Produced by | Tiger Sniff Youth Culture Group
Author | Cucumber soda
Caption | Movie "The Determination to Break Up"
This article was first published on the tiger sniff young content public account "That NG" (ID: huxiu4youth). Here, we present the face, stories and attitudes of today's young people.
At the end of Park Chan-wook's last film, "Miss", the perverted uncle who tortured Kim Min-hee for many years sighed:
"I'm just an old man who likes to listen to dirty stories."
Park Chan-wook fans will also make fun of him for this sentence — he is just an old man who likes to tell dirty stories.
Unexpectedly, Park Chan-wook, who won the "Best Director Award" in Cannes this time, is not dirty, and even voluntarily gave up the label of sex and violence. As he said, "The Determination to Break Up" is a clichéd and boring love story.
Evaluation is polarized.
For audiences who can't empathize, "The Determination to Break Up" is indeed old-fashioned and lengthy, and even unnecessary. A film critic said that the discomfort was broken: the process of watching, inexplicable suffering; After reading it, it is unprecedentedly dull.
"The movie smells of a middle-aged Korean man committing adultery to a foreign woman, and I was stared at uncomfortably and disgustingly during the whole process."
"Tang Wei can't do it, the script can't work, but Park Chan-wook's shots, transitions and editing are so imaginative that it's hard not to be impressed."
Some people also praised Park Chan-wook for once again constructing a dangerous and charming adult fairy tale to help Tang Wei "make a second debut":
"It doesn't seem to matter whether the story is good or bad, and like Kim Min-hee in "Miss", Tang Wei is the key to the establishment of this movie. Her mystery, beauty, fragility and danger are abstract and concrete, and her love is like a 'fog' floating and confused. The Cannes jury quickly put a palm leaf on the muse from the East. ”
The viewing threshold of this movie is not high or low, but extremely subjective fluctuations. As many people as there are people who love it, there are as many people as they don't understand it.
If you can walk into this fog of love set by Park Chan-wook, you will be shocked and speechless; On the contrary, it is also possible to feel that 2 hours were wasted out of thin air, listening to this old man tell an old martyrdom story.
(Spoilers included below)
When I watched the movie for the second time, I understood why the love between Song Xulai (Tang Wei) and Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) came to life.
As Park Chan-wook self-dissected, this is not a "standard love template" for moral policemen, and of course, such viewers will not like Park Chan-wook's style. Instead, it is an inexplicable, inexplicable adult mood—feelings outside of taboos, curiosity and seduction.
"'The Determination to Break Up' is an adult story, a love story, and a crime movie. But what I really want to emphasize is that this is a story about loss that any adult can relate to, and instead of seeing it as a real tragedy, I try to express it with subtlety, elegance, and humor. --Park Chan-wook
The story is not complicated. Xu Lai was a Chinese woman married to South Korea, and her husband died on a mountain climb.
Police officer Zhang Haijun summoned Xu Lai according to the procedure, and the woman in front of her was unusually light about her husband's death, and even accidentally laughed when she spoke the wrong Korean. This made the other police suspect that Xu Lai was the murderer.
An unusually naïve and cute, zhang Haijun was confused and moved, and gradually developed a good feeling for his suspect.
When he was amused by the woman's lame mistake, Zhang Haijun also laughed out of nowhere. After laughing, he realized the identity of "police-suspect" between the two, and quickly and alertly closed the corners of his mouth.
In the course of the investigation, Zhang Haijun discovered that her husband had been abusing her for a long time, and even tattooed her waist and abdomen to declare sovereignty.
The shame of watching others made Zhang Haijun have a subtle jealousy: Why should such a good woman commit herself to such a terrible man?
Xu Lai deliberately lured Zhang Haijun into his own world.
In the case of knowing that the other party is following him, he constantly sprinkles bait to make men more and more curious about themselves.
Xu Lai also cleverly cleared himself of his suspicion of murder.
The DNA in her husband's nails, she explained that she was the result of domestic violence, and even took the initiative to lift her skirt to show Zhang Haijun the scars. In order to let Zhang Haijun remember his own taste, he would spray perfume on his hand before the interrogation to attract the attention of the other party.
Sometimes she was naïve like a girl who didn't know what she was doing, and sometimes as cunning as a fox who had just come down the mountain. The same atmosphere reminds people of Wang Jiazhi's clumsiness in seducing Mr. Yi.
