What can most touch overseas audiences and overseas Chinese in "Don't Tell Her" is not the cultural difference in the film, but a common emotion, that is, love, even if such love is full of Chinese characteristics, it can also break the gap between region and culture, because love can be read and understood by anyone.
"Don't Tell Her" is a small and medium-cost realist literary work, and it is also a family film that shows the collision of Chinese and Western cultures. The film is based on the real experience of Chinese-American director Wang Ziyi, telling the story of a large Chinese family in the United States, where grandma was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, but the family reached a consensus to choose to hide grandma, and the family in a foreign country rushed back to their hometown in northeast China, and everyone used the name of a wedding to see the last side of grandma. Quite dramatically, Billie, a granddaughter who grew up in the United States and has always had a good relationship with her grandmother, is still unbearable in the face of seemingly tacit family lies, and she intends to tell the truth to her grandmother, and the emotional conflict between the family is about to erupt.
After the film premiered in Los Angeles in June 2019, it received excellent word-of-mouth, and in the ongoing awards season, it received 13 awards and nominations including the Golden Globe Award, the British Academy Film Award, the American Critics' Choice Film Award, etc. Actress Okafina became the first Asian film queen of the Golden Globe Awards with this film.
The film's entry into the foreign cultural difference is "whether to tell her", but in fact, the script does not let the characters argue over the right and wrong of the lie for too long, nor does it take the right position as the final result. The director cleverly uses humorous plots to dissolve the weight of life brought about by cancer and dying farewell, avoids using sensationalism and emotion to envelop the audience, and puts more thinking back into Billie herself. On the one hand, emotions drove Billie to accompany her grandmother on her last journey, and on the other hand, the bottlenecks in her life forced her to re-examine herself, recall the Bourgeois American air she breathed, and look back at the Chinese Changchun that was related to her.
Today, we do not discuss this film from the perspective of Chinese and Western cultural differences, but from the perspective of film criticism, from the three aspects of the film's lie structure, performance texture and "table" space field, to analyze why as a small production film with family ethics themes, plain narrative methods and simple style, "Don't Tell Her" can achieve such great response and achievements.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > a different narrative of multiple lie structures</h1>
It is worth mentioning that "Don't Tell Her" is the "favorite film of 2019" selected by director Ang Lee, who also has a Chinese identity, in the "2019 Directors' Choice" of Variety magazine in the United States.
The film opens with Grandma talking to her granddaughter Billie in the hospital waiting area, and within a few minutes, she throws the "result" of the story to the viewer, so that the viewer, like the characters in the film, faces the problem of "how to catch" the result. And when Billie's family returns to their hometown, what needs to be caught is a deeper cultural barrier.
If "Don't Tell Her" is a core event of a lie, then the whole film is always hovering in the whirlpool of events, and strives to present the dramatic sparks stirred up by the whirlpool at the boundary of the events. The film sets up a narrative structure built by multiple lies, from "Grandma's body is normal" as the beginning of the lie, "Sun Zi Haohao's marriage" as the second grafted lie, the family wedding scene is like a life and death field, the wedding set is more like a high wall of lies built by the whole family, seemingly solid and beautiful, in fact, like plastic foam, it cannot withstand any emotional substantive thrust.
The "return of the people back home" around the above two premises more vividly runs the action of lies through to the end, meets and says goodbye, pretends that everything is okay, and then each of them is sad. The Easter egg after the end of the film seems to immediately overturn the "result" thrown at the beginning of the entire film, the real prototype of the grandmother is still alive after six years of cancer, for the family and even the viewer, long before the beginning of the film, this lie has long been destroyed by the solid reality, the film thus presents a hypothesized truth that continues with the lie.
The oriental daily life of the film, such as massage cupping therapy, weeping funerals, and collective sacrifices during sacrifices, undoubtedly creates visual and psychological obstacles to the Billie family returning from the West, and through Billy's mouth, it is the loneliness of being far away in a foreign country, the drawbacks of cultural integration, and the illusion of foreign prosperity.
This cultural mutual exclusion is also reflected in the use of the "Tai Chi Regimen". Similar to Ang Lee's debut novel "Push hand", "Tai Chi" is not only the most effective way to lift the oriental attributes, but also acts as the most important glue during the run-in period of Billie's relationship with Grandma.
The lie has not been punctured, Grandma still maintains confidence in the concept of life at the critical moment of life and death, she actively exercises her body, and tries to teach Billie the way of dealing with the world for many years, and Billie has been receiving teaching information from her father from the external environment in addition to completing the performance under the framework of lies, opening up the joints of the body from top to bottom, in fact, it shows that it is clear to open up the intergenerational communication barrier, and more clearly and concretely highlights the heart string of the lie that lies between the two people and even between people.
In my opinion, compared with the young directors in China, the Chinese and female identity of director Wang Ziyi has made her avoid the creative ideas of bitterness and hatred, and choose to present a universal family story in a very light and pleasant way, colliding with disgust, grievance and uneasiness from a kind of awkward cramping, complaining about each other's different love words, and rising up the family-style fireworks.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > a constantly upgraded "table" space field</h1>
The film makes particularly careful use of space to make plot arrangements and symbolisms. Shortly after the opening scene, the bird who mistakenly enters Billie's bedroom, like the embodiment of Billie at that moment, she first receives a letter of "failed application for the Guggenheim Award", and then learns from her father about her grandmother's worrisome illness, what kind of strange journey she is about to embark on, and what the future holds after Billie's resignation, it is this double unknown that makes the "dramatic pressure" of the film continue to accumulate.
