Prose Poems - A Brief Analysis of "What Are You Over there"

"What Time Are You Over There" is a film that makes people very impatient to watch. Of course, it also continues Cai Liangliang's consistent style, trying to establish the audience's emotions in the aimless storytelling, and thus expressing the meaning that the director himself wants to talk about.

At the literary level, this can be seen as a work of prose culture, the story is very simple, only the basic lines: after the death of Xiao Kang's father, the superstitious wife always believes that the soul of her husband will return to her home; Xiao Kang meets Xiang Qi who is going to Paris when selling watches, Xiang Qi buys a watch in his hand, after which Xiao Kang inexplicably becomes curious about the time in Paris; and Xiang Qi lives alone in France. The story tells the story of three people in this way, and the connection between the characters is very weak, and the connection is established through the well-off. Although Xiao Kang and his mother belong to the same family relationship, the alienation of family life allows the two to live in their own space; Xiao Kang and Xiang Qi only establish a connection in the transaction of buying a watch and buying a watch. Three people live alone in their own space and time. The film constantly shows the details of their respective lives: the mother buys roasted geese alone, burns incense at home and turns off the lights, waiting for her husband's return; Xiao Kang is afraid of the dark in the middle of the night and does not dare to go to the toilet, a person eats supper at night, a person drives to listen to the radio, a person collects time; Xiang Qi Chinese cultural obstacles in France, and lives alone in a hotel... They barely communicate with people and rarely talk, and these different pictures of a person's life are superimposed to make up the whole movie. So the film is like prose, it is difficult to produce continuity in content, but it maintains the consistency of emotions.

It is not difficult for the audience to feel the loneliness of the characters from the film, and this loneliness has even become an emotional realm. On the one hand, loneliness comes from the behavior of the characters themselves, and a person's lifestyle inherently produces a sense of loneliness; on the other hand, loneliness comes from the expression of influences, and the use of a large number of fixed long shots makes the narrative extremely slow. The character completes a series of complete actions under the immovable lens, such as the shot of the well-off peeing, and the director must present it from the beginning to the end. And the camera is often some distance away from the character, that is, the character is in the background, and the distance between the object or the character and the audience is pulled away, which creates a sense of alienation in the movie. The combination of character behavior and film and television techniques together creates a sense of loneliness in the film. The constant accumulation of these lonelinesses, even if not heating up, will affect the mood of the viewer through the accumulation of quantity. Such a narrative, you think that the "story" can continue endlessly, because there is no one who can end its ending.

Cai Liangliang's cleverness lies in the fact that in such stories and emotions, he extends a lot of aspects that he wants to express, which give the film connotation and depth. For example, the loneliness of the characters, which is the emotion that the film directly wants to convey, is similar to the loneliness under wong kar-wai's lens, which is a product of modern urban society, and the lack of communication between people causes emotional alienation. Everyone has a hole in the mind that needs to be filled with something to fill. So there are some strange people who behave strangely, who persistently pursue or wait for something vague to fill the void in their hearts. Just like Xiao Kang's obsession with time collection, the wife's superstitious waiting for her husband, the expired pineapple can and the drunken wine.

Not only that, Cai Liangming also expressed the absence of "father" in the film. This is a typical issue in Taiwanese society, and it is also a theme that the director constantly expresses in New Taiwanese films, Hou Xiaoxian's "Son's Big Doll", Yang Dechang's "A Day on the Beach", and even Ang Lee's "Father Trilogy" ("Pushing Hand", "Wedding Feast", "Eating Men and Women"). They are all talking about how "we" will grow up and where we will go in a society where fathers are missing. In the death of his father in "What Time Is Over There", Xiao Kang is like a little boy, afraid of the dark, childish, without his father, there is no one to guide him to grow. Xiang Qi's background film is not introduced, but she lives alone in Paris, with no friends and relatives, like an orphan. At the end, a father-like man appears in the vast background of the film, staring at Xiang Qi, then staring at the camera, and then turning to leave. You may think of him as a "father", he looks at Xiang Qi and the lens representing the audience, what he leaves for "us" is a back, he is not involved in "we", not involved in "our" life, not guided "we" how to grow. The father's back only implies that "we" need time to grow on our own. The film concludes with a speech "First to my father, the father of Xiaokang". Of course, this is neither the father of the director nor the father of XiaoKang, but the father of "our" generation.

In addition, the thinking about time, the relationship between space and memory, and the conflict of family life can all be incorporated into Cai Liangming's expression of the connotation of the film. Through such an extremely simple, marginal story and free image processing, Cai Liangliang expounded his thinking on modern society