Film critic | "Season of Love in aNother Country": Sinking in the Moment of the "American Dream" Shattered

Text/Wang Xu

(Film information: "Season of Love in Other Villages", Director: Luo Zhuoyao, Screenwriter: Fang Lingzheng, Starring: Maggie Cheung, Leung Ka Fai, Wen Xilian, Hong Kong, China, 1990)

The movie "Season of Love in aNother Country" shows a struggle in repression at the beginning. In the cold and dark color of the picture, a couple dressed in ordinary clothes quietly pack the same ordinary clothes. In this rustic room of their own, they are careful and cautious, and although they are methodically packed, they can still cover their wives with a gray coat from their husbands, so as to cover the intentions of the western-style skirts that their wives wear, which are still very new.

At this time, it was still dark, and the couple carried the sleeping baby and walked out of the house. The film conceals the footsteps that should ring through the alley at this moment, which is not the negligence of the main creators on the common sense of life, on the contrary, the silence when the husband and wife walk out of the house is precisely a reflection of the common sense of life, highlighting a kind of look at the surrounding environment, which is a self-trained internal psychological reaction to a pair of voyeuristic eyes from the shadows that do not necessarily exist but have to be alert.

It was not until she got on the train to Shanghai that her wife, Li Hong, quietly put on her stockings under her seat. The lens stays in this picture for enough time to condense the repression of an era, and it allows ordinary people to dare not slacken their nerves all the time to be effectively expressed through the rich film language.

There is also a clear meaning in the scene of "showing" the queue of people applying for visas outside the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai. The long line of people, with anxiety and expectation, waited for "good luck" to come to their heads. "Good luck" is a concept fraught with uncertainty, and its manipulation is in the hands of the U.S. consul. This turned the anxiety that pervaded the crowd into a prayer to the consul's family, even though the prayer did nothing to help him get a visa. As for expectation, the film uses a deep symbolic picture to express the expectations derived from the numbness of thinking inertia of ordinary people just right. As the consul's car drove past the queue, those who were sitting or standing invariably paid respectful attention to the sedan that was just sitting on a civil servant in a nearly upright posture. This picture conveys a certain trained manifestation that makes the organizational behavior paradigm an indelible mark for ordinary people.

Under the collision of such anxiety and expectation, leaving is a more urgent desire than obtaining a visa to go to the United States to become his wife Li Hong. Following the guidance of this thirst, Li Hong was denied a visa many times. In the consul's view, the woman's reasons for applying to the United States are not sufficient, and the film shows this with Li Hong's impatience when she was interviewed by the consul. However, Li Hong still obtained a visa to go to the United States as she wished, and under the cover of the appearance of arousing the compassion of the US consul in the name of her child, the ordinary people who did everything in their power to go to the United States summed up the practical significance of "peeking at the whole leopard" at this moment.

With the relief of tears of joy, Li Hong has been in the United States for a year. In this year, Nansheng, the husband who grew up with his son ShanShan, not only stubbornly held on to a huge debt, but also faced the lack of envy and insidious snickering of his neighbors. Those eavesdropping focused on Li Hong's sending back seven cross-ocean family letters a month, which was enough to make Nansheng, who remained in China, with the title of inexplicable "ten thousand yuan household" become the focus of everyone's attention.

This mental repression accumulated in daily life peaked in the face of a letter from Li Hong asking for a divorce from her husband. In order to find out, Nansheng, who had not had a moment of respite in the past year, smuggled himself to the United States and began his own rather tragic journey to find his wife.

The process of finding Li Hong is also a journey through which Nansheng experiences a transformation of human nature. The journey is gray, but it's a dizzying reality. The United States has opened up a realistic stage for Nansheng to dissolve the boundaries of nationality. This stage unleashes a monster called "Life", and the mental high pressure it brings is more terrifying and frightening than the certain oppressive atmosphere that Nansheng feels in China. Nansheng, who had just arrived in the United States, was kicked out of his home by a childhood friend on the night he joined him. From the mouth of this childhood friend who studied painting together in the Children's Palace as a child, Nansheng learned bits and pieces about Li Hong after all. Li Hong once lived in a basement like a garbage heap, but now the house is empty. The sudden interruption of the clue made Nansheng's heart empty, mixed with the incomprehension of being driven out of the house by his childhood friends, Nansheng, who was sleeping on the street, lay on a foreign land and fell asleep in the wanderings that hit his heart. Beside his face, he snuggled up to the worn-out enamel jar, which was empty, implying that the man was gradually facing the mental pain of emptying himself and saying goodbye to the past.

After a series of meaningless searches, Nansheng is completely transformed in his relationship with Zhen, a fifteen-year-old Chinese girl. Jane inadvertently guides Nansheng to understand the monster of "life" and draws the nourishment she needs from it. Under such a close look at "life", the traditional consciousness that stuck in Nansheng's mind gradually collapsed, but it endlessly tore at the remaining rationality of this man.

Perhaps, "rationality" is an instinct that Nansheng urgently needs to transform in the process of finding his wife Li Hong. At home, it is a pretense of conformity with the oppressive and suffocating atmosphere, and in the United States, it is a stress response to survival. Through the general appearance of this woman outlined in the memories of people who have had contact with Li Hong, the film almost reflects the only way for Li Hong to transform "reason". On this road, Li Hong's struggles seemed futile, and she eventually lost herself in the unscrupulous way of making a living in order to grab money. But this way of making a living is not incorrect, under Jane's simple, direct "preaching", Nansheng pimped for Jane. The pain of splitting with traditional consciousness makes the film nansheng's anguished screams reveal the spiritual calamity that Li Hong has experienced in the United States for a year. Li Hong's loss is the sinking of Nansheng, and the husband and wife finally meet at the end of the shattered "American Dream".

Although the film is fictional, it creates a kind of heaviness about life, which makes the characters, time, places, and even the country in the story have symbolic significance. Even the story itself is a symbol, symbolizing the revelation of the truth of life at the moment of human nature's transformation.

(End of full text.) Made on July 2, 2021)

——The views in the article belong to the author himself, I am responsible for the text, and have nothing to do with the publishing platform (including various websites, forums, self-media, public accounts), reprinted print media, and others.

About the author: Wang Xu. His pen names include Wang Muyu, Xu Muyu, Xu Muyu's Bookcase, and Wang Xu 326, who settled in Chongqing.