Text | Huang Zhe
If it wasn't for the Spring Festival holiday to watch "Waterfall", "Love Myth" would have been my personal New Year's best film. Why does this "God Nagging" "Waterfall" move us? Maybe because its creators live a similar life to ordinary people, they have more life.
Mother and daughter covered by masks
"When I perform, I'm fully engaged as a man. But at the time I record and accept, my soul is feminine. Regardless of the art, a truly good artist can only be feminine. Orson Wells, whose works are branded like steel masculines, once summed up his artistic life. I doubted whether the Hollywood giant was sincere in saying this until I saw "Waterfall", which was the best picture at last year's Golden Horse Awards and represented Taiwan for the Oscar for best foreign language film.
Zhong Menghong, the director of "Waterfall", can be said to be the representative of Taiwanese author-type directors after Yang Dechang, Hou Xiaoxian, Li An, and Cai Mingliang, with an average of one work every two years, and each choreographer shoots a shoulder pick. Only viewers familiar with him know that the signature he made the camera was "Nakajima Nagao". This name looks like Hari, but it is actually a playful tu hi - "Nakajima" is the harmonic sound of Zhong Dao, and "Changxiong" is the common name of old men in Taiwan in the early years.
"Sunshine"
Zhong Menghong's all-round talent and aesthetics are recognized, and the previous production is indeed like the name of "Changxiong": "The Fourth Painting", "Lost Soul", "Sunshine", which has always revolved around the relationship between men and father and son. Under one zoom zoom after another, the story is slowly advanced, and from time to time you have to say a few fatherly life philosophies and summarize the previous plot. Although the pace is slow, the relationship between this group of male family members, whether it is broken or rebuilt, is always inseparable from fighting and killing. This is quite in line with the hormonal release law in the tropics, reminiscent of the male peacock proud trotting trotting around the island.
And this time, the signature of the "Waterfall" camera is also "Zhong Menghong", in this regard, Zhong Dao's explanation is: the epidemic has isolated Nakajima Nagao and cannot come back.
Sunlight peeks through thick clouds, kicking off a day in Taipei in this movie and movie. But everything in the camera, turning into the interior of the apartment building wrapped in blue fences, since then, whether it is the fixed-focus lens that is always level-looking or the mask that people in the play always take off, it is a reminder to all the viewers whose lives have been changed by the epidemic for two years: Don't think about watching the absurdity of others in Nakajima Nagao's lens, what happens below is the story around us, even our own story.
Time back to the beginning of the outbreak two years ago, and the same color of the mask fence, from the outside looks like wearing a mask for the whole building, but also reflected the blue and dark color of the house, so that this family is like a fish tank with two same-sex fish - fish farmers know that this is a big taboo. The epidemic is close to the daughter facing the pressure of the college entrance examination, isolation, and suspension of classes, and for the mother who needs to earn money to support the family, the performance is declining and the salary is reduced. For this family, it means that the mother and daughter who are constantly rubbing will be forced to get along at zero distance for 24 hours, and the reduction of space will make the pressure of the contradiction amplify in an instant, and God knows whether it will collapse.
Sure enough, at the beginning of the film, the perspectives of the two are constantly reversed like Rashomon, and for the drama film, the energy superposition is rarely set so early that people think that this is a thriller or even a supernatural film. Or reminiscent of Bergman's classic Autumn Sonata, which depicts the relationship between mother and daughter, The daughter played by Liv Uman exclaims: "Mother and daughter, what a terrible combination!" Everything is reasonable, everything is done in the name of love and care. ”
This fear of the worst-case scenario, even fear, is planted as early as the lesson that was not completed when the epidemic broke out in the film. As we all know, Zhong Menghong is a terrier, and the book bag is naturally not white. In the class, caesar was stabbed in the famous scene of world history, and it came to an abrupt end, and what was not said was Caesar's last words to his adopted son, the assassin Brutus: "Wu'er, there is also Ru Yan? "In connection with the consistent bloody rain and wind of Zhong Dao's previous works, will the direction of this family in "Waterfall" be out of control like "Lost Soul"?
The film travels to a third of the way, just as the original tight fence did not know when to break a hole, Jia Jingwen's mother Luo Pinwen, who was finally crushed by the three mountains of public office, motherhood and wifehood, suffered from schizophrenia. In this way, everything that seems unreasonable before has a reasonable explanation.
The mother and daughter are unfortunate because from then on, as the daughter in the Autumn Sonata says, "the wounds of the mother are to be borne by the daughter; the disappointment of the mother is to be repaid by the daughter; the pain of the mother is to become the pain of the daughter". The daughter has to start taking on the responsibilities of her mother, which she did not need to take on. But the good fortune of misfortune is that only one of the family really has a problem, not two in "Lost Souls" or even more in "Sunshine"; and more fortunately, the mother and daughter find the problem directly and simply at a relatively small cost, and the solution also saves the father and son who have to pay the price of blood in both directions.
