Wen 丨 Liu Shaoyu
Flipping through Douban, there was recently a Taiwanese film "Lonely Taste" that rushed to the first place in the weekly word-of-mouth list and was on the list for three consecutive weeks. It just went online on Netflix earlier this month, and it is normal for popular new films to be on the list, and there is a reason why it seems more important: now mainland audiences have reached the point of full acceptance of Taiwan's film and drama works, and every time a new film and new drama comes out, the evaluation will be higher than the actual level. The enthusiasm for Taiwanese films is so high that it is a synthesis of three points:
The curiosity aroused by the value system watching the fire from across the shore; the extension of the good impression of the golden age of family drama; and the reflection of the self with the progress of social development on the other side.
The current style of Taiwan's film and television is completely different from the two sides of the strait and the three places in the 1980s and 1990s. In the past, Taiwan's film and television, including musical works, mostly showed their beautiful and mournful faces, and mainland audiences once chased Taiwanese stars and works, and the most important thing was "purity".
The reason behind this is because its mainstream will shapes the social individual very differently from the mainland. Taiwanese films often show the next generation that eventually grows up under family tragedies, which is directly related to Taiwan's emphasis on "youth striving for self-improvement", and the young people in the film are like serving in the military, to "fulfill" the pain they will inevitably experience in their lives, and eventually all this will be classified as the inevitable polishing in the process of becoming a talent.
In modern times, Taiwanese society has basically removed this general theme of macroscopic down, and filmmakers and the society shown in their scripts and under the lens no longer have "unified thinking", so the chaos and alienation of modern society have become the main characteristics of Taiwanese films at present.
"Lonely Taste" is such a movie.
Its basic plot is that an old father who has a bad character and abandoned the family dies, the whole family gathers with the mother for a funeral, the formerly estranged family members are forced to face each other to settle their former emotional debts, the characters enter a specific environment that promotes narrowness, and the dramatic conflict occurs from the position, while they are open to the door, exposing the internal misery of these families to the audience.
Seeing this setting, it is easy for the audience to predict the process direction of the supplementary film in advance, plus it is produced in Taiwan, and in the audience's viewing experience and aesthetic inertia, the image of the film is better guessed. In the face of the keywords of "family", "Taiwan" and "parents", the audience will often make up for it in advance, it will be a healing, warm, and fusion film, in which there will be beautiful tree canopy, rainy streets, simple and smiling children, grandma carrying bags to buy fish, and the sparse soundtrack spreads a faint sad mood.
Taiwan's New Film, Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Childhood Past"
But "Lonely Taste" is not this kind of movie, after watching it, you will feel that every part of it is not so beautiful, the rhythm is not so calm, it is a tilted, one-or-one film, and it is not successful in aesthetics and character design.
"Lonely Taste" and the popular Taiwanese films in recent years (such as "Who Fell in Love with Him First" and "Sunshine") have the same dramatic beginning, when the protagonist's family suddenly dies, opening a family storm. At the root of the form, such stories are the most common "family fun" type comedies in Taiwanese popular movies and television, starting from a bizarre event in ethics and showing the different personalities of family members.
In recent years, these popular movies have added a considerable amount of sadness to the basis of this type of salivary farce, and the main characters have also presented a strange sense of comedy (Chen Yiwen, who won the Golden Horse Award for Best Actor in "Sunshine", is this kind of role).
"Sunshine Shines" Chen Yiwen
In addition to the head of the family, family members, especially men, are mostly comedians. Among the female secondary characters, there will always be one or two sensitive and fragile images of life injuries (the popular character of "Big Buddha Plus" is the result of combining the above two personalities).
"Big Buddha Plus" belly money
The film is started by the tragic events of the protagonist's family's death and absence, which will be immersed in a sad and serious atmosphere from the beginning, but it is essentially a serious family farce on the surface (not only in Taiwan, but also in Korean films, such as Bong Joon-ho's "Mother"). The difficulty of this type of film is how to integrate the plain daily life scenes, the low tone, and the pessimistic and indifferent attitude to life with the slightly eccentric character appearance. Being able to reasonably graft together these contradictory elements and their respective expressions has been more than half successful, but unfortunately, "Lonely Taste" does not do this.
