The film's pioneering of the dialect genre Selling point or "groove" point?

Recently, dialect movies have appeared in a bunch. Set in Shanghai, "Love Myth" has been called a new Shanghainese film by film critics, "Embracing You Through the Cold Winter" has another Wuhan version in addition to the Mandarin version, and the recently acclaimed "Lion Boy" has also launched a Cantonese version in return for fans.

In recent years, presenting film lines in dialects has become a conscious creative choice. Especially since 2018, almost every year there have been no less than 10 dialect movies released. According to incomplete statistics, the development of the types of dialects in the film has reached more than ten. Beijing dialect, Northeast dialect, Nanjing dialect, Shanghainese dialect, Sichuan dialect... Almost all of these well-known dialects can find corresponding dialect movies. There have always been many debates around dialect films, and with the release of "Love Myth", the evaluation of shanghainese in the film has attracted attention. Whether the film should use dialects and how to use dialects is also worth pondering.

Features of dialect movies:

Regional, documentary, comedy

The dialect grows on one side of the water and soil, and is deeply engraved with unique regional colors. In the movie, there is no need to deliberately explain and bother to lay the groundwork, the characters have a mouth, the taste of the city, the fireworks will come, and the cultural imprints such as local character, customs, and lifestyles revealed by the dialect will also be activated. Yang Haiying, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, once said, "Why do some movies use Henan and Shanxi dialects instead of Mandarin?" I think it's mainly about showing different states of existence. ”

Therefore, the combination of "region + dialect" has been favored by some directors, and dialect has become a means for them to pour local emotions and create a movie universe. Jia Zhangke is quite representative, starting from "Xiao Wu", films such as "Children of jianghu", "Legend of the Sea", "Good People of the Three Gorges", "Mountains and Rivers" and other films are obsessed with the Shanxi dialect. Fenyang, Datong, Taiyuan, Shanxi's local and Shanxi characters are connected by the Shanxi dialect to form a Shanxi world with a strong sense of region. Many newcomer directors also start stories from the people around them and the things around them. Xu Lei's debut film Sherlock on the Plains places scenes in his hometown of Henan. Bi Gan set his sights on his hometown of Kaili, Guizhou, where "Roadside Picnic" and "The Last Night of the Earth" fill in the less represented local color patches in dialect movies.

"One of the great functions of dialect films is to enhance realism, and speaking dialects instead of Mandarin is more in line with the characters' daily lives." Liu Haibo, a professor at Shanghai University, said. For example, in the movie "Qiu Ju Fights a Lawsuit", Qiu Ju's authentic dialect directly brings the character close to the ground. The dialect of the southern dialect and the northern tone in "Eight Hundred" truly restores the history of the people of the whole country working hard with one heart and one mind to resist the war.

Proper introduction also makes dialects comfortable in commercial films. "Crazy Stone" mixes more than ten dialects (including dialect variants) including Chongqing dialect, Sichuan dialect, Tianjin dialect, Qingdao dialect, etc., which is simply a dialect smorgasbord movie. In this film, the vivid and vivid dialect has become an excellent joke maker, highlighting the comedic effect of the film and tapping out another potential of dialect films.

Someone came in tongues

Some people go away because of dialects

From the box office, dialect movies are easily loved by audiences in dialect areas, and dialects can also become selling points, bringing added value to movies. According to the data of the professional version of the lighthouse, the box office proportion of "Love Myth" in Shanghai ranks first, contributing about 40% of the box office. Coincidentally, "The History of the Demise of Romanticism", which is also set in Shanghai and has a large number of Shanghainese dialogues, won a total box office of 19 million yuan in Shanghai, accounting for 16% of the box office, almost 3 times the usual box office in Shanghai.

