After another disastrous Valentine's Day slot, we finally ushered in the movie "Bouquet of Love" (hereinafter referred to as "Bouquet"). A year ago, when the film was released in Japan, it triggered a movie-going boom, winning the first place in Japanese moviegoers for six consecutive weeks, and was selected as the top ten movies of the year in Japan's "Movie Shunbao" that year. As far as the current performance in China is concerned, the film has carried the word of mouth of the influx of mass audiences, and the Douban score remains high, hovering at 8.7 points.
Poster for the movie "Bouquet of Love".
This is actually not surprising at all, because "Bouquet" is naturally a film without a threshold for watching movies, the theme is close to life, and the expression of delicate reality is exquisite. Without dramatic constraints, it is closer to the core of the universality of every relationship: two people, two hearts, how love is born, how love disappears.
In the view of the author of this article, the background of the romance of love is a growth proposition. If the hero and heroine are seen as different doppelgangers of the same person, then "Bouquet" is actually more like a coming-of-age movie than a love movie. It is about the results of different choices made by a person from graduation to work in the process of socialization.
Written by | Yancheng
01
Love and Freedom:
The post-adolescent self
Obviously, the first theme of "Bouquet" is love. A relationship that can be substituted for all young men and women, so much so that when you see the beginning, you think of the end. The best part is that people tend to think that the audience craves a fresh story, but in fact, they don't mind, and even crave to see what they already know:
The beginning of the green encounter, the night of a hit, the mutual reflection of the two hearts that do not fit in, is not unseen in "The Best Time" and "Anne Hall", the entanglement of the hot love period, the minutes are wonderful, nor have they been seen in "Lover" and "Five Hundred Days with Summer", and finally when love has become a thing of the past or even burdened, it is not seen in "Marriage Story" and "Love".
Stills from the movie "Marriage Story".
A more direct experience than the encounters in these films comes from the audience's own life, experiencing a relationship, or watching a bouquet of flowers bloom and wither. Just as the film semiotician Christian Metz believes that the screen is equivalent to a mirror, even if the audience's face is not directly reflected in "Bouquet", they still identify themselves according to the inner monologue of the male and female protagonists.
"Bouquet" is not a story of "the delay of the soldier, the can be said, the woman is delayed, not to be said". There are no negative people, no third parties, no natural disasters and car accidents, no parents who beat the Mandarin ducks (they only appear briefly and leave the scene quickly, leaving ripples of uncertain results). Stripped of these dramatizations and constraints of specific situations, "Bouquet" is closer to the core of the universality of every relationship: two people, two hearts, how love is born, and how love disappears.
To say "real" is not to say that "Bouquet" is as simple as a neorealist film that obscures causality and shows an undifferentiated everyday life. On the contrary, its plot arrangement, including many details that echo the emotions of the front and back, are highly dramatic. For example, the encounter between the male and female protagonists is under many coincidences: the night when the last train leaves, inadvertently confirmed similar movie preferences, two identical pairs of shoes, two expired tickets.
Stills from the movie "Bouquet of Love".
These coincidences and the protagonist's slightly exaggerated tone create an atmosphere called "destiny", which seems to be distorted, but to some extent close to the "essence of love" - no matter how much rationalization is laid out, the occurrence of true love is always considered an "accidental event".
No one will be calm, rational, and anticipated to "fall in love" with expectations.
Žižek has a book called "Events." An event, in his definition, is "something extraordinary takes place." Falling in love, in his eyes, is such an event:
"It's a big deal in life. Let's say you have a happy life. You're in luck. You have a job. You see your friends a lot. You're not in love. You sometimes have one-night stands. You party with friends in the evening. You can get drunk. You can go to all kinds of places. Suddenly, in a completely fortuitous situation, you fall down in the street and someone helps you up. He/she may be a young boy/girl. This is the love of your life. It's a completely fortuitous situation, but your life has changed. Nothing is the same anymore. Like they say, when you look back, you'll see that your life is preparing for this moment. One of the illusions of love is, 'I've been waiting for you all my life.' ’”
Someone who has only a cursory impression of Zizek may have a hard time imagining that he, the bearded stuttering academic rock king, could say such a love brain. Knowing that it is an "illusion", people in love will still not hesitate to pay for such an event.
