Yesterday we published "After a long fifteen years, finally another director used the right Tang Wei" and held a positive attitude towards "The Determination to Break Up". But Gray Wolf has the opposite view of the film, he believes that Park Chan-wook made a low-end failed version of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", exposing a huge gap with Ang Lee, and the use of Tang Wei is not as good as "Color, Ring".
Wen 丨 Gray Wolf
In the process of watching the film, there is an inexplicable torment; After reading it, it is unprecedentedly dull.
"The Determination to Break Up" brought me roughly the above impression. Even some iron fans can't help but express disappointment in the logic of this film. If it were not for park Chan-wook's proud camera scheduling, I believe that many viewers would not be able to survive these 140 minutes.
"The Determination to Break Up"
From the script, the story does not escape the traditional closed loop of Park Chan-wook, but the strange effect, foreshadowing setting and the energy and motivation of the characters are greatly reduced.
Like Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook is characterized by the creation of a connotative "cool piece". His ingenious camera scheduling must match the speed and rhythm of the strange story to create the maximum impact effect.
The story comes from the mountains to Haiti, and the camera scheduling also goes to the mountains and seas, and the two phases are agitated and completed. This is a routine operation from "Common Security Area" to "Miss"; However, "The Determination to Break Up" uses "Mountain" and "Sea" as the titles, and there are exquisite concepts in the air, and the specific feelings are not really effective.
This can be seen as a problem with the script, if the foundation of the past of the park-style "cool film" is the unity of spirit and flesh, then "The Determination to Break Up" can be regarded as "separation of spirit and flesh".
The scene where Zhang Haijun monitors Song Xulai is not a conventional concept of voyeurism, but a separate parallel coexistence - Zhang Haijun's body is still at this end of the telescope, but his soul has floated to Song Xulai's apartment, looking at it, and even teleporting to the field, taking over the soot that Song Xulai shook off during his sleep.
In this scene, Park Chan-wook's camera scheduling is characterized by overload, not only as a matter of showmanship, but also as an imbalance caused by the lack of story and characters.
Park Chan-wook's footage simulates the rhythm of a gust of wind, approaching the sleeping Song Xulai, who suddenly wakes up and stabs Zhang Hae-joon, who is monitoring with a telescope, this series of shots is rich and capable, especially at a high level.
But the push of the narrative, the creation of emotions, and the on-the-spot reactions of the actors have all discounted these carefully constructed scheduling.
In the case of a scene in which Jang Hae-joon interrogates Song Seok-lai, Park Chan-wook conducts a virtual image experiment of the four-square grid of solid and mirror surfaces, in a question-and-answer rhythm, the clarity of the two (and their mirror images) changes randomly like a wave, and even destroys the same clarity of the same mirror, achieving a certain "anti-physical" feature.
But this anti-physics has also become a "counter-narrative" in disguise — the scene explains some key information, such as Song Xulai's grandfather was a national hero of the year, but this information is obscured by gorgeous technology.
However, the camera and scene scheduling are ultimately skeletons, stories and characters are flesh, just as bone sense cannot replace the sense of flesh, the film assumes that Zhang Haijun's almost perverted desire for Song Xulai can never find a corresponding degree of carrier, and even Park Chan-wook cuts close to Song Xulai in the "spiritual and flesh separation" mode, and realizes Zhang Haijun's distant call and immersive "double presence", the real sense of this desire is weakened in reverse.
In terms of the treatment of desire in Western films, the most effective is the two modes, one is to transfer desire to the telescope as an instrument carrier (such as Kieslowski's "Love Short Film"); The other is to use the Scorpion Woman to lead the protagonist to a deadly vortex (as in many film noirs).
Both belong to the desire enhancement/amplification mode, but "The Determination to Break Up" seems to use a way of offsetting/neutralizing, that is, once Zhang Haijun, the subject of desire, really approaches Song Xulai and maintains a platonic love with the latter, the desire drive that runs through the story will also exist in name only.
People may say that the desire in "The Determination to Break Up" is not only Zhang Haijun's desire for Song Xulai, but also Song Xulai's desire for Zhang Haijun, but combined with the character's life, this is not so much desire as the sea of wandering fate and the spiritual need for the mountain that does not move.
Later in the film, when the truth is about to be revealed, Song Xulai takes Zhang Haijun up the mountain to worship his ancestors and completes a ceremony of "seeing his parents", which is like pure love.
But Song Xulai wants Zhang Haijun's heart (love), not seeing it as true love, but her ups and downs make her like a man with a sense of security (profession). When the murder case was discovered by the latter, she quickly lost this sense of security together. Breaking up with Zhang Haijun in the middle is a predestined thing, not even a "determination to break up", but more like a kind of "helplessness to escape".
Her uneasiness is the raging waves, which are directly reflected on the wallpaper of the waves in her room and the notebook covers of the same pattern; On the other hand, the wallpaper in the home is a square block and a solid rock formation.
The story told in "The Determination to Break Up" is actually the story of a knowable man (a solid mountain) who collapses in front of an unknowable woman (the bottomless sea).
But this story is by no means similar to Ecstasy, nor is it similar to Instinct. The former is a consumptive reproduction of a sick desire, while the latter is a typical snake and scorpion female puzzle.
Ecstasy
Jang Hae-joon is neither an inexhaustible detective like Stewart, nor is Song Seo-lai a snake and scorpion woman who kills people with an ice pick at the climax of sex, and they cannot be brought into the established equation of Western cinema (even if Park Chan-wook uses the inanimate viewpoints of dead fish, the dead, and the mobile phone to achieve psychoanalytic gaze), it cannot be equated with the corresponding characters.