In the middle of the film, the bird appears again in the hotel room where Billie is staying, after Billie experiences getting along with her family after returning to her hometown, her mood is still entangled and complicated, but she seems to have a deeper individual thinking about family concepts and family relationships, and the action of "waking up" gradually becomes a relatively stable state, facing a family environment outside the door, it seems that the sense of distance is the only inner truth that can be felt.
In my opinion, similar to Ang Lee's "Eating Men and Women" and "Wedding Feast", several important table scenes in the film "Don't Tell Her" are also talked about, behind the round tables are their own angular positions and statements, and the individual values of the West and the collectivist family concept of the East are constantly in conflict.
It is worth mentioning that the table scene at the beginning of the film takes place at home, on the issue of "how long has Sun Zi Haohao and his girlfriend known", the grandmother as the "big parent" also plays the role of the creator of the lie, and the next few scenes also confirm the inheritance of the lie in disguise and the daily compulsion, it seems that the round table meal that began with the lie is about to open a wider curtain, and the hard stone of swallowing and digesting the lie is swallowed and digested by itself around the table.
The ensuing meal takes place in a larger commercial hotel, where the family engages in a verbal contest around China and the West about "material life, national identity, family concepts", etc., everyone uncovers each other's false wounds, and then disperses back to the nest, accompanied by Grandma's coughing in the direction of the screen and Billie showing the black marks left by cupping to the screen, this fierce confrontation scene finally ends in the dark field of the wonderful, trance and uneasy picture.
After that, the table scene took place at a more open wedding scene, which greatly broadened the potential of spatial narrative, the clash of ethical cultures between the East and the West began to bombard in turn, the concept of "home" with different opinions, the sensational scene with a sense of comedy, the insiders and witnesses of lies poured in in, accompanied by songs and laughter, the family neatly ended the lies, and a long farce finally came to an end.
The way of photography at the dinner table actually corresponds to the continuous activation of emotions, from the initial entanglement of lies and the sense of cultural impact, to the later identification with the traditional Chinese concept of family, but the choice of camera position in the center and its fixation actually refer to China's family-centered culture - the interactive function of photography and emotion has always been skillfully used.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the formal sense of character setting and performance</h1>
If emotion is a sharp weapon to break down the barriers of Chinese and Western cultures, then the vivid performance of the group portrait once made the "exotic feeling" of the film easily land. "Don't Tell Her" won the Golden Globe Award, the British Academy Film Award, the Sundance Film Festival, the American Independent Spirit Award and other awards nominations, and helped Okafina win the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in the Music Category, and Zhao Shuzhen, who played the grandmother, broke the nomination record of Chinese actresses at the Hollywood Film Awards.
The differences in the way different actors perform, and the differences in the identities of the characters set by the story, form a seamlessly linked emotional state. In particular, the tension between Grandma's bravado and clarity and Billy's gloom and loss is more accurately based on the state of the characters who are on the front or back of the "truth", rather than staying on the obvious age and intergenerational gulf, and the interaction of this performance subverts the values and standard rhetoric of life and death in the East and West.
Other actors have also completed their own functional role tasks, and the group portrait scheduling from beginning to end in the film continues to expand the level and difficulty of the performance, as a participant in the lie, it is also a performance practitioner of the lie role. Although Haohao's Japanese girlfriend has an essential language barrier, she also has to participate in this grand lie performance. On the contrary, the role setting of "Grandpa Li" has a more special meaning, he is old and deaf, ignores the disputes of the family, intentionally or unintentionally withdraws from the dinner table, and truly focuses on being an "outsider" outside the war with the Families of the East and the West.
In the ever-changing performance time and space, in the tense or lax trial of covering up the truth, especially in the street scenes of "collective action" that appear many times, the actors forge a strong absurdity and comedy in the form.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > summary</h1>
Although "Don't Tell Her" inherits Ang Lee's cross-cultural identity attributes and family issues, compared with the rather critical nature of Ang Lee's films, it eventually follows the route of warm pulse all the way to the end of love, but this "love direction" is not only the insoluble deadlock between Chinese and Western cultures, but also the only reconciliation action that can be made within each family after a short escape from cultural difficulties.
Life becomes precious because of the time limit, we fear life, we cherish life, we can not reverse life after all. In the face of this ultimate test, whether to face it calmly or in the dark, the concepts of China and the West are completely opposed. From this point of view, the film makes full use of technical means such as the structure of lies, the texture of performance and the "dining table" space field, showing the stories of family members under traditional Chinese families who maliciously conceal the stories of their elders suffering from diseases.
Even if we have been wandering overseas for decades, what remains unchanged is the eternal affection, and the heavy love has turned into the most white lie, accompanying us and our relatives and supporting us to go on.
#心晴计划 #