There happens to be another popular Japanese film in 2021, which is Ryusuke Hamaguchi's "Chance and Imagination". In the film, Hamaguchi uses three stories between reality and surreality, with a sense of fate and imagination, to show the magic moments he captures in his daily life. Some of them are mixed with lust, some are a bit embarrassing nonsense, and some are even a bit of bizarre science fiction. "Bouquet" seems more simple and affable, but in a way the same thing: love is the magic moment in life. It is already a legend in the ordinary.
Stills from the movie "Chance and Imagination".
Another point I like about Bouquet is its discussion of the relationship between love and freedom. At the beginning of the film, the unknown male and female protagonists have a sharp heart to oppose the strange couple's act of listening to two headphones. Before they met and fell in love, they didn't understand why anyone would want to share incomplete music with each other – that's stupid! The tracks of the left and right channels are obviously broken! However, after falling in love with each other, they naturally became the men and women they once despised, sharing headphones.
This detail is wonderful, and the magic is that when it happens at the latter moment, no one even notices between the parties. Love is sharing, it is surrender, it is sacrifice, and most miraculously, it is a thoughtless, transcendental instinct. Žižek is about to speak again at this time(how he always speaks): "In love, it means giving up other forms of freedom, because love is already the most wonderful freedom." If you want both, then what you get is never true love. ”
The control group is the third appearance of the headphones in "Bouquet": the male and female protagonists who have lived together, in the face of the pressure of work, do not want to disturb each other, they choose to wear their own headphones again. This moment of silence is actually earth-shattering, and although well-intentioned, it marks that after this, they no longer blend into each other's lives without boundaries. In terms of composition, they also appeared independently of each other in the same space for the first time after they met.
At this moment, in fact, the second theme of the film is outlined, or rather, the underlying theme - the post-adolescent self.
02
A one-man movie:
Success Learning with Yang Dechang
Bouquet of Flowers is a two-person film and a one-man film.
The heroes and heroines of "Bouquet" have a very classic Bunqing-style acquaintance: they meet because of the amazing match they like each other (Oshii Mori, Gas Tank, Imamura Shohei), and they also fall in love because of the amazing match they despise each other (the stupid couple who shares headphones, the "pseudo-fans" who don't know Oshii Mori and like "The Shawshank Redemption"). Self-identity is always made up of love and hate, the other and the dimension of the self. Thus the hero and heroine identify each other as soulmates within the self-constructed lineage and quadrant. In a way, this is the equivalent of a self-portrait of Naxos – they are too similar, more like a person who is in love with himself.
The background of the romance of love is a growth proposition. If the hero and heroine are seen as different doppelgangers of the same person, then "Bouquet" is actually more like a coming-of-age movie than a love movie. It is about the results of different choices made by a person from graduation to work in the process of socialization.
If love is just a "ghost story" for many people who have never seen before, then growing up is actually a more universal experience. The film uses specific literary works and changes in the attitudes of the male and female protagonists to identify the impact of this socialization process on them: "Zelda's Dragon Fight", Natsuko Imamura's "Picnic", "The Juvenile Murder on Ridge Street"... What was once an important proof of their self-identity as a "literary youth" has turned into a switch, a dusty brush, and a self-consolation of "watching movies at any time" after entering society.
For students or young literary and artistic youth, this is actually a very representative shift: they used to tend to draw nourishment from the literary/film/game world, which was an inward fun. But graduation leads them to a real life, which requires them to have an outward orientation. They used to draw nourishment from the creator's second-hand experience material, but now they no longer know the world through other people's narratives, filters, perspectives, and translations.
Despite bidding farewell to the carefree ivory tower, the hero and heroine still make their own representative choices. The male protagonist, who once appeared even more determined and idealistic, decisively became a corporate employee after being crushed by the offer of "1,000 yen a painting". In contrast, the heroine still maintains her own life and fun - the film's description of her job is more vague, and you can only guess that it is probably a low-paying but idle job.
