The author | Xie Minghong
Editor| Li Chunhui
Han Han's movie signboard smashed into his own hands, if you put aside Liu Haocun's extremely poor passerby popularity.
Elderly people love to return to their original intentions. Watching Han Han's "Four Seas", there is always an illusion of re-reading "Triple Gate": an unruly teenager who wants to turn the dragon into a dragon, and finally finds that he can only be a "thing in the pool".
Of course, there are still basic warning meanings. The first rule is that you must not borrow your ID card casually, otherwise you will be in debt at a young age. The second rule is to drink alcohol without swimming, swimming without drinking, and even if you swim, remember to avoid the course of the ship. Rule three, obey the traffic rules, illegal racing must not be. Rule four, brag don't tell others the real address. Rule five, do not know how to swipe the room card, you can check the Internet.
With the post-80s and post-90s Wenqing thinking, it is not difficult to understand what Han Han wants to express: a small-town youth who likes the simple girl next door, returns to the beginning of the story after reading thousands of sails. It's just that in a pile of innocent groaning lines, the film completely loses the strength and necessity of expression. Deconstructing with post-metaphorical social trends, contemporary Internet natives may only be left with pure and speechless big moves.
"Four Seas" proves a simple truth, that is, do not take the literary impulse as the creative talent of film. What's more, the creators themselves are no longer as impulsive as they were when they were younger.
Eternal islands, young people who never grow up, foggy photography that can get rheumatoid arthritis forever, and all kinds of racing cars that are tireless. Han Han seemed to be trapped in the cycle, unable to walk out of the boundary of his youth.
Coincidentally, Han Han and Guo Jingming's dedication to youth are the same destination. The former cannot get out of the small town where human nature is trapped, and the latter is inseparable from the big city of materialism. In addition to singing a song for them that is also some years old, "Don't Want to Grow Up", Hard Candy Jun seems to have nothing more to do.
What "Four Seas" says, the sky has no answer
The sign of growth is to quietly put away baby Anne on the bookshelf and "The Summer Solstice Has Not Arrived", for fear of being found out and have such a period of youth. Unable to appreciate youth pain literature because of "too old" is probably the first headache for Han Han fans.
What "Four Seas" is talking about, the sky will not give you the answer. When Liu Haoran and Liu Haocun walked by the seashore, they suddenly felt that the script was written by Guo Jingming. If they look up at the sky at a 45-degree angle, can they see a look of disgust on the sky's face? Find an electronics factory to work well, young people feel confused mostly because of less experience and more thoughts.
The protagonist Wu Renyao (played by Liu Haoran), the harmonic sound is undesirable. His mother died prematurely, his father was gone, only his elderly grandmother was dependent on him, and the motorcycle was his only friend. Ah Yao's father (Shen Teng) returns to the island and even mistakenly recognizes his son when he first meets him.
If the story is filmed according to the flow of the Spring Festival comedy, it should be Ah Yao who, accompanied by his beloved girl Huan Song (Liu Haocun) and his father, practices his driving skills to defeat his opponents and usher in a bright life. But happiness is always short-lived, the father left and did not intend to accompany Ah Yao for a long time, Grandma went to her hometown to see the snow and embarked on a long journey, celebrating the accidental death of her brother swimming, leaving hundreds of thousands of usurious debts for Huan Song and Ah Yao.
Desperate, Ah Yao and Huan Song left Nan'ao Island and rode a motorcycle to work in the big city of Guangzhou, but found that life was difficult. Huan Song did not go well in finding a job, so he had to cash out at the restaurant. Ah Yao can only ride a motorcycle, performing stunts in the playground while working to pay off debts. In an instant, love and his own skilled career have become a passing cloud, and the tentacles are scattered.
At the beginning of the film, "Maggie's Gift" on Ah Yao's bed has already told the audience in advance of the pain of the ending. Boys work hard to earn money to help girls pay off their debts, and girls work hard to help boys redeem motorcycles. In the end, it backfired, the boy almost died in the sea of fire when the star double flew over the Pearl River, and the girl happened to ride the boy's motorcycle and was knocked into the Pearl River by the boy boss and killed.
On the first day of the Chinese New Year, O'Henry felt obscure when he saw so many people die, not to mention the audience who looked forward to rejoicing and celebrating the New Year but was drunk on the head. Ah Yao returned to the island with his wounds, licking the imprints of his youth. The four seas are home, but where is the four seas home?
There are themes for the movie, but the overall look is like a short video emotional smorgasbord. There are both the depression of small-town youth and the hazy obscurity of first love, as well as the alienation of human nature from small towns to big cities, the alienation of family affection in modern society, the teasing of fate and the futility of struggle...
Single out one can be made into a movie, and "Four Seas" wants to eat everything but becomes four different. The theme is profound, but the presentation is juvenile. For example, the male and female protagonists will not swipe the room card, is it because Nan'ao Island is not connected, or is it to show the innocence of the young people in the town? Liu Haocun was asked whether he was married or not to have a baby when he was looking for a job, as if Han Han wanted to force the political correctness of the movie. But in fact, if Mrs. Han had come out to look for a job, she would have known that normal people would not ask such questions.
Three-piece set of Korean-style films
After becoming famous in 2014, Han Han has actually been making the same movie - a coming-of-age story about a teenager's travel, mixed with sharp emotional monologues and various sentimental clips.
The Three Magic Weapons of Korean Cinema, Youth, Nostalgia and Island. There is a "Song of Dongji Island" in "After the End". "O East Pole Island! Dongji Island! We don't want to go anywhere but here. In this kind of self-intoxicating praise, the ridiculous words are enough to make people can't help but be funny.
