateur" of "A Piece of the North" is mainly reflected in three aspects:
1. The fluency and authenticity of the story
The film takes us through the perspective of two good people to see the glamorous rays in the countryside, but the story itself presents a fragmented disorder.
The whole story is as aimless as Niyoshi's journey. Everything that Niyoshi meets, everyone, seems to have its own function, but when put together, there is no intrinsic connection. This goes from narrative to stacking.
The one who said, isn't fragment stacking itself a narrative technique?
Wrong, just as the so-called form is not scattered, any movie that looks like a "fragment pile", in fact, has a bearing and a turn inside. The best example is Kore-eda's films, which, while seemingly just a combination of fragments of everyday life, are always progressive in the contradictions and emotions within the story.
Movie "Non-Stop"
There are also positive examples in domestic films: "Labyrinth of Hearts" also shows us all kinds of characters in the countryside, but borrows a coffin puzzle to connect the people in the whole village, making the story super attractive.
Movie "Labyrinth of Hearts"
Combining those seemingly scattered fragments with an internal logic requires a lot of effort.
Obviously, director Cai Chengjie did not make this effort.
In terms of authenticity, the use of dialects is also the most criticized place in the film.
The use of dialect dialogue in films with rural themes seems to be a matter of course, especially for literary and art films, dialect dialogue can greatly enhance the local atmosphere and realistic color of the film.
However, in "A Vast North", most of the characters speak the northeast dialect, but in a few dialogues, they will switch to Mandarin dialogue, which is confusing and weakens the authenticity of the story.
2. Under-consideration of lens language
It seems that since the 40-minute dreamlike long shot in Director Bi Gan's "Roadside Picnic", young literary and art film directors have become more and more fond of long shots, as if long shots have become a talisman on the technical level of literary and art films.
However, no matter how long the long shots are, they are also valuable to cooperate with the narrative, and good long shots often bring the audience a greater amount of information than frequent editing, and can also create an immersive atmosphere.
However, in "A Vast North", there are a lot of meaningless fixed long shots.
The meaning of a fixed long lens is not to be long, but to the information conveyed by the interaction between the different scenes in the lens, which is also an extension of emotion.
In "A Vast North", there are too many fixed long shots and too little information conveyed, which inevitably gives people the feeling of "making up time".
One scene in the movie goes like this: the person is gone, and the camera stares at the house for half a day.
It's not that even if a little empty mirror is good photography, empty mirror can't be regarded as a panacea for independent films. What is the role of such an almost blank expression, in addition to making the audience feel that the director is making a mistake?
3. Unprofessional performances
Many young literary and art film directors' works are small costs, and it is difficult to hire senior actors, let alone big-name stars, but this cannot be an excuse to lower the requirements for literary and artistic film actors.
In fact, the more the actor is not professional, the more the director's tuning skills are tested.
The actors in "A Vast North", except for the starring Tian Tian, who has a background in acting, are almost all amateur actors. So many of the characters in the film are full of poetry recitations, which make people play in minutes.
Especially in a scene where Erhao confronts the women in front of the car, several actors who play the peasant women almost dare not speak their lines, and every sentence they say seems to be held out, and they are eager to swallow it back immediately.
In fact, there are many examples of amateur actors starring in movies, the most famous of which is Wei Minzhi in Zhang Yimou's "No One Can Be Less".
Before starring in Lao Mozi's works, she was also almost a vegetarian, but anyone who has seen that movie can appreciate the simplicity and strength, cowering and bravery of the rural girl played by Wei Minzhi in the film - which is inseparable from Zhang Yimou's tuning.
There is no such cheap thing as the so-called "true color starring" in this world, makeup, lighting a dozen, dozens of people in the crew circle around you, you an ordinary passerby can perform the true color is strange! Behind any "true color" that looks like it is a careful "tuning" day and night.
However, our young directors often throw the pot of performance to amateur actors, trying to cover up the lack of technique with the word "true color", which is laziness!
It is true that it is a little uncomfortable to harshly criticize a domestic literary and art film in this way, but Brother Yi has to do so. Because it is precisely because we are full of expectations for China's young filmmakers that we hope that they will do better.
Filmmaking is the same as practicing martial arts, and it is necessary to practice both inside and outside. I don't want young Chinese filmmakers to have only concepts and ideas, but they don't have the basic skills to make a good movie.
In particular, don't do this in your debut, because it will make you more and more biased.
The depth of love, the depth of responsibility. Come on, young Chinese directors!