"You will have no shadow, no footprints. Even if you find your way home, no one will talk to you because no one can see you."
If you wear a mask, you can't reveal your identity, gender, or even have to speak, no one knows who you are.
The same goes for other people around you. You also don't know who they are.
Here, in addition to stealing property, you can do whatever you want.
Even rape and murder cannot be punished.
You can be the truest of yourself.
Because, masks are power!
It hides everything.
But if you take the initiative to take off the mask.
It is considered to give up this power, and you will be out and imprisoned!
Would you like the world where identities disappear?
The world is —.
<h1>"Hey Ma Hey Ma Hey Ma"</h1>
Hey Ma Hey Ma, which means "once upon a time".
This is the opening phrase commonly used by Bhutanese storytellers.
It's like when we were children, lying in the arms of old people, listening to them pull the long voice "In a very-long-long time ago...", we began to tell us stories.
As for how long ago, whether it was true or false, it doesn't matter so much.
As director Dzongsar Rinpoche said:
Sometimes we must create illusions so that the world can see the truth.
"Hey Ma Hey Ma" is such an illusionary world that you will like and feel exciting at first glance.
In Bhutan's mysterious primeval forest, the mysterious Year of the Monkey Jumping Festival is held every 12 years.
Everyone who attended the event was personally chosen by the Wizard Elder.
Members are elite and at least have a sense of honor when selected.
You have the right to decide whether or not to participate, but who would give up such an honor?
You must of course abide by the rules of the common game, and those who break it are imprisoned or deported, or even mentally tortured for life.
The male protagonist is a young man who is participating in this cultivation event for the first time.
Every day, ceremonies are held here to celebrate life and death, as well as ritual dances and religious plays.
All kinds of people gather here, because of the masks they wear, hide their gender and lose their worldly identities.
Here you no longer have the possibility of suppressing yourself.
Just as the deceased in the religious drama in the film does not hide any possibility of good and evil.
Everyone completely follows their own inner calling, without restraint, without the restraint of the real world.
Here, you can satisfy your own unsatisfactory voyeuristic desires in real society, pranks, and even the pleasure of the ubiquitous sexual urge.
The male protagonist is attracted to the intercourse of a couple again and again.
He often spied on the couple, and the more he did so, the more he aroused the primitive desire in his heart.
His whole being was wrapped in lust. Want to burn the body, the mood is restless.
Until one day, he bumped into a woman wearing a "red fury" mask bathing naked by the river.
He was completely attracted to him. Remember.
And inadvertently touching the body of the "red fury" woman at the ball, her every move made him even more moved.
Since then, the "red anger" woman has become the object of the male protagonist's lust.
And the woman seemed to have something in mind for him, and when he was not noticed, an ambiguous breath began to flow between the two.
When one night, the grand event is held.
The male protagonist finally could no longer suppress his desire to burn, and when he decided to ignite the ambiguity with the "red anger" woman, an accident occurred.
Wrongly, he raped the woman he used to spy on.
In the darkness and chaos, he inadvertently killed the woman's husband.
But because of everyone's mask, the murderer has no identity, and no one can decide who deserves to be punished.
When the male protagonist washed off the blood on his body and fled back to the grand event.
A drama about death is playing out there.
Coincidentally, it seems that every lyric in the play is torturing the male protagonist:
Have you ever taken someone else's life?
Have you ever snatched something that doesn't belong to you?
Have you defiled the bodies and souls of others?
After learning that someone had been killed, the Wizard Elder said:
"We don't know who the murderer is,
Even if we knew, we would never report it.
But I want to tell the murderer,
Your conscience will always be condemned. ”
At the husband's funeral, the man saw that the wife was grief-stricken and took off his mask himself.
In order to seek excitement, she secretly changed her mask and broke the rules of the mysterious event, which led to the death of her beloved husband.
The pain and torment in her heart made it difficult for her to extricate herself.
She gave up the mask, gave up this power, and chose to be punished and imprisoned in the hope of redemption.
And the male protagonist in the distance also remembered the woman's face.
Did the male protagonist really escape the disaster after rape and murder without any punishment?
yes.
After the event, the man left the mysterious forest safely.
But, neither is it.
24 years later, at the Grand Gathering of the Year of the Monkey, he came here again.
Obviously, everything in front of us is different from before.
Although everyone still wears masks, various electronic music and modern pop dances on the scene replace the religious dramas of that year.
What's happened in those 24 years?
Is the Wizard Elder still there?
Did the Wizard Elder really not know that he was the murderer?
Why did he come back?
To redeem yourself? Or is it to save others?
All I can tell you is that what he has done since his return this time is unexpected, shocking and thought-provoking!
And the dancer played by Zhou Xun appears at the beginning and end of the film, so what is her entanglement with this mysterious and unknown story? What does it have to do with men?
The film will give you all the answers.
<h1>Power under the mask</h1>
Wear a mask and hide behind various symbolic people, beasts, or emotions.
To make people strip away from the reality of the present, no longer have an identity, everything can be independent of themselves.
But soon, the mask will take on a different identity.
Men identify women who flirt with themselves through masks, and then recognize the wrong person because of the mask.
People's faces are obscured by masks, but masks in turn are a metaphor for the true side of people.
The male protagonist is assigned an expressionless face mask.
As this face suggests, in the film, he is alienated from the indulgent crowd, most of the time only relying on voyeurism, Mu Ran looks at all this.
But in the end, it is still difficult to escape the power of desire.
The woman he flirts with wears a red mask of anger, representing boldness and provocation.
And on the woman he misidentified, the red mask became the blood and anger of rape.
The man he killed was played by Liang Chaowei, wearing a mask of serenity, but in turn hinted at the tranquility and constancy of death.
