In the past two years, some netizens have continuously turned out the stills of the 2001 domestic movie "Blue Love", praising the "prosperous beauty" of Yuan Quan and Pan Yueming, who starred in the year, so that this literary and art film is not low in popularity, but there are not many people who have really seen it, and the score of more than 5,000 people on Douban is one of the proofs. In fact, the structure of this film and the beauty of the audiovisual language are not inferior to the appearance of the two actors.
How to make art films look good, not only can express profound themes but also appreciate elegant customs, attract more ordinary audiences to "go out of the circle", is a worldwide problem. Huo Jianqi's "Blue Love" is a bold attempt, especially around 2000, when domestic first-line directors gathered to shoot blockbusters, highlighting the background of grand narrative and epic style, this cold and pioneering, poetic work is even more valuable.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 The avant-garde exploration of "five and a half generations" directors, the exquisite narrative in the layered structure</h1>
Huo Jianqi and the fifth generation of directors Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and other people are classmates, but several years younger, after studying art, he worked in the North Film Studio after graduation, worked as an art designer in Tian Zhuangzhuang's famous work "Horse Thief" and other films, and only directed his debut film "Winner" until 1995, when Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have long been internationally renowned, so he often ridiculed himself as a "five-and-a-half generation" director. In 1999, Huo Jianqi made his masterpiece "That Mountain That Man That Dog", which won numerous awards and also won 19-year-old Liu Ye. In 2001, he once again used two newcomers, Pan Yueming and Yuan Quan, to shoot this "Blue Love".
If the style of "Winner" and "Singer" is concise, and "That Mountain Man That Dog" is fresh and ethereal, then "Blue Love" is obviously different from any film before Huo Jianqi, and this rebellious film is quite avant-garde in terms of style and narrative.
"Blue Love" tells a love story between Tai Lin, a young criminal police officer, and Liu Yun, a drama actor. Tai Lin just took over his father's class as a criminal policeman, one day on the bridge saw a girl about to jump off the bridge to commit suicide, after dissuading only to find that this girl named Liu Yun is a drama actor, is engaged in performance art, the two met and fell in love. Liu Yuntuo Tai Lin helped find a man named Ma Baiju who had saved himself, did not think that Ma Baiju was involved in a murder case many years ago, and now it is the suspect pursued by the criminal police team, Tai Lin further investigation found that Ma Baiju is Liu Yun's biological father, and the story of the lovers has been intertwined and complicated.
The film is adapted from the recently reputable Hubei writer Fang Fang's novella "Performance Art", but Huo Jianqi has made a substantial adaptation and reorganization, using a layer structure in the plot and designing an exquisite play-within-a-play.
Tai Lin and Liu Yun's love story, the case of Ma Baiju, and Liu Yun's performance art are the real world in the film, which is the main line of the film's narrative, and it echoes the theme that "performance art and life are interconnected, and human participation is the way performance art exists". The drama performed by Liu Yun, which appears many times in the film, it is also real, symbolizing the emotional world of the characters, it not only gives the audience a hint to the plot of the real world, but also assumes the role of explaining the concept and connotation of "performance art", and most importantly, it assumes the thematic function that the director wants to express. These two lines have their own narrative division of labor, while parallelizing and interpenetrating each other.
There is a third line, which is nested in the real world, which is the story of Ma Baiju. At that time, a policeman took away Ma Baiju's lover Li Wenzhu, one day in the bathhouse Ma Baiju and the police met unexpectedly, angry Ma Baiju questioned the police about all kinds of wrongs, resulting in the police who were doing undercover exposed their identities and died on the spot. Ma Baiju, with a sense of guilt, fled to other places and even changed his name and surname, and Li Wenzhu also had a nervous breakdown after learning the truth. The film flashes back to Ma Baiju's youth many times, and his and Li Wenzhu's love stories alternate with Tai Lin and Liu Yun, creating a sense of helpless fatalism.
The difficulty of the layer structure is that it is easy to disrupt the audience's viewing rhythm, and if it is not handled well, the audience will not understand. When Solving this problem, Huo Jianqi used flashback methods to insert narratives of other time periods in the normal narrative, and integrated the director's thinking within the scope of the audience's viewing habits, so that the audience could understand the advancement of the plot effortlessly.
The film begins with Liu Yun pretending to jump off the bridge Tai Lin in time to dissuade her, at the end of the film, Liu Yun jumped off the bridge again, and Tai Lin, who was unknown, also jumped down to save her, and Tai Lin, who was struggling in the river, found that she was bungee jumping, and the whole film ended in Liu Yun's performance art again. This end-to-end echo not only creates a sense of suspense, but also pushes the emotions to a climax, once again sublimating the theme.
The director repeatedly tells the audience that life is a kind of performance art, and everyone can be a part of the performance art of others.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 Moving love with melancholy as the background, individual identity with search and change as the process</h1>
Blue is a melancholy color, so the whole film has a melancholy, melancholy atmosphere. Where does the melancholy of the modern city come from? The search for self, the pursuit of personal self-identification is an important emotional component.
There is a very interesting line in the movie:
"For an instant I thought it was ridiculous
I'm looking for other people, and I'm being looking for people
Everyone recognizes each other in the dark, and a finger is about to touch the tip of your nose
You don't know anything yet."