"If there is a film that speaks in the dialect of my hometown, I will have a sense of intimacy and am willing to contribute a movie ticket." Audience Member Xiao Wang said. It seems that the role of dialects in psychological and emotional connection is accurate, and the filmmakers deliberately use dialects to make it a marketing tool. In the Spring Festival of 2019, "Bear Haunting : Primitive Era" launched five dubbed versions of Sichuanese, Henan, Shaanxi, Hunan and Cantonese, reaching target groups in specific places. The effect of this strategy is immediate. During the Spring Festival, "Bear Haunting : Primitive Times" earned a total of 420 million yuan at the box office, twice as high as the box office of "Bear Haunting Metamorphosis" in the same period of 2018. The attendance rate of the above five regions is generally higher than the average of 25%, of which Henan and Sichuan are more than 30%.

Strictly speaking, "Bear Haunting: Primitive Times" is not a dialect movie in the true sense, multiple dialect versions are parallel, and people from all sides can take what they need and all parties are satisfied. But for most dialect films, they are highly bound to a specific region, which actually creates an artificial threshold for watching movies. Although "Love Myth", which speaks Shanghainese throughout, has received 8.3 points of praise in Douban, it has won the love of specific circles. But when faced with a more diverse audience, the evaluation is different. At present, the cat's eye rating of "Love Myth" is only 8.5 points (the same period of movies such as "Through the Cold Winter to Embrace You" and so on are above 9 points). In addition to the narrative style and positioning of the crowd is relatively niche and other reasons, "domestic films also have to watch subtitles throughout" is the focus of many people's complaints.

Although many viewers have developed the habit of watching subtitles under the training of foreign language soundtracks, for dialect movies, it is still inevitable that the audience will not completely accept the information when watching the movie. A non-Shanghai viewer said after watching the film, "Shanghai is speaking fast, and you have to keep an eye on the subtitles." There is a scene on the dinner table, the speech is more concentrated, and you have to look at the picture, and you have to understand what is said, you really can't be distracted. In addition, there are also many expressions in the film that only locals can understand, like the "thirteen points" said by the old white mother in the film, although the meaning of "stupid" and "stupid" can be roughly inferred from the context, it is still difficult to accurately appreciate the emotional color of the hatred contained in it.

Dialect movies should be the icing on the cake

Rather than shedding the end

Although dialect films have a natural threshold for watching movies, from an artistic point of view, director Shao Yihui still chose Shanghainese dialogue. "Put in the movie, for the sake of rationality, everyone should also speak Mandarin, but purely from the perspective of creation, I think speaking dialect is more helpful to performance, from the earliest I planned to find friends around me to act, I decided to use dialect, whether it is a vegetarian or a professional actor, the dialect must give extra points to the performance." This choice is not to show authentic Shanghai... Just to serve my story. Shao Yihui said.

Judging from the final presentation, the dialect adoption of Love Myth is generally successful. Liu Haibo commented that this movie does not have the ups and downs of the protagonist's fate, there is no strong dramatic conflict, and the essence is all in the words of several middle-aged men and women who want to talk and stop, and there are words in the words. "This is not an action movie and a plot movie, it is a dialogue movie, and the subtleties and beauty of the delicate emotions can only be conveyed in Shanghainese, and in Shanghainese, only Shanghainese has this 'tone', can express this 'tone'."

But not all attempts are like this. "The Man Taken by the Light" was criticized for the discomfort of the dialect. Like other dialect films, the film is set in Yichang, Hubei Province, and the characters in the film all speak Hubei dialect, but because there are no Hubei people in the main role, the dialect is not authentic, which makes people very dramatic. More importantly, the story's departure from Yichang, or its departure from dialects, does not affect its unfolding. Dialects are neither necessary nor important, and adding dialects hard is not only not to add color, but to fall into the trap of dialects for dialects and characteristics for features.

Dialects can highlight regional characteristics, can express documentary style, can enrich the intensity of expression, and thus can become a point of view and a selling point. However, dialects do not all bring benefits, and we must be cautious whether to adopt dialects. Whether a film can win the audience's love and whether it can receive praise depends on the content of the work, and the dialect is only a form of expression at best. Li Mengxin

Source: Volkswagen Daily