"A Vast North": A Glimpse into the Wild Stories of Rural China

"The North is a Vast Expanse" (film stills/photos)

The opening scene of the movie "A Vast North" - in the snow-covered woods, a man and a woman are struggling to walk, the snow is kneeless, and the two people are walking very slowly. The camera turns, and it is the rural kangtou of the heroine Wang Erhao's perspective. In the form of a voice-over, she engages in a "two-space" dialogue with the people in the camera.

The film is director Cai Chengjie's feature film debut, and won the best feature film and best director at the 11th FIRST Youth Film Festival in 2017. In February this year, he won the Golden Tiger Award at the 47th Rotterdam International Film Festival. The jury commented that it "focuses on a female perspective, a woman who, despite being in a difficult situation, constantly rebelling against the identity of her victim, her struggling journey is a combination of tangled emotions and a delicate sense of humor." "In the film, everything in the story revolves around the character of Wang Erhao.

After a year, the film was released on the National Arts Alliance on July 20 this year, and this small-cost realism film can finally meet the audience. When the script was first created, the film was called "The Little Widow Chengxian", and now "A Piece of the North" is more like the title of the film in Cai Chengjie's view, and it also contains a wider range of imagery.

<h3>Full of absurd words</h3>

The film was filmed in Director Cai Chengjie's hometown of Pingquan County, Hebei Province, which is the junction of the three provinces of Mongolia and Hebei, the hinterland of the source of the Liaohe River, and the language brings together the pronunciation of the three places, and Wang Erhao, played by actor Tian Tian, speaks a mixed dialect, occasionally jumping out of the northeast cavity and Shandong flavor. Tian Tian is a native of Shandong, and the dialect was learned for the sake of film. In Cai Chengjie's memory, there are always stories happening in this land, either bizarre or strange, and the story about Wang Erhao has long been heard.

Wang Erhao, played by Tian Tian, is a widow who has died three times, and because of this encounter, Wang Erhao has become a strange existence in the village. The more magnified her encounters became, the more bizarre the fatalism about her became, and she became a "fairy"—a symbol of the villagers' spiritual needs.

At the beginning of the movie, The third husband of the second husband, Dayoko, has just died, and the village is full of rumors of her Kefu, who is homeless with her little uncle. As a creditor, Fukyoshi regains his jinbei car, which becomes her and Shi's "mobile residence".

The background of the story is winter. Cai Chengjie analyzed to Southern Weekend: "If this story is not in the ice and snow, then the survival pressure of the role of the second good is not so great, she must find a warm house, can spend the winter, this matter is very important." So I think the starting point of this story is survival. Survival is the driving force, so keep looking for a house, and pretend to be a ghost in order to find a house. In addition to the basic survival problems, the human warmth emitted by Wang Erhao in the film is in confrontation with the indifference of the people around her, and the cold of the external world makes the shimmer of humanity that flashes on her body appear more precious.

It was icy outside, the temperature in the car was the same, and finding a place to sleep became a good goal. At the beginning of the film, the director used the protagonist identity to explain the reason why Erhao left his brother-in-law's house: she was raped by lao tofu while she was still in a coma. Next, sexual harassment runs through the whole film, and the village chief, classmates, and villagers all want to taste some sweetness in the widow Wang Erhao.

Because of these strange things, Wang Erhao became a "fairy". In Cai Chengjie's view, there must be a general understanding behind this seemingly inexplicable thing: "A woman who has died three husbands, her fate should be regarded as falling to the bottom." But people will always put death and be reborn, rebounding when they are inferior and particularly sad, and when such a woman with a particularly tragic fate still needs to continue to survive, she has some possibilities of making falsehoods come true. And if it is an ordinary woman, others do not care too much, just because of the death of three husbands, others will feel that she herself is hard, more likely to associate with divine power. ”

From being the object of bullying by the whole village to becoming a god worshipped by everyone, Wang Erhao planned to use this "identity" to the end. Paralyzed for many years, the deaf fourth master who could not take care of himself was thrown into the iron bucket by her to take a bath, the second good to find the kung fu of washing powder, the fourth master froze to death inside, the funny thing is that the fourth master actually died and came back to life and legs and feet were flexible. The female fetus identified by B Chao was cast by Wang Erhao, and actually completed the transformation of the dragon and phoenix, fulfilling the dream of the family "as long as they are not alive or dead, they will give birth to sons in death". The director uses absurd techniques to show the impossible events, leaving the audience between the real and the unreal: what the hell is going on?