Zhang Haijun ghostly guarded the woman's downstairs, peering into her daily life with a telescope:
Every day I eat ice cream for dinner, immediately after eating a cigarette, like to follow the historical drama to learn Korean, and repeatedly copy a copy of the "Classic of Mountains and Seas". The audience follows the man's voyeuristic perspective, eager to teleport to the woman's side, just to catch the ash that immediately falls on her.
A dead woman from a foreign country collides with the two most difficult emotions of men, "curiosity" and "pity". I am afraid that these two are also the source of Tang Wei's own charm.
Men and women, but also police officers and suspects.
The man cooks her a plate of crappy Chinese egg fried rice, and she hypnotizes the insomniac man with the sound of breathing – she knows the man is falling in love with her because she did it on purpose.
Deliberately speaking the wrong Korean, deliberately leaking out of the horse's foot, deliberately laughing unconfidently. Naïve and mysterious, both deadly male imaginations of women wander in her. So much so that it interfered with Zhang Haijun's judgment, ignoring the opposition of his subordinates, and insisted on ruling out Xu Lai's suspicions.
"To Haijun, Xu Lai is like the waves on the sea, sometimes she is calm, sometimes violent, sometimes irresistible, sometimes she wraps you in her arms, but she is always fickle," the director explains the attraction between the two.
A middle-aged man who is already tired of marriage finds a new motivation for life in the mysterious female suspect. Like all cheating men, avoiding their wives in the middle of the night to text another woman.
The climactic moment of love patronizing Zhang Haijun also became the moment when his conceit as a criminal police officer collapsed.
The paper wrapper can't hold the fire. Zhang Haijun inadvertently cracked Xu Lai's forged alibi. The woman kills her husband, and she herself is reduced to an inferior policeman who violates professional ethics and is carried away by love.
"As a criminal policeman, I was so fascinated by a woman that I have now completely collapsed."
But he still chose to let go of the criminals who were right in front of him.
"Throw the mobile phone into the sea, the deeper the better, don't let people find it", a decisive admonition, Xu Lai regarded it as the most moving confession.
If the first half is Zhang Haijun's gaze and pursuit of Xu Lai, then the second half of the two have switched positions.
In order to escape this failure, Zhang Haijun moved to Lipu, a small seaside town where his wife worked, and unexpectedly met Xu Lai here. Not long after she lost her husband, she immediately married another unreliable man.
There is a little story that has been circulating on the Internet for a long time, and the logic of this movie is very similar: there is a pair of sisters attending their parents' funeral, and the sister meets a favorite boy at the funeral, and it is not long before the sister kills her sister, because she believes that only by holding another funeral can she meet the boy again.
Park Chan-wook put this paranoid disease on Tang Wei.
In order to see Zhang Haijun again, Xu Lai appeared at the scene of the murder of her second husband. This time Zhang Haijun couldn't bear it and desperately wanted to find evidence that Xu Lai had killed her husband, but unfortunately, this time her husband was really not killed by her own hands.
Xu Lai did fall in love with Zhang Haijun after he left. Even when she saw her second husband die in the pool, her first reaction was to remember that Zhang Haijun had said that he did not like the smell of blood, so she panicked and destroyed the crime scene.
Both men made their final plans. If you want to erase everything, you must make the witnesses disappear, and the witnesses of this strange story are each other.
Zhang Haijun thought that when he came to the cliff at the top of the mountain again, Xu Lai would push himself, the only person in the world who knew about it, off the cliff.
However, he was ready to accept death, but what he was waiting for was a hug from a woman.
Xu Lai chose a sad ending for himself.
If you can't have love, it's better to go to destruction. After handing over all the evidence and recordings to the man, she went to her death.
As the man told her: Throw the evidence deeper into the sea. She dug a pit by the beach and waited for the tide to rise, the bunker was filled and she was buried alive by the tide.
Tang Wei presented a death curtain in a very simple Zanyu style
Zhang Haijun, who hurried to come later, did not know that he was stepping on Xu Lai's corpse. The eerie romance of this movie is to become the other party's unsolved case, burying his own body as final evidence into the deepest part of the sea.
One person's love is over, and another person's love is beginning.
If the whole story can be summed up in one sentence, it is "the gain, struggle and loss of love".
The film was rated by the audience as the least simple Park Chan-wook work.
If you are familiar with this Korean director, you can recall "I Want Revenge", "Old Boy", "Kind Gold", "Bat", "Miss". The stories are different, but the themes are always inseparable from revenge, sex, violence and bloodshed.