At the beginning of the film, the father is breathless in the hospital bed before his death, this scene can not be said to be a superb performance, it looks exaggerated and even grotesque, this grotesque and the death proposition of the character is not completely connected, its role seems to be more like providing a cold atmosphere for the film as a whole, and let the death always be accompanied by a sad and ridiculous sense of comedy, for the director to start satirizing and adding comedic elements. This is the two sides are separated, the most unsuccessful part of "Lonely Taste" is that in almost every scene, the actor's performance and the camera's capture of the actor's performance are not appropriate to the content that this scene wants to express, and it is too hot and unnecessary like the scene of the father's death.
After the warmth and humidity that are common in Taiwanese new movies and idol dramas, there is currently such a trend of "small-weird-cold" style in Taiwanese films. They never try to depict a crowded human world like mainland home-cooked movies, and the Tainan city in "Lonely Taste" seems to have only the protagonist's family living. From his father's breathlessness, to his death being wrapped in a body bag, the sound of singing Buddhist scriptures from the horn in the corner, and the night of dad's death, mom also wanted to open up a seventy-year-old birthday feast of her own - these combinations are more likely to be regarded by the audience as a bizarre family affair, self-deprecating meaning to overshadow the pain that is happening in the story, or the current trend of Taiwanese movies is to use irony and even ridicule to show the life pain that the protagonist is facing (the typical example is in "Big Buddha Plus"). The captured image of the belly money).
On the day of her father's death, her mother also celebrated her seventy-year birthday feast
The style of Taiwan's new film is quiet, calm, and from this static emerges the creator's fierce views on the differences in modern society. The basis of its "jing" is the work's nostalgia for the past, and combined with the local local scenery of Taiwan's rural and small towns, it can be regarded as a kind of root-seeking literature and art. Later, after the commercialization of Taiwanese film and television became more mature, on top of this, there were small fresh style movies that we are most familiar with.
Flashback passages try to get back the little freshness of the past
The difference between Taiwanese movies now and before is that its foundation has shifted from quiet to chaotic, even if it is still a local background stage, its fundamental personality is also chaotic and noisy, just because people are thrown into the modern context, the life problems encountered by people are mostly based on the separation of career and family, so I am entangled with the present self (such as the old friend of the male protagonist of "Sunshine" has become his biggest trouble at present), it believes that the original state of man is not a pastoral silence and simple heart, but the restlessness of people's hearts, and after market washing, Individual shirking of family responsibilities.
The debts incurred by the people of "Sunshine" after shirking their responsibilities
The Big Buddha Plus is messy and disorderly
The clutter of the "Classmate Meñas" scene
The protagonists of "Lonely Taste" deal with the various plots of the funeral aftermath, which is more to put the film into such a cold and embarrassing atmosphere. Reflecting the characters' respective personalities in urgent things and giving them a chance to collide is not to use the events behind them to trigger humanistic care, but more like to use it to shape the style and use the scene to achieve tension.
In the scene of the super father, in order to let the Buddha and the Tao be in the same place, he deliberately gave the mother a temper of not cooperating and preferring to do so, but before the story, she was not described as such a personality, which made the most core character become a two-faced person who switched on demand, which is not the "three-dimensional character" in the drama standard, but to arrange the scene that shows her different personality angles like a number.
In order to find a reason for the realization of the scene, it is necessary to push back to change the character's personality, which is the end of the line. The Buddhist tao "same competition" is the most blunt and pointless scene I have seen recently, and it basically does not achieve anything except to make all the characters stiff and embarrassing. You can't say that it was released by Netflix, it must have been "filmed for Westerners", but it still seems deliberate and crowded. Coupled with this additional motif that is detached from the daily life of the characters, it has never been used rationally in the film, and "Lonely Taste" is out of balance with the theme, character actions, and character personality organization, often in order to highlight one point, it completely abandons the other two points in the previous space.
There are many more such bluntly added plots in the film. For example, when the whole family knelt down to worship their father's spiritual seat and chanted buddhist scriptures, a flying cockroach was drilled out of the fruit gap of the spiritual platform, and then it was stomped on by the mother who originally had a grudge against her dead father.
