The 1990s were an era of constant change on the continent. With the end of the planned economy, Chinese mainland is gradually returning to a normal commercial society, and this epoch-making change has quietly affected the lives of ordinary people.
Especially in the northeast region at that time, under this economic reform, lost the glory of the old industrial base, and many workers were unemployed and laid off, and had to find another way out. Qin Yan, the heroine of the movie "Durian Fluttering", is a typical example of a generation that grew up in this context.
At that time, Hong Kong, China, as an economic center, attracted countless "Beigu" to come here. In order to survive, in order to support their families, they went forward and did not hesitate, and Ah Yan was one of them. The 21-year-old Ah Yan is a northeastern girl who studied Peking Opera and practiced kung fu for eight years, but she could not find a way out of development in her hometown, so she decided to leave the northeast and go to Hong Kong alone.
In this way, a two-way visa brought Ah Yan to Hong Kong, where his population was full of gold, and also shifted our attention to the girl's path of struggle. Sadly, the story is far from being as inspirational as we might think. When she first arrived, the helpless Ah Yan actually embarked on a road of no return to selling her flesh.
As a unique filmmaker, Chen Guo is known as a "grassroots director" in the industry. His work often does not show the fierce confrontation of reality, but it always touches people with a nuanced insight into the general public. Just as in the film "Durian Fluttering", the wind and dust women no longer seem to be a special group lurking in the gray area, they are more like the masses with ordinary occupations.
For a long time, mainstream society has been secretive about the marginalized group of "prostitutes", even full of contempt and hostility, but it has rarely really paid attention to the spiritual world and practical needs of this group. Chen Guo's film is not only a documentary about the wind and dust woman, but also a broad sense of witnessing the changes and differences between Hong Kong and mainland China in the new era.
Have we all done something forced to survive? Forced to choose a career you don't like, or spend your life with someone you don't love? There is a sentence in the novel "The Three-Body Problem":
"We're all worms in the gutter, but someone still has to look up at the stars."
No matter how unsatisfactory life is, people are always willing to live for hope. In the film "Durian Fluttering", Because Ah Yan could not get a living in the northeast, she took a three-month tourist visa and went south to Hong Kong, becoming a secret prostitute, wandering between small hotels and bathrooms, serving men of different ages and occupations.
In the shot, Ah Yan follows the pimps every day between the tea restaurant in Hong Kong and the horse sill. Those gray, narrow streets and alleys, simple, low houses also contrast with Ah Yan's dirty life and gray state of mind. Before Ah Yan could comprehend the prosperity of Hong Kong, she took the lead in adapting to the fast-paced life here.
In order to make more money, Ah Yan did not give himself any chance to rest, even eating is chewing and devouring, just like Lao She's camel Xiangzi, they are the most humble people at the bottom, just to live, they have exhausted all their strength.
Pack your backpack, arrive at the hotel, enter the house with your bathrobe, undress and bathe your guests. In this process, Ah Yan skillfully chatted with guests, looked for topics, asked for tips, and did not look at all like she had only worked for more than a month. She is like an efficient machine, tirelessly cycling back and forth between pick-ups and waits every day.
Ah Yan has no friends in Hong Kong, only a few occasional idle words of peers, everyone will gather together in the evening, talk about how many guests were received today, how many tips were taken, whether they met strange guests, and sometimes left and said politely to each other: Introduce customers to each other in the future, take care of each other. But in fact, the women in this industry are all women from the south of the world, forced to rush for life, pity and care for each other, often just a way of communication.
In the vast Hong Kong, like Ah Yan, there are countless small people who live like ants, including the only friend Ah Yan has met in Hong Kong - Ah Fen. In the back alley of Mong Kok Bowl Lane, where she went back and forth to her dormitory and picked up customers, Ah Yan met a little girl named Ah Fen.
Because his father was doing business in Hong Kong, ah fen's family smuggled into Hong Kong en masse, and the family was crammed into a small room of less than ten square meters. It was said to be in business, but Affen's disabled father just dragged one leg and set up a stall outside. Carrying a small box out the door every day, carrying it home at sunset. Ah Fen, along with his mother and sister, helped wash the dishes in the back alley restaurant, day after day.
The life of an adult is so simple to humble, in addition to being crushed by life, it is on the way to being crushed. Life will not sympathize with what happened to you. The only thing to be thankful for is to meet someone who can look at each other and smile.
Although life is hard enough, in the midst of this hardship, there is still a touching friendship that allows us to see a glimmer of humanity. For example, in order to protect Ah Fen, Ah Yan would rather stand up and expose herself to the police than let her be sent back to Shenzhen. At that time, there were only a few days left before she left Hong Kong.
For this simple little girl in front of her, Ah Yan is very envious of her tenacity and happy state of mind under the grinding of life. In her last days, she washed the dishes for Ah Fen and talked to her. The same fallen man at the end of the world, similar encounters allowed the two to establish a rare friendship and trust. In her days in Hong Kong, countless benefactors have asked about Ah Yan's origins, and she told different people that she was from Hunan, Sichuan, Xinjiang, Shanghai... I almost reported the Chinese place names over and over again, but I opened my heart to Ah Fen.
