After "Hello, Li Huanying", she will play the heroine, and Zhang Xiaofei's "Exchange Life" is most suitable for the Spring Festival file

2023 Spring Festival, I am afraid that most Chinese have a particularly deep understanding and re-recognition of the concept of "home", no matter what obstacles and twists and turns, everyone rushed to the direction of home with endless emotion and expectation years ago, there is nothing happier and more precious than the whole family sitting together safely, and among the several films in this year's Spring Festival, perhaps the light comedy "Exchange Life" is also the most suitable one for the whole family to watch.

As the only pure comedy genre film in this year's Spring Festival file, and it is also the second cooperation between screenwriter/director Su Lun and Lei Jiayin after "Living Together in Time and Space", "Exchange Life" has a fairly good degree of completion. "Exchange Life" still continues the fantasy setting that Suren has always preferred in his directorial works.

Because of an accident, Lu Xiaogu (played by Zhang Youhao), an eighteen-year-old boy who has always had a good impression of Jin Hao (played by Zhang Xiaofei), a trainer of health care institutions, and Jin Hao's blind date, the indifferent lawyer Zhongda (played by Lei Jiayin), accidentally exchanged identities.

At first glance at the synopsis, trailer and the previous paragraph of the film, to a considerable extent, you may think that "Exchange Life" will be a romance film, including actor Lei Jiayin in an interview during the road show also said that when he first read the script, he also thought it would be a love movie, and this type of teenager and uncle swapping identities is also common in romance films.

However, after watching the movie, we will find that behind the introduction of love, "Exchange Life" is essentially a rediscovery and call about the growth of teenagers and the importance and significance of the family, in a sense, it can also be said that "Exchange Life" is an urban warm family family film generated by comedy. And a sensitive enough audience can also receive a clear message from the English title "Five hundred mile" (the classic ballad of homesickness) typed at the beginning of the film.

At the beginning of the story, the audience can learn about Lu Xiaogu's living environment - a family of five composed of grandmother, father, mother, sister and himself. Although this family is not rich, but it is lively and warm enough, loving parents, grandma who likes to make short videos despite Alzheimer's disease, and the sister who always shoots family videos with DV. But we can intuitively and clearly feel Lu Xiaogu's desire to "escape" the family from the narration.

From beginning to end, the film did not directly explain the specific reason why Lu Xiaogu wanted to "escape" from this home, and it was always in a normal narrative state for everyone to speculate and perceive.

For example, one of them was when the Xiaotani family was sitting around to eat, discussing that one day they would buy the apartment they were currently renting, and we followed the camera to find that their family actually lived in a "nesting doll", and their door was opened to the neighbor's home, although it was not under the fence, but the inconvenience was also known at a glance.

And Lu Xiaogu's living environment is also in the same room as his sister, who lives in a Doraemon-like wall cabinet. On the one hand, a certain "far away" psychology of young Xiaogu may be inferior, or it may be the mood of desperate desire to change the status quo, in short, in this part of the film, it is actually vaguely processed intentionally or unintentionally. There is indeed a difference of opinion on this treatment.

Some people may feel that this is a narrative failure, and the motives of the characters in the details of the story are not clearly explained, but in fact, it is through such emotional details setting that blurred but is more real and relevant to life, no one can be completely clear and absolutely correct to analyze their emotions into one fifty-one ten clearly, people face various situations are rational, emotional and intuitive synthetic, chaotic judgment. And in the advancement of the story, ambiguity brings a certain clarity and freedom, and the audience can easily imagine and find their own understanding and substitution point into the story.

The fantasy setting in "Exchange Life" is more of a narrative device, the story itself still focuses on people and people's lives themselves, love is the motivation and reason for the characters' final initial decisions, but fundamentally the film still hopes to guide the audience to think about the meaning of "home".

It is precisely for this reason that the film spends considerable ink on the family portrayal of the three leading roles, and the family background films of the three characters of Lu Xiaogu/Jin Hao/Zhongda are all emphasized in the film, and the narrative is progressively and contrasted.

Different from the warm and harmonious Lu Xiaogu family, the heroine Jin Hao played by Zhang Xiaofei is a single woman in her thirties, she suppressed and gave up her singing dream because of family reasons, in order to help her mother who was trapped in health care products pay off debts, and she also had such a warm and happy time in her childhood, this mother-daughter relationship is also a branch line portrayed in the film. In the end, the ending of a mother-daughter reconciliation in a sense promotes the plot, and also assists and deepens the main theme of the film.

And the family of the ruthless unscrupulous lawyer Zhongda played by Lei Jiayin is also briefly and properly explained in the film, we can see through memory flashbacks that he has lived in an abnormal family since he was a child, his mother played cards and gambled all day and ignored him, and his father has long remarried to others to care for him flawlessly, the lack of family love can be said to have a decisive impact on the formation of his personality, and it is this personality that makes him so cold and ruthless in the future, blindly pursuing money and going astray.

Different from the previous genre film expression - the villain was finally educated/influenced to realize the important return of the family to the right path, in "Exchange of Life", the characters still maintain a consistent logic, until the end Zhongda is also unrepentant and evil to the end, and finally uses the fantasy and comedy setting of the story to make Zhongda get a terrier punishment is also quite interesting and unconventional design.

Different from the previous genre films whose stories were set to go astray, "Exchange of Life" has always achieved fantasy settings to serve the story and the characters themselves, in addition to examining life through exchange and the punishment of the wicked, the fantasy shuttle setting in the film is also linked to the video that the grandmother forgot at the beginning of the film review and the platform account password that could not be seen and the childhood photos, making the narrative chain of the story more complete, malleable and imaginative.

"Funny not tired, home is the most precious", "Exchange Life" does realize and convey such a feeling in the film, always the warmest harbor for everyone, as if no matter how big problems and sufferings, returning home seems to be able to be proudly forgotten or solved, a firework under the eaves, perhaps ordinary, but the most rare and cherished.