The film covers social issues such as son preference, sexual assault, human trafficking, etc., many of which come from real events that Cai Chengjie heard. But Cai Chengjie believes that using a fictional work to question whether this place really exists and whether it corresponds to real events is meaningless in itself, and if it is true, it will be made into a documentary. A village, hundreds of villagers, let all the absurd and strange stories take place here, and the good and evil of human nature are also staged, and the director says that he only wants to be a depictor of certain life forms in the northern countryside.

<h3>Insincere and insincere are difficult to move</h3>

Graduated from nortel's acting department, the female protagonist Tian Tian is the only professional actor who knows how to act in the movie. In addition to learning sign language, she also learned to drive a golden cup car and shaman dance, and memorized the lines in three days after getting the script. Because he is a professional actor, Tian Tian can give Cai Chengjie different performance plans, or exaggeration, or convergence, and then adjust according to the director's needs. Director Cai Chengjie believes that Tian Tian's acting is not a problem, the problem is how she can express the living conditions of rural women and the coordination and balance with all the rest of the non-professional actors. Tian Tian needs to fill the texture of rural life that he lacks, and this texture happens to be brought by the "ordinary actors".

Therefore, a month before the shooting, Tian Tian went to the countryside in advance, went to live in his hometown, observed the life of rural people, imitated their actions, and soaked in the original life; ordinary people who are not professional actors must memorize the script throughout and improve their performance ability according to the director's guidance.

Before each scene, everyone sat around and read through the script, the director put forward the corresponding performance requirements in the process, assigned one by one, and the "actors" went back to the hotel to rehearse, rehearse, and finally take them to the scene and shoot on the spot. Because the actors did not know how to dispatch and move, Cai Chengjie and the team decided to shoot with fixed lenses after consultation, giving them a free performance space. Cai Chengjie explained to Southern Weekend: "Can't give too many close-ups, close-ups need to constantly cut off his performance, non-professional actors have no ability to repeat, you interrupt him, his next state is different, so comprehensive consideration, our requirements for non-professional actors to shoot on the spot are to make him closer to life." ”

In the film, xu wei, who plays a good classmate, is the owner of a supermarket in Pingquan County. Originally, he brought his girlfriend to audition, but he was photographed by the director. After getting the script, he copied the lines on the back of the cigarette box and recited them over and over again in the time after buying and selling the goods. The film is scheduled to be filmed in February, and Xu Wei has memorized the entire Spring Festival and still feels a lot of pressure. It is worth mentioning that there is a plot in the film where Xu Wei is drunk on Erhao and wants to throw her on the bed, which makes Xu Wei feel very shy. Cai Chengjie recalled this funny story to Southern Weekend: "During the Spring Festival, he took his wife and practiced a little crazy, and then called me and said, 'I really can't act, I'm very nervous'. Then we went to his supermarket to do work for him, and his daughter-in-law said very coldly, 'You know what?' I have a stomach problem, he has been practicing with me, and now he acts every day regardless of the delivery, do not look at the store'. ”

The actor's story is not only this pile, in the original script, one of the protagonists, Stone, is also a normal child.

In the early stages of filming, Cai Chengjie found his relatives who were teaching at the Pingquan County Special Education School and made him some basic requirements for the stone. Taking the crew to pick the actors, I found that the children had different aspects of defects and disabilities. Cai Chengjie glanced at Wen Xinyu, who played the stone, and he told Southern Weekend: "Wen Xinyu is about 12 years old, especially shy but has a spirit, which is very suitable. ”

The crew found the sign language announcer in the county, translated all the lines in the script into sign language, and trained Wen Xinyu before shooting. Tian Tian also learns sign language, which is the main way of communicating between Niyoshi and Shi in the film.