Women help women
The reason why "Waterfall" was selected as the best film in the Golden Horse is inseparable from its "excellent metaphor". Previously, "Sunshine" was translated as "A Sun", which is both a metaphor for unreserved but a common path that burns the patriarchal power/love of both sons, and the harmonic "one son" reveals that the father was selectively hopeful at first, and later had no choice but to accept the reality of family changes. This time, "Waterfall" is translated as "The Falls", and the plural expression, metaphor is also multiple: on the surface, it is a blue fence that separates the normal world outside like a waterfall, it is a pathology with a waterfall sound next to the ear, and it is also the mouth that the daughter Xiaojing asks the sick mother to take medicine, and the mother who does not want to accept it spits on her face. Secretly, there is another synonym - falling. A wave of national epidemics has brought not only a mental illness to individuals, but also from executives to low-end reemployers, from apartments to homeless, from family guardians to patients who must be cared for.
But in my opinion, there is probably another layer of the metaphor of the waterfall. Remember that in Ang Lee's "Eating Men and Women", the literary and artistic youth in Taiwan at that time must be called "Dostoevsky" (that is, Dostoevsky). In Towon's "The Idiot", Duke Myshkin always thinks of his hometown "there is a small waterfall ... It pours down high, but it looks very low." From the same mental illness, the same performance of "always listening to its noise at night, but feeling extremely uneasy at such a time", to the same experience of treating all his softness to others without reservation, but also being ruthlessly abandoned, hurt and not believed, all of them are the portrayal of Luo Pinwen.
Zhong Menghong has always been concerned and committed to expressing family relations in contemporary Taiwan, and has focused on the mental health of family members in recent works. But his compassion is not Russian after all, nor is it a reunion of traditional Chinese aesthetics.
In previous works, he always let the family in the film finally find a "small reunion" in another part after paying the price of losing part. This time, for the mother and daughter who unfortunately fell but got back up from the bottom, they really pitied Xiang Xiangyu and arranged for more than one kind bodhisattva to escort them. Even in the international Taipei of the 2020 generation, it can also be like the "Story of a Small Town" of that year, "the realm of life is true, good, and beautiful, included here.". Several characters who appear on the opposite side of the protagonist are not negative characters in the usual sense, but let people see the "banal evil" and feel empathy: even if it is not real help, but not so harsh on others, will the world be better?
Zhong Menghong has previously portrayed men to love under the violence, and this time he told the story of "girls helping girls", which was particularly delicate and moving. The daughter who grew up overnight, the helper aunt who has a friendship for more than ten years, and the female doctor and female patients of the hospital. Following "Your Child Is Not Your Child", Wei Ruxuan, whose main business is a singer, sang again, and her healing song appeared exactly in the middle of the way, becoming a turning point, as if the finishing touch indicates that the protagonist will also be healed.
It is worth mentioning that these generations of actresses in reality have had common encounters in being trapped in family and spiritual problems. Among them, naturally the high-profile Jia Jingwen is the most. After winning the Golden Horse Film, she made no secret of thanking "the past experiences that you can search for at will." As a Taiwanese undergraduate student in Nortel's performance department, although she dropped out of school because of family changes, she admitted that she still benefited from the realism system here, so that she could successfully read and explosively transform the past experience stored in her brain during performance.
The Jury of the Golden Horse Awards also particularly affirmed Jia Jingwen's outbreak, and it was she who upgraded her acting skills to the mirror throw level to the mirror throw level of face change, which made Luo Pinwen's condition change and the entire plot real and credible.
Metaphor and self-conditioning
At the beginning of the film, the poster of "TramMania" is posted in a prominent position in the apartment. And there are large close-ups when the mother's illness has erupted several times, and it is not difficult to see that the protagonists of the two films also have the "holy foolishness" attribute of living in their own world and despite their kindness, they inevitably cause trouble. But after moving to the rental house, the poster with the bag was still revealed.
"TramMania" has allowed Akira Kurosawa to experience a box office fiasco, a partner breakup, a company bankruptcy, a discredited reputation, and a hopeless future. He even committed suicide by giving himself 21 knives — in the class at the beginning of "Waterfall," the teacher asked his classmates, "How many knives did Caesar get?" ”
Wei Ruxuan plays a sick friend, who is a gallery operator, obsessed with Degas and his horse racing map, while in reality, Degas, the youth suffered from eye disease, and suffered blindness and bankruptcy in his later years. Drawing out the horses and knights who have a goal in mind and a road under their feet is the most effective way for the painter to find the direction of his life.
In less than two years, the real Kurosawa Akira stepped out of the Waterloo of "TramMania", not only found his own direction, but also became a movie emperor with the same status through "Delsu Uzara", "Shadow Warrior" and "Chaos". Zhong Menghong let Luo Pinwen walk out of the disease in less than two years, and all aspects were plain but slightly gained, including love. At the end of the film, the real waterfall falls without any danger, and the family members can finally flow for a long time.
In the film, Luo Pinwen is not arranged to win back after the trough, but Zhong Dao may be taking the idol Kurosawa Akira himself. He has long been aware that the public does not understand and buy this movie, and before the Golden Horse Awards won a big victory, "Waterfall" was indeed criticized by film critics. In the end, "Waterfall" achieved word-of-mouth counterattack, like the words on her daughter's clothes, "Don't sweat it."