The mask becomes a rich metaphor that both reinforces and simplifies emotions, hiding and creating identity.
When twenty-four years later, the male protagonist returns to the jungle again wearing a double-sided mask.
The two-sided mask is one joy and one sorrow, and the main face is sad, because he still has a knot in his heart; the back is joy, because after all, he seems to have realized something in the knot of his heart.
Finally he was willing to take off this mask of self.
And begin the path of salvation.
When the mask is removed, the heavy metaphors dissipate, and one must look directly at oneself as they really are.
Is hiding one's identity free? This is a central proposition in the film.
The couple in the grand event use the mysterious constraints of hiding their identities under the mask to flirt, to vent their lust, pretend to steal, stimulate the desire to meet each other, and hilarize themselves and forget the existence of bystanders.
But it was accidentally made a big mistake, and the indulgence and blasphemy of freedom eventually led to the disaster of death.
After the protagonist accidentally kills someone, the elder who presides over the practice tells the rioting crowd:
"The identity of the murderer will not be revealed, but he will live in sin."
This directly echoes the reason why the protagonist returns to this land of demons after 24 years.
Crime and Punishment are not revoked by anonymity.
Instead, in order to atone for his sins the protagonist must take off the mask.
The film does not show the inevitable painful process of madness, and in the end there are many reservations about his relationship with the dancer.
But this large number of blanks makes people full of reverie about how he faced the cruel truth (whether it is the truth of his identity or the truth of the tragedy of the year) and how to carry out the journey of atonement.
<h1>The bardo world of Hey Ma Heima</h1>
In Heima Heyma, death and desire are always there.
The death here is very vivid, it is a play-within-a-play around a campfire at night, and a funeral for the person killed by the protagonist.
It was a mournful and solemn funeral, in the gap between death and rebirth, the Tibetan word for Bardo (bardo).
The deceased were placed in front of the stage, and the elders who presided over the funeral chanted:
Death is also an erasure of identity, and even if you think of the living, you can no longer turn back.
From beginning to end, the mask of the deceased has not been taken off, which seems to imply that in the land of death, everyone has no identity and everyone is equal.
And this extravaganza, held every twelve years, is isolated from the world, and everyone is under a mask.
Although born, it is more like the bardo world of a human world.
Everyone seems to have died, wandering in this gap between death and rebirth, without ties and restraints, without bondage.
Whether you can be reborn depends entirely on the one you are facing.
Your true self!
"Pursue freedom and be true to yourself!" This is the most appealing slogan of postmodernism.
It means that you submit to your deepest thoughts and even your subconscious mind and realize them.
Only in this way will it be called the most authentic self.
But we have never been able to get rid of the norms and shackles of real society.
But this mysterious event is like the hell world, he has come to greet you and take you to a different place than the previous world.
Your identity is hidden, and outside of this dense forest, the identity of the person is like a label.
To hide this identity is to really act exactly according to your own will, and perhaps to think according to your own wishes.
Many of the scenes in the film revolve around death and bardo.
During this period from death to rebirth, you will have a chance to show your true self.
In the Buddhist interpretation, this stage is not controlled by anything, even because Yama wants to calculate your good and evil virtues, to determine where you are going, even if you want to show yourself, it is impossible.
The protagonist and the couple enjoy this freedom and the thrill of being true to themselves.
But the result is that this freedom and authenticity is devoid of ethical and moral justice.
Just as the evil deeds of the male protagonist are the result of the real self, modern society often faces the following problems:
We have all the knowledge of human beings in this world, but unconsciously we begin to confuse good and evil, and there is no longer any good and evil;
If it were not for the buffer of the traditional forces of a national culture, the superficially rational world would be a terrible hell, a bardo path that no one would have come to guide, and everyone would have to escape into a state of perdition under the lust of the naked self.
"Hey Ma Hey Ma" is trying to point directly to human nature through this bardo story.
yes! Many times because of misunderstandings or various coincidences, irreparable misunderstandings continue to occur between people, and even catastrophes.
The results may be overwhelming, but the parties may also be truly innocent, what can you do?
If an ordinary person is an ordinary person, he will be able to repay the theory of cause and effect; if he is unusual, he will be killed without forgiveness.
However, "Heima HeyMa" uses many hidden hints to make people open the reincarnation layer by layer, to think about good and evil.
Even the humanity hidden under the mask, under the heavens, is clearly revealed.
Whether you are in the norms of society or in your own desires, there is no possibility of liberation!
No matter how free you are, if you leave the right good and evil and right and wrong, then what results can be achieved, but it is just making mistakes again and again.
In addition to the profound exploration of the theme, the film itself is also beautiful.
Bhutan's forests are deep and vast, and the thick greenery contrasts with the bright masks.
It took the crew almost a year to make masks and costumes, soaking and smoking to make them feel the age.
The night scenes in the film have no artificial lighting, all the light sources come from the torch, and the shadows are enough, so that the chanting and dancing around the campfire, and even the intertwining of fingertips and the temptation of the flesh, all carry a sense of beauty of light and shadow.
Director Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche is also a writer and living Buddha.
He is widely regarded for his book "Eighty-Four Thousand Questions" and the film "World Cup on the Mountain". Known as "the most storytelling lama".
The film attracted a lot of attention when it was screened at several international film festivals such as Locarno and Toronto.
Zhang Ziyi even said: "This is a metaphor for our time."
Zhou Xun and Liang Chaowei, the two big stars, are even more self-recommended to star in zero films, and there are not many appearances, but they are the main axis of the story.
It's an excellent film, and when you think about it, he will wake up and wake up like everyone in a dream.
"Heima Hey Ma" - perhaps, the real freedom is the real dream bubble, and desire is the key to your self-seeing!