Stone can't speak, which means that he and his sister-in-law Have lost a lot of opportunities for direct expression. But Cai Chengjie believes that the corner of the stone is the only emotional relationship of Erhao in this world, and it is also the motivation for her to live. They should establish a unique warm relationship between them, and sign language is a unique way of communication.

<h3>Who understands it? </h3>

The film was shot for nine days, and after the big troops left. On the tenth day, a heavy snowfall suddenly fell in Hebei. The director took the photographer to shoot some empty mirrors with an aerial camera, and the new snow was fluffy and soft, covering the entire source area of the Liaohe River, and the original messy and gray rural scene became regular and orderly. Speaking of this snow, Cai Chengjie felt lucky: "The benefit of snow scenes is especially in the northern countryside, from the perspective of photography, there is an unavoidable function of covering up ugliness, those houses are rotten and messy, and gray, but after a snowfall, all the tones are particularly uniform." ”

In the film, the real-world picture is black and white, and some absurd events are colored. Because it is a fixed shot, there is not much movement change, and the director needs to try more in the language of the shot. Cai Chengjie and the photographer decided to use black and white to present the realistic tone of the entire film, and the cold and black and white superposition made it more humane and indifferent. Using color to distinguish between reality and illusion, Cai Chengjie told Southern Weekend: "This color to participate in the narrative can better allow the audience to enter the world of storytelling and serve the narrative." When Wang Erhao and shi shi finally slept on the hot kangtou, there was a string of flickering small colored lights hanging on the wall, as if it were colorful hope.

At the end of the story, the people who died of absurdity were also one after another: Wang Erhao was distressed to give birth to a pregnant woman with six children, but the pregnant woman and her husband partnered to sell all their daughters; Wang Er was kind enough to save Xu Wei, a classmate who was chased for debts, in exchange for the result that the classmates who were interested in profit killed the villagers because of the mining disaster caused by the dog head gold. The kind Wang Erhao has been doing good in his own way, but he has not been rewarded for it, and more cruel things have followed.

Even so, director Cai Chengjie believes: "There are no pure bad people or evil people, even if the film shows some things of indifference or self-interest, these villagers are ordinary people with normal thinking." Wang Erhao's various behaviors did not transcend everyone, and all she did was derive from the most ordinary kindness of a woman. "The original perpetrator becomes a petitioner, the original victim becomes a guest of honor, and between the camera changes, the good and evil of human nature are intertwined, collided, and broken."

In the heroine Tian Tian, the most difficult scene is the "please God" scene where she dances in a shaman's costume. "I've always lived in the city, and I've never seen that scene." The shaman costume was hand-sewn by producer Jiao Feng, and Wang Erhao danced on the white land.

The film shows a lot of human complexity, but Cai Chengjie does not explicitly accuse good and bad, good and evil, he said: "I think this film is realism, but not critical realism." I didn't criticize them, nor did I demean or demonize them, I just presented them objectively. In fact, it is a feeling of the individual, and then with the help of the scenery and people there, in a wandering identity, they are intervening in each event and withdrawing from this one event. ”

Wang Erhao also has many wishes, such as eating hot rice, sleeping on a hot kang, and protecting the stone. Although she was so miserable that she was poured urine and beaten by the women of the same village, she was also indifferent, holding up her waist and being shot. In the view of the heroine Tian Tian, Wang Erhao's attitude towards life is positive, disasters are one after another, and she never thought that she would not live.

In the end, Wang Erhao's only spiritual sustenance stone died. Suddenly, quickly, without a little buffer. The film does not explicitly give Wang Er a good ending, but uses events to support the total collapse of her emotions.

In the audience's cognition, the concept of "immortal" belongs to the category of superstition. The little widow was put in the position of a fairy by the villagers, but she endured all kinds of suffering as a human being. All this is no longer a simple black humor, the world is strange, and the north is a vast expanse.