Three months flew by in the blink of an eye. Ah Yan's two-way visa has also arrived. On the day before leaving, she picked up a total of 38 guests. Until her last day out of Hong Kong, she didn't even bother to take advantage of the company's benefits: four days off a month and a day trip to Ocean Park.
As soon as the camera turns, Ah Yan returns to the small northeast town where she was born and raised, and the film also enters the second half. Without the lights of Hong Kong, the high-rise buildings, snow-covered streets and calm dance classrooms have stabilized the film's shots.
Ah Yan, who left Hong Kong, became a meek and cheerful ordinary girl, she quarreled with her parents, greeted relatives and friends, bravely divorced her husband who looked like a god, and went to see classmates who had not been seen for a long time. Returning to such a living atmosphere made Ah Yan feel that those three months in Hong Kong were just a dream. It's just that for Ah Yan, after experiencing a southern prosperity, everything in the small town has long been wrong.
Her parents took the money that Ah Yan earned from her body to feast on relatives and friends, and everyone thought that Ah Yan was doing business outside and making a fortune. In the isolated northeast snow town, simple people still believe in the prosperity and gold of the southern cities. For her real work, Ah Yan has always been difficult to say. When relatives wanted her to return to the south with her cousin to work, she looked embarrassed and did not know how to refuse.
In Ah Yan's view, this cousin who studied dance is her former self, so she does not want to see her sister repeat the same mistakes. But this is not the case. As Ah Yan sent away her former friends who used to read and rehearse together, her cousin has also taken a car to Shenzhen. Ah Yan put on her costume again and sang Peking Opera at the party in the small town.
When you are forced by life to have no way out, it is better to go back to your youth and recall the innocence and innocence of the past.
In the second half of the film, Chen Guo uses more long shots to deliberately reproduce Ah Yan's life in different environments in the north and south from the details of life such as bathing and eating.
Regarding bathing, this incident was once a nightmare for Ah Yan during her time in Hong Kong. Because of the "nature of her work", she had to take a shower dozens of times a day, serving different guests until her hands and feet were all broken and numb. In Hong Kong, bathing is tedious, numb and exhausting for Ah Yan.
In the cold northeast hometown, bathing means a kind of relaxation and enjoyment for Ah Yan. In the film, she lies in the bathtub, feeling the hot water flowing through the skin of her body, and Wu Zi hums and sings Peking Opera. At this moment, the bath returns to a private enjoyment, a spiritual pleasure, a hug of the self.
In addition, the film also gives a comparison of the dinner scenes. In Hong Kong, Ah Yan has hardly eaten a serious meal. Every time, in addition to busy work, I chewed on a box lunch box, hurriedly dealt with it, even if it was against the toilet door, I ate it recklessly. But even so, she often gets halfway through the meal and is called to pick up customers, and when she comes back, she continues to eat some scraps.
In the south, eating and bathing are just a survival necessity for Ah Yan. It was not until the return to the northeast that the meal became more ritualistic, and it also returned to a form of communication between family members and a display of human feelings between relatives and friends. This network of human feelings is somewhat ironic, because it requires Ah Yan to re-establish decency in the form of capital in her hometown by selling her dignity in a strange place.
Where does Ah Yan go after this? Whether she will continue to go south to earn a living, we do not know. But the meaning of the film itself is self-evident. We are all just a grain of sand in the torrent of history, driven by hope and disappointment in life. Only when a person does not have to worry about survival and food and clothing can he have the strength to pursue dignity.
In the film, Chen Guo successfully created a real and kind image of a dusty woman for us. In this little-known gray area, a door is opened, allowing us to see the joys and sorrows in their stories, and to see the growth and survival of ordinary girls.
It has to be mentioned that durian, the "king of fruits", which is longer than the south, appears many times in the film. After returning to the small town, Ah Yan received a durian sent by Ah Fen from Shenzhen during the Spring Festival.
In the entire film, durian appears three times, which actually has a deep metaphorical meaning. Durian first appeared when a pimp was injured by a sneak attack. It can be seen that durian can be a delicacy on the table or a weapon that hurts people. Just as Hong Kong was both a paradise for the rich and a land of fire and water that countless poor people were struggling with.
The durian appeared for the second time on Affen's birthday, and the father bought the durian that the family had never seen before to celebrate the daughter's birthday; the wife and daughter initially rejected the fruit, but the father told the family about the various benefits of durian, trying to make the family accept and love the fruit. In this scene, durian actually symbolizes a desire of mainland migrant workers to try to integrate into Hong Kong.
The third appearance of durian is after Ah Yan returned to his hometown, Ah Fen sent a durian as a New Year's gift, which opened the eyes of Ah Yan's relatives and friends in his hometown. Unfortunately, the "king of fruits" of the southerners went to the north, but was not accepted because of its ugly and hard shell. Therefore, durian here is also a symbol of the difference between the mainland and Hong Kong.
Of course, the most moving metaphor of durian is actually about life. In Ah Yan's time, durian symbolized people's yearning for money, although it was smelly and hard, but because of its value, people were still willing to spend a lot of effort to split it, pinch their noses and taste it. Just like in the story, those who can't resist the temptation of money, batch after batch of figures go south.
END.
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