◎Luanchuan
The young Wu Yuenu lay by the small window of the burrow to watch the fireworks that suddenly bloomed outside. Tang Niansheng asked her from the side, "Why don't you go to the top floor to see?" Wu Yuenu said: "It's very good here, because when you go to the top floor, the fireworks may have been finished, and I have missed it several times before." ”
In a flowing life, the calculation of good times and auspicious times may only be full of mountains and rivers. People always want to grasp the luck of the times, but in fact, they are often trying in vain to catch up with the times. The unlucky person gradually learns to be obedient, puts away expectations, and buries his head in his own life. "Good birthday auspicious time" has gradually become a vague and distant cliché, lying peacefully in the yellow calendar, and hindsightly confirming some specious superstitions.
As the calendar flips into the future, people take one step at a time, with the old lesson: the unknown knows death. Storytellers, on the other hand, do the opposite, and according to Benjamin, they have the "gift of going back to the whole of life," and death is an important theme. "Good Birthday" is such a short story-telling drama: when life is about to be cut off, how will a person reunite with his past? Seven episodes of seven stories, seven deaths, in terms of plot style, most of them are absurd or black, but everywhere conveys a realistic outlook on life: "In the end, it is difficult to be peaceful" is the injustice that everyone has, and impermanence is the norm of life.
The sequential unfolding of the entire episode is a process of calling back the calendar. In a place called Taiping City, clockwise flowing physical timelines intersect with counterclockwise flowing narrative timelines at Wu Yuenü's death. In the seventh story, the middle-aged Wu Yuenu is engaged in the funeral business, and is involved in a car accident on the way to transport a paper-tied sailboat, and becomes a guest under the sail. At the time of death, the fragments of past lives inexplicably flash back, and those familiar or strangers who have come and gone and have had various intersections with her become the protagonists of the first six death stories, entering the sail city at the end of their lives.
Wu Yuenü did not fully understand their stories, but only re-encountered them under the sails of the ship, and then watched them re-encounter with their past. In the six stories, when the men and women who step on the line of life and death look back at the encounter in their lives, some people are indignant, some people have nothing to say, some people are unwilling to die, some people feel relieved, some people defend themselves, and the only person who died of suicide finally did not appear in Fancheng, probably because he felt that his life was too bad to meet again.
In addition to the time clues, the interior of each story is divided into two spaces by Taiping City and Fancheng. Trying to live in Taiping City, everyone is a small person, after death to Fancheng, only to know that each has its own grievances or misfortunes, every piece is worth telling. Taiping City is the Taiping City of all people, a person's life and old illness can not find a place on its territory, but Fancheng magnifies a person's memory, and the grievances accumulated by people during their lives become the protagonist here.
Two time threads intertwine with two spatial worlds to form the complex narrative of the seven-episode shorts. The audience can do some reasoning according to Tu Suoji, and the clues may be the names of the people, the plot, or the details of the props, such as a dress of the same color, such as a car with a sense of age. This is a "fun" guessing game, and its mystery is a genealogy of the relationship between the sentient beings in Taiping City: under what circumstances did those who finally entered Fancheng intrude into Wu Yuenü's life? Do their respective stories intersect? In these relationships, there is love and disappointment; there are misunderstandings and accidents; there are carelessness and deliberateness; there is weak hope and utter despair. These subtle black and whites do not affect a grand history, but in an era without heroic epics, this is only the whole possibility of ordinary people's lives.
But rather than being a surreal suspense story or a display of Mindi customs, "Good Birthday" is more of a serious death experiment. In this series of stories, some people die of old age, some people die of illness, some people are killed, some people commit suicide, some people die of disasters... Death experiments probe the appearance of various kinds of death in order to look back at life: the extent to which different deaths will influence the living's decisions about their own present lives. The results of the experiment were presented in Fancheng, where the old and dead could arrange every detail of their funerals; the dead were still greedy; the suicides could not reconcile with themselves; the sick and dead young children were not happy or sad, but just blindly danced tap dance...
Therefore, although this short drama has some strange and chaotic colors, it is actually completely secularist and materialistic. The people in the story, whether in Taiping City or Fancheng, never thought about the problem of future lives or past lives. The death experiment, as a truncation of life, does not lead time to another world, but only illuminates people's experiences in life more clearly. In the final scene of the last story, the other characters have withdrawn, only the young Wu Yuenu and the middle-aged Wu Yuenu meet in Fancheng. When the emotions of the years turn into double tears, the audience may understand that a person's comfort can always only be himself.