Text/Yangcheng Evening News all-media reporter Li Li
Identification Object: "Love Myth"
Better than 92% of romance films and 93% of comedies, the score of "Love Myth" on Douban is actually a bit inflated. A friend said to me particularly incomprehensibly: Aren't there many such films abroad? I said: Yes, but there are not many people in China who shoot like this.
The peculiarity of "The Myth of Love" is that it has everything, that is, there is no love. Or rather, there is no such thing as the kind of love that we are familiar with. Xu Zheng plays the middle-aged man Lao Bai and the three women in the film, one has had a love affair, and the other two may have a love. But in the tense of the whole film, there is no such thing as "ongoing" love. Wu Yue's ex-wife Bei Bei naturally missed it, and Gloria, played by Ni Hongjie, was not a good match for Lao Bai to "reach", but Miss Li, played by Ma Yili, did not catch up with Lao Bai in the end. This is not the incompetence of the hero, but the intention of the screenwriter and director Shao Yihui.
Three women and a man, others may be the love shura field, but in "Love Myth" can form the most relaxed four-person small drinking bureau. Women are talking, men are responsible for cooking, and even, they become the appetizers of their topics.
Shao Yihui said that she deliberately reversed the social roles of men and women. On social media, people also relished Gloria's "rich and idle, husband is missing, don't be too smart", and Bei Bei's sentence "I just made the mistake that men in the world will make". But in my opinion, what "Love Myth" does is not actually "sexual transfer", but "de-gendering" for this group of middle-aged men and women. Although the three women did not demand of themselves with the worldly eyes, Lao Bai did not have a strong desire to be above them. The fate is gathered, the fate is scattered, the middle-aged people in the world is not forced, more is the companionship of the heart and the natural letting go.
As an urban film, the qualification and even excellence of "Love Myth" is that similar stories take place in other cities are not quite right, and only in Shanghai, where red wine and green onions are sold in a vegetable market, it seems seamless. The choice of roles is also wonderful, a group of "post-70s" and "post-80s" middle-aged people who are more than the top and the bottom, the days seem to be full of taste, but in fact, they are lonely and confused. Late at night, only he knew that after dawn, only the dignity and certainty of the people in front of them were left.
This group of seemingly self-contained but hollow urban people, typical of which is lao Wu who received a box lunch at the end of the film. Before leaving, the sexual encounter with Sophia Roland made others cry, but he finally came with a true and false sentence "I made it up". In fact, the truth is no longer important, this story is just a fable, is the middle-aged men and women in this city who have everything in their hands, seemingly within reach but ultimately difficult to have.
Therefore, "Love Myth" cannot be a popular movie after all, it can only be a resonance that occurs in the "stratosphere". This resonance, a group of people are lucky to get. Others, like me, can only envy and wait for other directors to shoot their own urban stories one day.
Editor: Li Li