After Wang Tong, Hou Xiaoxian, Yang Dechang, Cai Mingliang and other new Taiwanese film stars, Zhong Menghong is one of the important and unique filmmakers in Taiwan. Importantly, it means that although the number of works he directed and supervised is small, it is enough to constitute a suite of dialogue with the creations of his predecessors, so that the audience can see the evolution of the relationship between family and society, individuals and the times in Taiwanese films, and each one has been affirmed by the Golden Horse Awards, Academy Awards and other influential film awards in the Chinese film industry. Unique, that is, engaged in more than ten years of advertising and MV shooting, people to forty to officially shoot movies, but also his own works of screenwriters and photographers, life experience allows him to use the film to examine the truth of life, both mature and clear theme appeals, but also out of the conventional image style.
▍Taiwanese director Zhong Menghong
In his critically acclaimed new work, "The Sun Shines", the dark clouds chase the hot sun, the dark night drives out the day, and a native family faces disintegration, but after the rainstorm, the warm sun still shines on the black earth. The cruel jungle seems to bloom a flower of warmth, but the cold wind strikes a chill. The neglectful father in the film gradually realizes his responsibility, in order to destroy the foundation and life of the other family, cutting off the external force that pulls his family to the abyss, but his behavior is not determined by tit-for-tat or the inherent evil of human nature, but the result of the rupture of the interpersonal emotional communication mode at the social level and the shrinking social function of the family - the family or individual huddled in various buildings is self-contained, which is the basic landscape of many cities today.
The resulting father figure in "Sunshine" is far from the male majesty or shouldering the burden of the head of the family in the traditional cognition, and the parent-child relationship led by the father and related to the two deaths is an extended discussion of unfinished topics such as family and family affection in films such as "Doctor", "The Fourth Painting", "Lost Soul", and "All the Way to the Wind". Although Zhong Menghong has given his father, who is often aphasian or even simply absent in Taiwanese movies, the communication area within the family is extremely narrow, reminding the audience of the line in "Big Buddha Plus" he supervised - "It is now the space age, people can take a spaceship to the moon, but they can never explore people's inner universe" - even between relatives.
▍ Stills of "Sunshine"
The paternity that accompanies death
In 2006, Zhong Menghong released his film debut documentary "Doctor". Wen Biqian, a Chinese doctor who works at a children's clinic in Miami, treats a 12-year-old boy from Peru when he remembers hanging himself a few years ago and fixing his life on his 13-year-old son Felix. The Peruvian boy, like Felix, is a precocious teenager who loves painting, but a terminally ill man who longs to live, a physically fit and longs to die—Felix not only shows his ideal grave and funerary items in front of his family, but also hides them from attempting suicide.
With the open concept of family education in the United States, Mr. and Mrs. Wen Biqian get along with Felix and their daughter, and the two fully respect the personality of their children and give them independent and free space for growth. The parent-child relationship presented in the family video tape is very harmonious, the family of four often talks and laughs, and Felix is like a lively and sensible little adult. For Felix's imagination of death, the two parents only see it as a manifestation of his precocious puberty, and when they learn that he has tried suicide, they only advise their son not to take similar risks again, and do not delve into the inner world hidden behind Felix's smiling face. During Wen Biqian's parents coming to the United States from their hometown in Taiwan to reunite with them, Felix hid in a closet to end his life.
Under the restrained lens of Zhong Menghong, there is no judgment on the American family model, and the mood of Wen Biqian and his wife in recalling their beloved son is also very calm, and they seem to have come out of sadness. But in fact, guilt and self-blame fill the interview process. Wen Biqian tried to find the key to open the door of Felix's gloomy heart through video tapes, her son's paintings and other relics, but she was unsuccessful.
This seemingly unsolvable mystery also influenced Zhong Menghong's subsequent creations, allowing him to continue to explore the relationship between father and son and the meaning of family existence by decoding the secrets hidden in the heart between family members.