And "The Determination to Break Up" hardly has any large-scale scenes.
But it is still a Park Chan-wook expression, even more viscous and uneasy.
How should the presence of desire be present? In Park Chan-wook's films, it is likely to be a silent voyeurism.
Orientals are ashamed of voyeurism itself, and the beginning of voyeurism is a secret writing of desire.
"The Determination to Break Up"
"Miss"
Voyeurism is constantly emphasized in movies.
Through exquisite camera scheduling and pushing and pulling, the audience experiences Zhang Haijun's desire ups and downs: people are still in the car, the soul has penetrated the distance of the telescope, and they are involved in the interior, sniffing the hair and breath of Xu Lai.
The moment Xu Lai raised his head, the man who was immersed in voyeuristic desire came back to his senses.
It doesn't take a line to set a blade-like piercing effect in the picture.
If you change a director and actor, if you are not careful, these shots will become obscene. This is also the special interest of Park Chan-wook, weird and provocative.
And voyeurism is not the gaze of a single male subject, and women are also involved in the process of voyeurism.
The morning Xu Lai discovered that Zhang Haijun was spying on him, he picked up his phone and took a photo of the voyeur for the voyeur.
Hunters are unaware of their prey.
Zhang Haijun hid behind Xu Lai to record, but he did not know that the record was Xu Lai's deliberate words for him to know: I want the heart of the criminal policeman, steal it from me.
In the second half, Xu Lai completely dominates the narrative, and we see the voyeurism of the female body: hovering around you, spying on you in the way you once spied on me.
I wore leather shoes today, why didn't I shave today and sleep badly?
When Zhang Haijun peeked at Xu Lai behind the lie detector, Xu Lai's gaze pierced him like a bullet.
In this film, there is not much exaggerated physical contact between men and women, but in this turn-based voyeurism, all expressions of lust are completed.
Zhang Haijun obviously did not eat sushi when he was with his wife, but took the initiative to order expensive sushi takeaway during the interrogation of Xu Lai. The fishy smell and rawness of sushi also seem to hint at the risk factor of this relationship between men and women.
Other images and details are proof of the presence of lust.
The melted white liquid of ice cream dripped down the table, the sound of breathing at the same frequency during sleep, the lipstick and mints from the coat, the constant positive and negative close-ups of lips and eyes, the tender pomegranate with the hands broken, and the old turtle symbolizing reproductive ability.
In the transition shot of Park Chan-wook's showmanship, there are warm hands and unsettling blood.
The film allowed him to rein in the rhythm of the past and express the most ostentatious parts of his work in a new way.
Park Chan-wook opted for a more orientalized and implicit expression. The image of "mountains and seas" in the movie spreads from wallpaper, notebooks, and mobile phone cases to Xu Lai's final death.
The exotic Xu Lai is a wandering sea, with a desire for stable mountains, which is also the beginning of her tragedy. She kept searching for mountains and eventually died in the sea. And the unbreakable mountain (man) will be completely destroyed by the unpredictable sea (woman) and will collapse.
But can this movie really be called a masterpiece? The answer is subjective, like its Douban score is quietly declining.
Even among fans, the likes and dislikes of this movie are very different. People who say it's good can praise it in a hundred ways; People who don't like it can pick out a hundred faults.
But to be sure, this is not a perfect Park Chan-wook story. Even after watching it, I didn't feel the slightest happiness of the past, and my chest was like a big mountain.
While Park Chan-wook is busy focusing on the ever-changing Tang Wei, he seems to have lost his personal narrative that he is best at. And Tang Wei only needs to stand in front of the camera to perform himself naturally, and does not do much to help the narrative.
A comment from Douban netizens is very interesting:
"We can reap: long-haired soup only, short-hair soup only, flower skirt soup only, fairy skirt soup only, plain face soup only, full makeup soup only, soft sister soup only, sneering soup only, want me to be beautiful and want me to kill people without blinking, tang wei, give me dreams and give me tang wei who will wake up soon." There is no determination to break up, it is the determination of men to fall in love with Tang Wei. ”
Park Chan-wook, who is no longer "dirty", is obsessed with Tang Wei, but he can't tell an ordinary love story that convinces all audiences, which may be the biggest regret of this movie, and it is also the fundamental reason why it is compared with "Color, Ring" and still cannot replace the latter.
We will remember Xu Lai's tragic and strange death ceremony, but it is still Wang Jiazhi's story that is more memorable.
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