The film repeatedly depicts the two people's gradual separation in their outlook on life and fun, and what impressed me the most was the scene in the bookstore: the heroine was looking at literary and art books, and when she looked back, she saw the male protagonist watching "The Odds of Life", a literal success study.
The most tender thing about Bouquet, however, is that, despite the contrasts and even opposites, it doesn't harshly condemn young people for any kind of reaction to socialization. Although the heroine's choice is undoubtedly a more idealistic or close to their original intentions, and her gentleness, sensitivity and helplessness in her relationship also make her more like the "no-fault party" who has been disappointed, the film gives the male protagonist who makes unpleasant decisions more attention. Following the camera, you can see him staying up late, working overtime, socializing, nodding his head and being taught by his predecessors to "work hard for five years first, and then it will be easy after five years" - every newcomer to society has been painted the same pie.
There is also a driver in the film who only lives in the paraphrase. He is the same age as the male protagonist, from the same hometown, and works in the same company. On a work day, he threw all his goods into Tokyo Bay without warning, and when he was arrested, he said only one sentence: "I am not a laborer." The male protagonist stared at the news report, thoughtful.
"I am not a worker" does not mean opposing the value of the worker and standing against the worker. Rather, it may be a manifesto from the oppressed, alienated laborer. I don't want to be a screw because it's too hard to make a screw.
Therefore, "Bouquet" is not a popular post in the sub-group titled "What to do if my Wenqing male ticket only looks at success after graduation" and Gao Zan commented that "Do not wait for the group to join Fan Deng's reading". On the contrary, it gazes at everything in this bustling adult society with understanding, tenderness, and helplessness.
Just like a friend of mine, after graduation, she read "Fatigue Self-Help Manual" and "The Courage to Be Hated", which she may have scoffed at before. After watching "Bouquet of Flowers", she also said with empathy: Reading success science may not be a disillusionment moment that needs to be accused. Because for the person who continues to be in a fight with life, it may be a signal for help.
Reading success is easy to make people feel rude, and indulging in film literature like college students is also easy to make people feel childish. Those years of indulgence in film literature, in the eyes of some audiences, do not seem to be a symbol of naïve romance, the privilege of the era of innocence, but rather a consumerism and deliberate gesture, which immediately reflects the childish and fragile side before the blow of real capitalist society. As the netizen "SLJ's Douban" said in the short review: "Watch a Yang Dechang movie together, read a niche writer together, and even wear Converse to laugh together, this is ridiculous, this is not a mature romantic view, this is exactly a childish, strange, narcissistic performance." Don't put life and responsibility on the opposite side of romance, defending the surroundings, defending and facing real life is also a romantic performance. ”
Stills of the film "Yiyi" directed by Yang Dechang.
In fact, I think this friend is right, and I have already passed the age of thinking that movies are my whole world. But after watching "Bouquet of Flowers", I suddenly didn't bother to use Benjamin's aura to argue that literature and art may be a life-saving straw for people struggling in alienation, and I was equally lazy to attack some childishness and curiosity in a clear-cut manner, as if I had never been naïve and strange.
Looking at "Success Study" and "Yang Dechang", I felt more relaxed than ever, free from the pressure of trial and trial, because it seemed that no matter which book they chose, they could live well. In fact, I would like to say that the most idealistic aspect of "Bouquet" is not to let a couple break up kindly, but to make them all agree with their choices - how easy is it to be self-consistent in the violent growth? Who doesn't have a moment of gritting their teeth and pulling between "original intention" and "desire"? Who can take a certain path so decisively and firmly? It's just that Yutai Doi softens all this, so that a lot of sleepless regrets become a tacit wave of the next meeting. This is a statement of love, but also a statement of growth. How dashing, as Xu Zhimo said: "You have yours, I have mine, direction." ”
That's why Bouquet of Flowers finally gave me more relief than sadness. "Love like a bouquet" doesn't just mean that love, like a bouquet, will eventually pass away with the wind. It is also saying that even if it knows that it is about to die with the wind, it is still willing to stop at such beauty. This metaphor can also be replaced by youth, replaced by growth. It was an unforeseen, traumatic encounter (an aggregately unpredictable traumatic encounter, according to Zizek), but even if it was known early in the morning, there was no regret to repeat it.