Felix's painting depicting his own genital organs in "Doctor" serves as the second painting of the boy Xiaoxiang in "The Fourth Painting", which points to the obstacles to his growth along with the portrait of his father and the dream that reveals the secret of his brother's death. After losing his biological father and brother, interrupting the contact with his grandfather, who taught him the principles of being a human being, and the little who took him to walk the rivers and lakes, the male guide on Xiaoxiang's life path was only his stepfather. However, after Xiaoxiang realized that his brother's death was related to his stepfather, he regarded him as a burdensome stepfather and forced him to bury the secret with his fist. Xiao Xiang's fourth painting is his self-portrait, and although the film does not show it, the audience can imagine what kind of juvenile face the accumulated thoughts have created.
▍ Stills of "The Fourth Painting"
In "Lost Soul", Wen Biqian made a cameo appearance as a doctor and received a father and son. He examined his father's mentally ill, as if he had changed into a human being, and found nothing out of the ordinary. And this pair of father and son, which looks ordinary, has a hidden feeling that the doctor can't see. The son fainted and woke up to no longer communicate with anyone, even killing his own sister by mistake, and the father dealt with the scene and the son-in-law who came to look for his wife. The police intervened and failed to stop the father and son from continuing their crimes. The truth gradually surfaced, and the father bore all the blame. But from beginning to end, father and son lacked real communication, and whether the son's soul loss was true or false, the father had no way of knowing.
Compared with the above films, the father-son relationship in "Sunshine" is more closely related to social reality. The family of four in the film is a typical Chinese family that the audience is more familiar with. The eldest son, Ah Hao, is excellent and lonely, carrying the hopes of the whole family, and the second son, Ah He, is rebellious and stubborn, and the contrast with his brother is obvious. His father, Arwen, was taciturn and would only recognize Ahao's son. Mother Qin sister rarely shows emotion and strives to play a role in reconciliation. The family's life was not given a bright background by the "sunshine", and the parent-child relationship, especially the father-son relationship, derived from it, was initially shadowed.
▍ "Sunshine" poster
Pragmatic fathers left the family unbalanced
There is no shortage of films in Taiwan where a father is absent or aphasia, meaning historical paradox or the symptoms of the times. Wang Tong's classic trilogy "The Wordless Hill", "Scarecrow", "Banana Paradise", brothers or brothers with different surnames joined forces to shape Taiwan's modern history, and his father was hidden in the depths of history. The father in Hou Xiaoxian's "Childhood Past", Yang Dechang's "Juvenile Murder Incident on Muling Street", Cai Mingming's "Teenager Nezha" and other films has changed with the progress of the times, but whether it is a frail and sick provincial person, an intellectual who cannot speak, or a taxi driver with a sad face, young people cannot understand and grow through them, and can only feel the wonderful and cruel world on their own. After the new Taiwanese film, there is no father in many youth films that show the confusion of growing up.
NJ, played by Wu Nianzhen in Yang Dechang's "Yiyi", undertakes social and family functions at the same time, and is the father of a rare "inside and outside" in Taiwanese movies. However, in Taipei, where the values of Oriental humanity and the concept of Western civilization are fiercely colliding, his Confucian standards of conduct are constantly challenged when facing friends, customers and even family. For the son Yangyang who focuses on shooting other people's heads and helping them find the "back", he can't give any growth advice.
Compared with NJ, the father Arvin in "Sunshine" is more pragmatic. "Grasp the time, control the direction" that appears many times in the film is the school motto of the driving school where Arwen works, and he often recites it as a creed in life. There are different reasons for his love and hatred of his two sons, to some extent, he thinks that Ah Hao is living according to the eight-character policy, and Ah He is completely deviating. In addition to making the pressure piled up on Ah Hao's body more and more (the driving school brochure that Ah Wen gave ah hao for different years was thrown into the corner by Ah Hao, not only was he not motivated by the eight big characters printed on the cover of the book, but he was not even interested in using the manual as a calculus paper), but also made his relationship with Ah He into a stalemate. Ah He can only get out of the family mixed society, prove his existence value, and cause More disgust to Ah Wen - Ah He and his friend Cai to cut the black wheel and are sent to the Juvenile Auxiliary Nursing Home, which he actually regards as relief.