Paragraphs like this, you can't say whether it's witty, weird, or what, the point is, similar to this kind of play, you don't know what the use is, the previous one seriously interrogated the soul, after remembering the father, immediately there is such a funny scene, and then seconds back to a serious book, the character's expression as if the incident just happened did not happen at all. This abruptness and incongruity will wash away the overall atmosphere of the film. However, looking at "Lonely Taste", it actually has no whole from beginning to end.
At the beginning of "Lonely Taste", in the performance of the mother to go to the market to purchase, come back to do her best shrimp roll, these contents are surprising, Hong Kong and Taiwan movies depicting cooking and eating paragraphs, there is always no mistake. In this kind of movie, the characters must eat fish, shrimp, crabs, and must be pure southern cooking methods, so that the whole life scene can come alive. Before the Hong Kong film "Uncle Uncle", Du Qifeng's "Detective", Xu Anhua's "Sister Tao", and Ang Lee's "Eating Men and Women" are all like this.
But the story of "Lonely Taste" is later, who remembers that the old mother Xiuying was famous for making fried shrimp rolls, opened a famous restaurant, and the younger daughter took over the management of this restaurant? The audience can no longer see any feeling of a chef in their mother and daughter, nor do they remember that the eldest daughter Wanqing is doing dance teaching, and the second daughter Wanyu is doing plastic surgery, the protagonists are reduced to the most basic units of society - mother, daughter, these family roles, the daughters because of the professional differences, the collision of the daughters, is also shortened to personality.
The youngest daughter, Wanjia, is in charge of the hotel, and only this scene appears in the whole film, and the rest of the time she is like a student
A mother and three daughters left in the world, missing an unworthy husband and an unfamiliar father, this setting should be no problem in the script creation stage, falling in the movie, but because of the disorder of the proportion of several roles and the chaos of the opponent's play, in the end there is no feeling that should be there.
For example, the role of the second daughter is very specific at the beginning, and the more she ends up, the less the role is, and only the mother and sister are left to cry. But then she said to her daughter, "You stay here to study, take exams, get married and have children, and you have more choices when you go out." Suddenly throwing out a general negation of the society in which it is located, plus the film is not originally used to talk about this, just to use a few paragraphs and a few scenes to amplify the position of a particular character, "Lonely Taste" finally marches under this patchwork.
The death of his father was the same day as his mother's seventieth birthday party, and on the way to the funeral, the eldest sister caught up with the breast tumor examination. Of course, in reality, such a thing can happen, but in the film, it seems that everything has to be rushed together to have their own meaning, which is a kind of clunky stacking method.
This is the failure to clearly distinguish the personality attitudes of several daughters in the father's funeral, and adding an additional illness to one of the daughters to aggravate the scene, which eventually leads to a messy perspective and uneven rhythm.
"Lonely Taste" borrows a lot of supporting roles to narrate and assemble the story of his father's life, and also adds a few flashback passages from his parents' youth. The main problem is that the audience does not really feel that the story of the father in the film is particularly attractive to them, because the film is vague about the moral position of the father in order to emphasize family reconciliation.
Flashback to parents in paragraphs
Director Xie Fei's short comment on the film on Douban is very reasonable, he said that it is "a typical oriental women's morality drama". Even if the father is wrong, he is also the head of the family, and he uses blood to forgive an evil father who has turned his back on the whole family. One moment to stand on the side of the hurt mother and daughter, the next moment to resort to forgiveness, relief, so that the whole film can not look forward to the rear, and finally in the storytelling there is a situation of reluctance and confusion.
When the film has nothing to say, it will fall into a vague mournful tone, which is the style of "drought and flood protection" of taiwanese films in the past after the failure of innovation. The atmosphere and tone change from time to time, oscillating between humor and helplessness, crying self-deprecating, self-deprecating and crying again, it is really not possible to return to the spiritual hall scene to find tension. After seventy minutes of talking, another female star, Zhang Junning, was brought out, and her first shot was beautiful, weeping, and acting with crying scenes, but only then let her enter the story, even if she participated as a cameo, she still seemed reluctant.
In an hour and twenty-three minutes, after this long day, the little daughter sat in the taxi and watched the night view outside the window, the rain hit the car glass, and the first and only time the film appeared in the upgraded shot, which was the same as Zhang Junning's sudden addition, making the film's additional content appear very abrupt.