Whether it is the East Pole Island in "After Forever" or the Nan'ao Island in "Four Seas", the spatial construction of Han Han's film has always been a polarized structure of "small town island + steel city". Ah Yao in "Four Seas" can't integrate into Guangzhou, and when the boss told him to buy a river view house, he said: "We all have sea views there." "The young people in the town who are tired of seeing the sea view find that the top enjoyment of housing in the city is the "river view".
"Riding the Wind and Waves" shows the ruin of Tinglin Town's "untraceable past" with nostalgic melancholy, including familiar racing elements, mockery of the underlying system, praise for the young and crazy, and the sense of the fate of the characters; in "Flying Life", Wei Xiang and the male protagonist stand on the rusty staircase and sing "Glorious Years", and the Oriental Pearl in the background is undoubtedly the trick of the big era on the small people.
The small-town youth in Korean-style films has a rebellious and confused confrontation with the mainstream world similar to that of the sixth generation of directors, but the focus has been quietly replaced by the externalized Loser image - living a life of nesting, although it has a skill but is not ambitious. This is a more commercially logical kind of insane deconstruction, which in itself is flattering rather than constructing the audience's emotional resonance.
Who doesn't have a "want to be that year" bragging about it, and it's clearer to watch Korean movies – most of the teenagers that middle-aged brag about are just their self-righteous bulls. When a young man becomes a middle-aged man, there are only two paths to go. Or like Ah Yao's father in "Four Seas", he will live a mixed meal and eat. Or like Zhang Chi in "Flying Life", gamble your life and take another chance.
Interestingly, these two roles are still played by Shen Teng. As my grandfather Chen Yinke said: "The so-called scenery, but it is not a skill." The road is bumpy, but there is no way out. Han Han deliberately sanctified the small-town teenagers, so they either died physically in the past or spiritually in the past, and they were always unwilling to live in the present.
Compared with the middle-aged men's wine table, Han Han is more intelligent than them in that he polishes it with words and makes the complaint full of stomachs into golden sentences suitable for forwarding in the circle of friends. In "After the Indefinite Period", "you have not even viewed the world, where is the world view", "Riding the Wind and Waves" is "all small people, don't say anything big", "Some people live in style, some people live in human design, I live in the ability"...
Looking at it this way, the "sky will not give you the answer" of "Four Seas" is not only a demotion of rhetoric, but also an expression of degradation. Generation after generation of literature, just like Wang Shuo's "Jingwei Duanzi" disappeared with the obsolescence of Feng-style New Year films, the witty words of Han Han's films cannot always be young.
Forever stopped in adolescence
"What I express in my novels is actually everything I express in other media." It should be appropriate to list Han Han's films as "author films" with distinct styles. Andrew Sarris once made a metaphor in his 1962 Notes on authorship:
"If the director has no technical ability, no basic talent in film, he is automatically excluded from the director's temple." Examined by this standard, Han Han had once touched the door frame of the temple, and the fall of "Four Seas" made him gradually drift away from the door frame.
The youth in Korean movies are always in a sleepy situation that makes people cry and laugh, but they have not forgotten to leave a trace of warmth. Dongji Island in "After the End" becomes a prosperous place, where Jianghe and Sumi meet again; Xu Tailang in "Riding the Wind and Waves" finally reconciles with his son; and Zhang Chi in "Flying Life" also completes the defense of professional dignity. The dilemmas are different, but they all have a hopeful ending.
How did "Four Seas" smash the pot? Ah Yao went from "nothing" to "nothing", which seems to have made a fierce hand on the theme, but the actual expression is weak and powerless. His dilemma is not caused by the outside world, but he chooses step by step, and it is difficult to truly arouse the sympathy and resonance of the audience. In the face of debt, the normal situation is to call Wang Yanlin's usurious behavior, and then turn himself in illegal racing, and the plot will not be serious for too long.
In order to avoid illegal debt collection, Huan song can go to the big city to work, but the place where the motorcycle is forbidden is forbidden, and she is also responsible for the car accident. Ah Yao wants to help repay the loan as a wronged boss, and he does not have to take the risk to fly over the Pearl River. The plot of all kinds of distortions is calculated, and the complaints encountered in "Four Seas" are all "made" by the protagonists themselves.
"Four Seas" did not shoot the pride of teenagers, but the English title "Only Fools Rush In" came from Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Fall In Love". Wise man say，only fools rush in. But I can't help falling in love。 In a popular phrase, it is probably "The wise do not fall in love, and the fool is willing to fall." ”
The positioning of "Four Seas" is lost, and the pure author's film seems too self-pitying. Speaking of comedy, the plot is driven by accidental death. In the low melodic movie, there are too many jokes, and the harmonic laughter is outdated and boring. Obviously, the days of going away from home are very depressing, and the second half of the plot is still the whole police and debt collectors hard bar.
As a result, the tragic story full of fatalism has become a ridiculous parody of short videos. It's as if there are jittery bloggers telling you how to make the movie han han feel. After watching it, the audience was deeply impressed, felt that there was a Korean flavor but lacked the background, opened the comment area and found that the blogger was actually Han Han himself.
Huan Song once asked Ah Yao what he could do when he did a good job, and Ah Yao replied: "Doing a good job means doing nothing." The expression of the degradation of "Four Seas" seems to illustrate the same truth, and after filming, nothing is filmed.
Because han Han, the most wanton teenager, has completed all the expressions that should be completed in his youth. Every step of the way, he will only get farther and farther away from the public life.
Stories like this play out in many directors. The beginning is pure expressive life, then it is half-blinded and half-guessing expressive life, and finally it is a completely speculative life. Instead of strangling "Four Seas", it is better to open "Triple Door", because the boy who just dropped out of school inside is the real Ah Yaoli!