▍ The father of "Sunshine" Ah Wen, who works at a driving school.
But the real relief in the movie is Ahao, who jumped off a building and committed suicide. And the only mistake that Ahao made in his life has multiple meanings in the movie. It allows Ah Hao to tell the story of "Sima Guang smashing the cylinder and discovering that the child hiding in the shadows is himself", which is directly related to his fate from the metaphor, and he is reborn due to death; at the same time, it stimulates Ah Hao to wake up to the fact that although he is not needed by his father, his girlfriend Xiaoyu and the child in her womb are waiting for him. More importantly, Arvin realized that there was something wrong with the way he got along with his family, and he didn't know anything about them.
▍ Ahao in "Sunshine"
With the help of a Discovery Channel documentary about ocean secrets, Arvin tries to read the reason why Ahao posted pictures of the seabed in his room, but to no avail. In his dream, Ah Hao was as gentle as before he was born, and accompanied him on a night walk in the alley in front of his house to officially bid him farewell. This dream can be understood as the result of Arwen's "daily thoughts", and can also be seen as Ahao's entrustment, a sentence of "Dad, I don't accompany you, I go this way", reminding the father who was only willing to admit Ahao's son before, and facing up to the fact that he really only has (left) A and a son now, and should cherish it well.
Tragedy extends from the family to society
The way Ah Wen cherishes Ah He and protects his family is to kick away the stumbling block on Ah He's new life road, the vegetable head, and then completely crush it. But is the head of the dish guilty of death? The tragedy of the film is based on the second death incident, which is pushed by Zhong Menghong from the family to the social level, pointing to the human disqualification.
At the scene of the juvenile trial, Ah He almost pushed the responsibility for cutting off the arm of the black wheel to Caitou, completely forgetting the righteousness of Caitou when he helped him out. After he returned to society after ending his sentence early, he did not look at the head of the dish who was still serving his sentence. What is even more tragic is that Caitou returns home to find that his only relative, Grandma, who is dependent on him, has been sent to a nursing home, and that grandma's house has been seized by the court because she cannot afford to pay black wheel compensation—if Arwen could have helped Grandma Caitou share the cost of the compensation as his black wheel father had hoped to do several times, all this could have been avoided.
▍ Ahe in "Sunshine"
The head of the dish who was released from prison repeatedly "disturbed" Ah He, although there was an element of unwillingness, and it was also a fact that he cared about Ah He and this only friend. It was precisely because he cared and didn't want Ah He to be scolded by the boss because of the smell of smoke in the car, so he got out of the car and smoked, giving Ah Wen the opportunity to kill him.
However, this friendship was obviously considered cheap and harmful by Ah Wen's father and son, and even Sister Qin and Xiao Yu—they did not realize that without caitou's friendship, Ah He might have suffocated at home long ago. So does society still have the soil to nurture "healthy" friendships? The answer given by Zhong Menghong is very pessimistic.
As another kind of young person, Ah Hao, an honors student, only has a friend Xiaozhen who passively knows in the cram school. However, Xiaozhen listened to him tell sima Guang's story (if Xiaozhen jumped on the first bus, the story might be hidden in Ah Hao's heart forever), accompanied him to the zoo, and did not let him let go of his heart. Arwen used his behavior towards Black Wheel's father and grandma to say that some middle-aged people are indifferent to emotional communication, they don't care about empathy, they only want self-preservation.
▍ Ah Hao and Xiao Zhen in "Sunshine"
In a society that lacks empathy, the protection of justice by the legal system is shallow, and the offender's dish head will be imprisoned and educated, but in the face of more complex problems, it is incapacitated, unable to change the fate of the vegetable head grandmother who was expelled, and her death is even more uncared for. The way family members who live in the middle of it being "sunlit" seems to be only to be injured and become each other's sun. (Editor-in-charge: Li Jing)
Source: Beijing Daily Hot Wind | author Mei Sheng
Editor: Jiang Baojun
Process Editor: Wang Mengying