Tai Lin did not get good grades from an early age, did not go to college, and replaced his father as a police officer (young viewers may not understand, in the 70s and 80s this kind of policy was very common). The police are a symbol of order, pay attention to obedience and restraint, and are suppressed personality, which is contrary to Liu Yun's ideological emancipation in performance art. The role of the policeman is a necessity of life, not a conscious choice for him, and in the first shot he says "the dream is to become an artist". He is trying to adapt to the new character environment, and the film also uses some details to show, such as vomiting at the crime scene and arguing with the old policeman. Establishing a new self-identity is a painful process, to abandon one's own inherent hobbies, habits, ideals, and to find a balance between finding one's own value, which is a process of self-oppression and self-change. We feel the pain of finding self-identity from Tai Lin's conversation with his father and his sudden emotional breakdown in conversation with the old policeman Gray Horse.
From Tai Lin's hesitation to tell Liu Yun the truth, to his determination to track down Ma Baiju at the expense of love, this psychological transformation was the beginning of his self-transformation.
Liu Yun has been looking, looking for family affection, looking for love, looking for artistic inspiration, rather, she has been looking for herself. Liu Yun suffered setbacks and psychological shadows when she was a child, and this experience made her heart full of doubts and contradictions. But he is also an actor who loves performance art, oscillating between sensibility and reason, artistic ideals and secular reality, between waiting, searching and fearing results. She doubts her origins and doubts her love affair with Tai Lin. In the film, she has many pure and gorgeous costumes on the stage of the drama, and her Shakespearean inner monologue shows her loneliness in the process of new self-affirmation.
Liu Yun's sense of self-identity as an artist is that she can create freely, and she wants anyone to become a participant and collaborator in her performance art. But the creation of performance art is clearly in conflict with the order of society and the acceptance of ordinary people. For example, Liu Yun lied at the beginning of the movie that he killed his ex-boyfriend, was taken to the police by Tai Lin, and left a case file. Tai Lin asked the clerk in the bookstore, "Is there a performance art book?" The clerk asked him, "What is performance art?" Tai Lin thought about it for half a day and couldn't find the right word. Liu Yun's performance art is incompatible with reality many times, and she asks herself, "Am I living in the artistic process of others again, and who has entered my artistic process?" Her self-identity has a lot of frustration.
When Liu Yun screamed in horror on the stage and jumped from the bridge with tears in the corners of his eyes, the audience thought it was an irreversible tragic story. Fortunately, the director left warmth at the end, Liu Yun flew freely in the air, and Tai Lin shouted her name in the river, regardless of safety and danger, he cooperated with this performance art.
The girl who had been looking for it found her answer.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 Exquisitely crafted audiovisual language, poetic under multiple lenses</h1>
Huo Jianqi is known as a "poet director" in China, and he is well versed in art design, and he is well versed in the way of building "Jingyu" into "love language", and pays great attention to the beauty and poetry in the language of the lens.
The creation of poetic mood allows people to see the subjective emotional changes of the characters in the objective scenery. "Blue Love" was filmed in Dalian, with a long river bridge, a seaside pier in light blue tones, and the distant view of the characters is the endless sea. The streets are deserted late at night, the trams under the thunder and lightning, the buses that pass by. Several of Tai Lin and Liu Yun's highlights are placed in a wide set, and these still lifes as a background are not only moving, but also complex emotions flowing.
In the design of the audiovisual language, the film is meticulously crafted in composition, color, light and shadow, and even editing, and has a poetic meaning as a whole. Huo Jianqi has a special preference for fixed lenses, and there are two shots of Tai Lin walking through the street after getting a haircut, and the vision of the same camera position is like the same person observing Tai Lin's life from a distance. In these two repetitive scenes, Tai Lin's emotions are completely different, the first is pleasure, the second is sadness, and this repetition implies the growth of the characters. Bridges, piers, etc. use medium and long-range shots, and the scenery and depth of field in the shot are controlled just right, and the actors' performances and beautiful scenery are included in the lens at the same time. The most amazing shot design of the film is that Liu Yun plucked up the courage to see his biological father Ma Baiju, in the slowly opened door, the camera only gave Liu Yun's face, and the father's reaction did not appear in the picture, which had both the beauty of the composition and the suspense.
In the long shot + special color, there is a clear desire for self-expression of the director. Tai Lin and Liu Yun argue in the photo printing room, and the dark red picture coupled with a long shot that lasts for several minutes highlights the anger and entanglement of the characters. There are also character monologues under close-up shots, Liu Yun has three very beautiful monologue close-ups, in this way, the audience can often enter the psychological perspective of the characters to understand this emotion.
Why do Chinese and foreign art film masters like to use actors with outstanding appearances in movies, such as Pedro. Almodóvar, Michael. Haneke, Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-wai, because beauty is also an important part of film aesthetics, the temperament of the actors even affects the temperament of the entire movie. The role of Liu Yun is completely created for Yuan Quan, she is sometimes melancholy and calm, sometimes brilliant and bright, sometimes eccentric, and has a unique sense of mystery, perhaps the audience and Tai Lin, have never understood her. Pan Yueming also played a police role in the movie "Can't Help It" in the same year, and it is really valuable that he can perform different flavors when he is young. It can be said that this film and the two actors achieve each other, and one is indispensable.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
From 1999's "That Mountain That Man That Dog" to 2003, "Blue Love", "Life Show" and "Warm" are all very good realist works, and this period is the peak of Huo Jianqi's creation. In the era of blockbusters, he still adheres to the "small and beautiful" style and adheres to the pursuit of poetic films.
"Blue Love" may not be Huo Jianqi's best work, but it is the bravest film, it has the courage to explore the narrative structure to challenge the audience's viewing habits, pay attention to the emotional needs and self-worth of the Chinese urban population in that period, and it is still worth savoring 20 years later.
Thanks for reading.