Contributing author: Zhang Jia
(This article contains some spoilers)
With the style of the characters, the dialect, the sharp and admirable shots of the quick editing, the trailer for "Nameless" shows a quality similar to director Cheng Er's previous work "The History of the Demise of Romance". Perhaps also out of concern about this, the film party is eager to announce its position in the trailer: "super commercial film".
In fact, it is true, every shot of "Nameless" has been delicately polished, the characters are mysterious, contrived and elegant, two gags and play an important role in the little characters (one of them is also Wang Chuanjun), the indoor lighting imitates the blinds of "The Godfather" with brown-yellow sets, and the plot is just right and a lot of omissions have been made. More importantly, it maintains Cheng's preference for text structure since The Third Man.
Throughout Cheng Er's previous works, a prominent common feature is to edit the text structure, disrupt the chronological order of the story, hide key information, so as to turn each shot into an isolated action, each scene as an independent aesthetic object, artificially create difficulties for the audience to understand, and then repeat a certain detail or previous fragment in the subsequent story, reweaving many fragments into the story clues and solving the suspense. "The Third Man" hides Gao Yuanyuan's knowledge of Xu Zheng's crimes, "Border" does not explain the relationship between Sun Honglei, Wang Luodan and Ni Dahong, and "The History of the Demise of Romance" disguises Asano's identity and creates a reversal. Similarly, "Nameless" also did not disclose the identity and relationship of the characters played by Tony Leung, Wang Yibo, Zhou Xun and others, leaving unreasonable omissions in the details of the previous plot, which will be reversed after completing the details.
This editing of the text structure can effectively create suspense in the story, although it often makes the audience abandon watching halfway due to the difficulty of understanding, but when the answer is revealed, the decryption effect of sudden realization will still be achieved. More importantly, it creates a fast, concise editing style, each knife is cut decisively and crisply, but in the retained scene, the camera is slow and calm, the characters move leisurely, and the strong tension between the two forms a unique aesthetic style of Cheng Er, which, together with delicate, contrived, and stylish sets and lines, gives the film a charming charm that does not need to be understood.
However, such a structural arrangement does not highlight its necessity in Nameless. Because there is no clear chapter of "Border" and no relatively clear story thread in "The History of the Demise of Romance", "Nameless" is in a disorderly and difficult to understand state long after the opening. The confusion of the story is intertwined with the macro history of linear development - 1938, 1941, 1944, 1945, which further disturbs the audience's interpretation. And because the identity and relationship of the characters were not notified in advance, some plots used to improve the character image (such as the character played by Jiang Shuying being released by Tony Leung) did not have the desired effect, and they floated away in the passage of the progress bar like meaningless fragments, and could only be used as thin information, and after the answer was revealed, it was mentioned by the audience seemingly absently.
It is this lack of editorial necessity that makes Nameless' non-linear arrangement of text structure more like suspense itself. When we saw Tony Leung face Huang Lei with almost exaggerated acting skills, and a drop of blood on his sleeve entered the field of vision, we hesitated for a moment for some unrevealed possibility, and were immediately brought into the next scene. It was not until the relationship between Tony Leung and Huang Lei was revealed that we remembered the hesitation at the beginning. Here, the opening information is not necessary, and its existence, in addition to showing Tony Leung's amazing acting skills and his elegant action of eating morning tea, is only to interfere with the audience's audio-visual, hinder understanding, and create suspense for the simple and clear solution later - this is not even foreshadowing.
Because the film arranged too many fragments for the setting of this kind of suspense, resulting in the space that should be used to fill the story and characters was occupied by the suspense itself, the screenwriter used all his energy to create the symbols of spy warfare such as character identity and relationship, and then chopped and shuffled them, while the story development, character character, and emotional core lacked the necessary mention, which caused us to be disappointed after the answer was revealed: I didn't see anything work in the past hour, just to show off the spy war symbol itself.
Without the necessary management of the story, many of the choices made by the characters in "Nameless" lack credibility and rationality. (The following involves spoilers) For example, Wang Yibo, who is also a Communist Party, needlessly concealed his identity from his girlfriend Zhang Jingyi, causing the latter's death; Wang Yibo's sudden attack on Japanese soldiers after quarreling with Zhang Jingyi contradicts the image of a city government shown by deceiving Sen Hirozhi in his later story; And Wang Yibo's fake drama in Tony Leung without anyone's watch, showing an unnecessary hand-to-hand fight as a film noir, is almost absurd, seems to be a veritable "super commercial blockbuster". If we will marvel at the suspense left by the previous article after the answer is revealed, then these obvious omissions and traces of symbolic management greatly reduce the audience's trust in the screenwriter.
In this regard, we can simply use the theories of Jameson and others to attack the "postmodernity" of film production, just like Zhang Yimou for color, Quentin for action, in the era of late capitalist domination of art, symbols surpassed "realism" solid storytelling and character shaping, and became the only god in "fetishism", the source and destination of banknotes. However, such criticism is preceded by conclusions and irresponsible, and it seems plausible that we can apply it to anyone we want to criticize without thinking. The analysis that can really understand art, and perhaps the only effective analysis, is the interpretation of its technical means, in what way (language) the author expresses these things, what his purpose is, whether it is ultimately achieved, and whether such a plan and operation are reasonable.