From the appearance of the story, "The Determination to Break Up" is closer to Diao Yinan's "Daytime Fireworks"; But in terms of spiritual essence, this film is closer to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", which belongs to the desire combination of Li Mubai /Yu Jiaolong.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Li Mubai is the mountain, and the jade dragon is the sea, which is the most accurate expression of the "mountain/sea relationship" in Asian films so far, and the actor has also made outstanding contributions to it: Zhou Runfa's abdomen is thick and straight, and he has the temperament of not moving like a mountain; Zhang Ziyi is petite in appearance but has a large heart, with a deep-sea rage version of the unpredictable.
Li Mubai's confession before his death was a lie to Yu Xiulian at the moment of the landslide; And the Jade Jiaolong finally fell into the clouds, and it had the height and intensity that Song Xulai's funeral rites on the surface of the deep pit did not have.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
In terms of story setting, although the spiritual essence is similar, "The Determination to Break Up" does not have the same coherent strength and poetry as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", but reveals a variety of helpless stupidity.
After Zhang Haijun spies on a scene where Song Xulai sleeps in the car, Song Xulai finds him in the morning, and the resulting viral spread of "morning" makes the situation seem particularly childish - this is a man like a mountain.
"The Determination to Break Up"
In a scene of catching a suspect, it is a deliberate coincidence. In a scene where Zhang Haijun puts on an iron glove to subdue the suspect, Song Xulai happens to drive by and witnesses this "victory", which is obviously a boy's spiritual victory method with boastful significance, which is very superficial in terms of narrative dynamics.
This kind of superficiality is something that Ang Lee strictly rejects, otherwise it will not produce a mood; But it is also this kind of superficiality, which seems natural in the two leading actors Park Hae-il and Tang Wei.
This is naturally a kind of separation of spirit and flesh, at least the dislocation of the separation of flesh and bone. The emptiness in the play, complicated by superb audio-visual technology, can still create a fog effect in a half-concealed way, but in the actors, this emptiness problem cannot be completely obscured.
In terms of the proposition of "mountain /sea", the male protagonist of the film is suitable for actors such as Ken Takakura and Zhou Yunfa, who are immovable like mountains, and only such a background can bear the suffocating feeling of mountain collapse, which Park Hae-il naturally cannot do. But looking around the Korean film industry, there is no shortage of low-end versions such as Zhang Dongjian and Yuanbin available.
Tang Wei is a similar problem, her performance seems to be static, lacking tension. The reason is that, in addition to talent, there is also a lack of minimum motivation and desire to perform, or to stick to a certain vein of graphic photography. Her spiritual realm may stop at a pond, unable to have the width of the sea like Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi.
In this regard, people complain about their acting skills, which is not as accurate as spitting out their realm.
Ang Lee's "The Invisible of Great Desire" is a scene of close eye contact in the drift of bamboo fights, and it is only mentioned in this stroke. Such brushstrokes are not difficult to conceive, but there is no place in "The Determination to Break Up". The problem may lie in the script, but also in the fact that Park Hae-il and Tang Wei cannot stand the test of oversized close-ups, and in an ambiguous atmosphere, they maintain their own panorama.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
This also makes the charm of Song Xulai/Tang Wei very suspicious: Zhang Haijun did not "love" Song Xulai at the first sight, but on the domestic violence photos and CT pictures that were used as evidence after the crime (this is like the process of netizens identifying with their personal design after their banning in that year), which indirectly proves that Tang Wei's so-called charm comes from the bone phase and a sense of vulnerability of "I see pity", not anything else.
This also shows in disguise how great it is for Ang Lee to briefly revitalize Tang Wei as an actor (and the only time in her career), and even give her a sexual charm that she did not have in the first place.
"Color, Ring"
This ability, which comes from the subtleties of emotion and the gap between culture, is where Ang Lee is far superior to Park Chan-wook.
Therefore, in terms of the essence of this film and even the use of Tang Wei, Park Chan-wook really got the wrong object and gave up his own strengths to come to Ang Lee's home field.
Or, only when Jang Hae-joon deduces Song Seo-lai's plan to kill her husband twice according to his ability to repeat the case, there is a little bit of inspiration that Park Chan-wook is good at; The scene where Zhang Haijun is bitten to the middle finger by the turtles scattered all over the ground (symbolizing the simultaneous decline of his sexual ability) is also his most typical bad taste.
"The Determination to Break Up"
But there are very few such bridges, and in more pages, we see ambiguity without sparks, cooking, seeking Buddha, and love brains without crisis.
"The Determination to Break Up" is still a story of crime and punishment in itself, but sin is the original sin, and punishment is self-punishment. Song Xulai is a pessimist, so she will think that giving medicine to the elderly for euthanasia is a relief, and the same is true for herself; Zhang Haijun is a secularist, he does not understand the essence of marriage and love, but is just an inevitable spiritual derailment in a mediocre life, and his collapse can hardly be regarded as a kind of mountain collapse.
The excitement of the killing and the obsession with the unfinished case are the pathologies of the male protagonist, and sleep disorders are his symptoms. But this "unfinished" is nothing more than a tasteless mediation of life, and it is also contrary to the precise closed loop in Park Chan-wook's own story. Therefore, in terms of roles and actors, Shan and Hai, Jang Hae-joon and Song Seo-lai, Park Hae-il and Tang Wei, are neither matched nor in tune.
This is not the collapse of the mountain, the engulfment of the sea, but only the mini-pattern of the last play: the mountain is not a rock mass mountain, but a sand mountain that can be washed away at any time when it is dug out by the barrel; The sea is not the whole sea, but refers to the pit dug on the beach, a puddle of seawater.
"The Determination to Break Up" is probably such a sand mountain and a puddle in the sand pit, a wave passed, leaving nothing behind, like a face in the sand of the sea.