From Jiang Wen's "One Step Away", we can see the hormones of human emotions

Stills from "One Step Away"

Men make money, women spend money, men make women's money – in a way, it's a way of keeping the world running. Women's needs derive the movement of the world, and the world is like a perpetual motion machine, driving into the future in this cycle, in this "self-sufficiency". All the consumer goods in this world seem to be for women. From clothing and perfume to heroes and countries.

In this interlocking and rolling process of evolution, cinema as a small link has a special meaning. For although it is included as a form, its own spirit requires it to express this movement.

In view of this, I often divide movies into two categories, one is male hormone movies and the other is female hormone movies. Of course, there are few pure single hormone movies, the jianghu is usually intertwined with children's dreams, and the harem is also indispensable to dragon and tiger fighting. What we read is often the spark of two hormones colliding, and a smart director won't let a movie lack these two things. (As Voltaire said, if there were no God, people would have created a God.) Then if there is no love, then we will still create a love. After all, human beings live by faith and love)

Of course, there are strong and weak hormones, and there will also be differences between morning hormones and those before going to bed at night. Jiang Wen's films, of course, have both hormones, and are usually stronger than others, or the moon at night triggers the tides and secretes exuberant hormones. This is also doomed to his films will have a good box office.

The storyline is quite simple: during the Beiyang years, Ma Zhaori and Xiang Feitian held a general election for the flower country in the Eastern Magic Capital. The two-term president completed Yan Ying's thrilling re-election, but a car accident caused her to die in Huangquan, and the horse involved in it had to die in the end of the world, and Xiang Feitian, who was a friend of Mo Rebellion and Fei Huang Tengda, wanted to arrest Ma and kill him because of the pain of reversing the scales. The daughter of the warlord, takeroshi took part in recording the elections of the Flower Kingdom because of her obsession with movies. Believing that Ma Zaori was not the real murderer, he wanted to help him escape from danger, and gradually fell in love with Ma Zaori in the process, but in the end Ma Zaori still lost his life at the muzzle of the pursuing soldiers.

The film contains a large number of homages to other classic films, including "The Godfather", "Desire StreetCar", "Train Entry", "Watering Gardener", "Rashomon", "Melody of Broadway", "Singing in the Rain", "Journey to the Moon", "Sweet Life", "Eight and a Half"... It is also interspersed with many black and white silent films, which also reflect Jiang Wen's unique feelings for that period. What is even more surprising is that the film expression also covers cross-talk, opera, dance, drama and other forms of artistic expression. If the film itself is a mixture of different arts, then Jiang Wen did play quite a good time this time.

Structurally, the film is not narrated in the strict sense of the word from the beat to the scene to the sequence, thus constituting a scene of succession and transition. Nor does the story develop in accordance with the inevitable transition caused by internal and external conflicts. Rather, it is constantly deconstructed, narrated, voice-over, metaphorical, signifier and signified. Jiang Wen seems to have no interest in understating the unpretentious narrative, and does not seem to want to explain the information contained in his subtexts. He tends to over-the-top and self-conscious hype, and he tells us that's how he plays movies.

But what should we say about such a discredited film?

The first thing to do is to figure out how our criticism of a film unfolds. Most viewers will draw preference conclusions based on past movie-watching experience and their own life experience. But the conclusion of this conclusion is often the result of cultivation. It's hard to realize that we're not being forced to accept dominant story-form information in entertainment. We embrace Hollywood storytelling in our entertainment, subtly unfolding criticisms of the films we know as they are, a set of expressions that audiences have long known over time, produced by the film industry and audience interaction. In contrast, although Europe is the birthplace of film, its more artistic film expression style is increasingly dwarfed by today's Hollywood films that advocate maximizing the interests of commodities and catering to the tastes of audiences, and Hollywood also has the momentum of monopolizing the world film industry.

The colorful thing about the world is that there are different peoples and cultures in the world, and when one cultural form meets another, the collision is naturally inevitable. On the surface, the cultures of Europe and the United States, while deeply concerned, have long since become very different in the process of historical evolution and integration. Not to mention that there are also significant differences between regions, the mythological system embraced by the European continent and Northern Europe is obviously different, and although China and India are adjacent, the values and worldviews they believe in are also significantly different. Hollywood's popularity is actually the result of the strong importation of American culture, and American values clearly have a special appeal to many peoples around the world.

Jiang Wen is actually angry, angry with Hollywood, angry with everyone, and angry with himself. He wanted to get rid of the hormones of adolescence but couldn't, and he wanted to let the audience understand what he was experiencing in his mind in vain. Due to his childlike nature, he eventually chose to show the audience his kaleidoscope: showmanship, homage, artistic mixture, textual metaphors... he approached the film in such a way that of course he was the only one who was so willful.

I think Jiang Wen should be regarded as a child in the final analysis. As Fellini said in an interview: "I think that mental people always maintain a basic and powerful component of personality that is either youthful or childlike or innocent. This is also what he said in the movie that he is still a child.

One of the criteria for a person's maturity may be that the contrast between the hormones at night and the hormones in the morning is not too great. But such maturity is often at the expense of youthful acumen. It is often the "one-minute hormonal ripples" that remain in the deepest recesses of our memories. This is exactly the difference between the handsome lady and her daughter in the final discussion of men.

We still prefer classic stories, a movie with too many metaphors is like a love that metaphors too much will eventually become a flower in the mirror and a moon in the water. In contrast, we prefer the simple plots of Roman Holiday and One Night Winds because it is closer to our pure hormones. #情感点评大赏 #