On the contrary, in the "retention link", "Lonely Taste" repeats almost exactly the same content again and again, such as the warm light passage of grandma and granddaughter in the bedroom, and there is no difference between the two times, and the supporting role Miss Cai enters the camera in a dark state and the same dress with the same expression every time, which is some annoying similarity.
The scene in the living room near ninety minutes should be the focus of the whole film, and there are many appreciations for this scene by watching the general comments. But careful observation, in addition to providing the leading actors with an opportunity to "explode their acting skills", many links are unqualified or even strange.
The mother first pointed out that her younger daughter took over the restaurant. It's okay to show that mother and daughter have different positions because of generations, but does the younger daughter need to look at her mother like this, with the same expression as looking at a mortal enemy and an enemy?
The eldest daughter, Wanqing, said something she did not dare to say before after getting drunk, and this expression was not accurate.
The lens for the mother, even if it has clearly explained her temper at this time, her black past, but is it necessary to use this kind of light for her?
The previous scene was also, the use of the film, could not have made the role of the mother such an ugly face, because in the story, she was not written as a purely repressed image.
The inability to make the character look good, or to make a character look good or not, is not directly related to the character settings of the character and the current situation, which is a serious problem in the technical implementation of the film.
The little daughter's expression has always been mismatched with what she is facing in this scene, and the picture frame here directly cuts half of her face.
In this whole scene, the expression of the little daughter is too exaggerated
In terms of lens language and frame design, this scene in the living room not only continues the roughness of the whole film, but even can be said to be the most failed processing of the whole film. In addition, when mothers and daughters argue about the issue, the dialogue that takes place has always revolved around the point of "who is sorry for whom", which is very cumbersome and rapping, and everyone is thinking about the literal meaning of the words. In the performance, everyone wants to compete to be a dramatist when they speak, and at the same time, they must collectively convey the common rhythm of "one family", showing that "no matter how discordant their position is also a family", which makes the film fall into the family drama of "blood is thicker than water".
Near the end, it was also thrown that Zhang Junning's character was the sister who was forced to be sent away that year, which was no longer important to the audience, because this character only appeared once in the front.
In terms of themes, the Buddhist uncertainty and the Taoist non-existence are not properly glued to the people in the plot. If the human world in the film is used as an example of religious themes, the film only allows the characters to "use" religion and walk into religious places to become their surroundings. Even if they are extremely persistent about these, they still only play a symbolic role and enrich the connotation of the characters.
"Lonely Taste" has the impulse of contemporary Taiwanese films to innovate, after trying unsuccessfully, and then seeking to return to the embrace of the small fresh style of the past, coupled with various coincidences and blunt reconciliations in the character conflict setting, this film is often looking for some of the best positions of "two-phase fit", and finally there is no consideration.
The film is an extension of a half-hour short film shot by the director in 2017. The short film itself has its own taste of independent production, starting from the "good pedigree" of this independent literary film, "Lonely Taste" will still have a natural liking for it after it is expanded to a 120-minute feature film. But the good feelings, and the warmth and human concern that can be expected in the story setting, have not transformed "Lonely Taste" into a substantial masterpiece, and it is not its medal when it is launched on Netflix.
Of course, now that small language films have the blessing of Netflix, sales and identity will increase by one level, which is an important path to achieve "going out" in addition to film festivals and co-productions, and it is undeniable that we are also more interested in "Lonely Taste" through Netflix.
Understanding this matter with a more calm attitude, we should be able to see that Netflix has expanded its global territory very rapidly in recent years, not only has it released Taiwan's "Sin Dreamer", "Who is the Victim", "Lonely Taste", South Korea, Germany, Brazil, Belgium, Turkey, India, these language film and television works are within Netflix's strategy. The way others solve the innovation dilemma and become your highest glory is not equal in itself, and at present, being "opened" by Netflix is not the quality guarantee of the film.
Just after watching a movie, before making a horizontal comparison, it is always easy to blurt out "tentative best of the year". It is not so much an evaluation after watching it, but more like a general projection of this large category of films - as long as it is a new film in Taiwan, and it shows the sadness and death of the bottom, it must be good.
Mainland audiences have been circling this formula for several years. For "Lonely Taste" and the whole kind of film it represents, we should try to remove the labels it carries before and after watching it, and don't take online evaluation too seriously.