Since "Criminals", Cheng Er has shown to some extent his disdain for stories and characters, and the exquisite audiovisual language itself is his goal, and the sculpting of audiovisual can work well on his preference for suspense, murder, and authorial hegemony. In his films, each scene is independent, the characters are active in isolated pictures, not expected to be understood or explained, he is just an aesthetic object at this moment, a model.
Cheng Er's understanding of actors is in some ways consistent with Bresson's "model". The difference is that Bresson expects the static presentation of the ultimate emotional state, while Cheng Er prefers the style of every move itself. In "The History of the Demise of Romance", we were deeply impressed by the "dim sum" pronounced in Shanghainese and the action of the three people looking down to eat xiaolongbao, Mr. Lu Ge You, the big man on the beach, confidently and calmly exited the scene in the rain of bullets, which is a classic bridge in the film. This ungrounded and pretentious tone, through Cheng Er's editing and audio-visual, has a very charming charm.
This charm also appears several times in Nameless. Tony Leung opens with a leather shoe on the ground, the face of the indoor light and dark processing is lit, the connection of a large number of sound and picture separation, the calmness of the agent's interrogation, the slow camera push and quick editing. However, when suspense became the primary goal of the film's sculpting, all tone management was destroyed. The character's sincere and hard recitation of words made the city in the chest fall short, the atmosphere of the film is difficult to unify because of the mixture of multiple elements and ambitions, and Tony Leung finally pounced on the truck excitedly under the stimulation of Wang Yibo, which ruined the long shaping of the characters. The tone of the entire film collapsed, or in other words, there was no time to take care of too much beyond suspense.
In this film about the War of Resistance Against Japan, the main characters are all Communist Party members, and we can imagine the difficulty of film production. In "Nameless", Cheng Er from time to time shows greater ambitions beyond "The History of the Demise of Romance", and in the previous work, a large overhead shot used to shoot the running action of the characters, where the wreckage of the city after Guangzhou was bombed by the Japanese army was filmed. Thrilling sound processing is complemented by serious images that face up to history. He may want to work between the two, while maintaining the tone, to complete the discussion of this heavy and sensitive topic, to achieve a kind of "weight-lifting" effect.
We can see that when shooting the ruins of the city, the director drives the narrative through a disabled dog. It wettled between collapsed buildings in search of refuge, was driven away by Kuomintang soldiers, and lured into the pouring rain with food. An insignificant "nameless" perspective can often effectively express the heaviness and misery of history, offering more honest compassion in a gesture of irony in a grand and cold narrative. Cheng Er did it. Similarly, he uses a drop of blood on his sleeve to hint at Tony Leung's connection to Huang Lei's character, and in an overhead shot, Tony Leung repeatedly wipes the blood stains with a handkerchief. The director lightly reveals the heaviness and uneasiness behind the picture.
However, this design did not save the "top-heavy" caused by the symbolization of the film. Although like the drug dealers in "Border" and the gangsters in "The History of the Demise of Romance", "Nameless" starts with the same negative characters of traitors and tries to provide some kind of observation and telling of history, but this arrangement also makes the film itself narrative difficult. In the face of the ambition of narrating history, the director seems to be tied and at a loss, and he puts too much energy into the suspense symbol itself, which seems to be a roundabout forward for this larger ambition. Unfortunately, his ambition is not expressed positively, history still stands proudly above literature and art, and the story only appears as a background with a sand and insinuation, and his serious face is as cold as ice. In the face of this sublime and important history, the film's management of suspense symbols and pursuit of tone are hypocritical and contrived. In the face of real killings and intrigues, the two ribs can no longer serve the purpose of irony and support, but seem ridiculous - it fails to pry history, but unspeakable history overwhelms them. What's more, if combined with the communist beliefs of the characters, the tone and the legitimacy of the story are lost. If the sentence "I consulted the director, the director is not prepared to let everyone understand" in "The History of the Demise of Romance" can be taken out separately to evaluate the film, then Zhang Jingyi's lines in "Nameless" can also have a similar effect: "I hate the way you look well-dressed."
For Cheng Er, "Nameless" is not the best film he can make, and in the current context, this theme does not leave him more room to play. However, his ambition to retell history with his non-mainstream entry perspective, unique audiovisual language, and non-linear narrative is still worthy of our respect in the domestic film market. The integration of audiovisual enjoyment and commercial production of "Nameless" makes it a work that cannot be ignored during the Spring Festival, and it also makes us expect the low-prolific director to find the next art space where he can show his talents
About the author: Zhang Jia, a doctoral candidate in liberal arts, an academic worker, writes novels, focuses on literary and intellectual history, film criticism, cultural studies, and French postmodern theory.