Original title:
"Manjiang Hong": Theme shift in genre fusion
Wen 丨 Ye Hang (Director of China Film Critics Society)
New film views
Special financial support for the development of the national film industry
Director Zhang Yimou's new work "Manjiang Hong" was released during the Spring Festival and became a topical work. This film not only has some inherent elements of Zhang Yimou's films, but also shows some new exploration directions in his recent years in the creation of commercial films at the level of genre compounding and theme refinement.
"Manjiang Hong", a popular lyric by Yue Fei, a famous general of the Southern Song Dynasty, clearly shows the positioning of the theme of "costume history", although it involves real historical figures, but in fact the story of the film is fictional: four years after Yue Fei's death, the envoy of the Jin State was suddenly stabbed to death in the residence of the Southern Song Prime Minister Qin Huan, and the secret letter carried by the envoy disappeared. The small soldier Zhang Da and the deputy commander of the pro-military camp, Sun Jun, were ordered to find the murderer and the secret letter within an hour.
The film sets the narrative space in a closed place, follows the "three-in-one law" to generate high-density dramatic tension, and accompanies the reasoning of the case to make the plot have multiple reversals. The participation of laughing stars such as Shen Teng, Yue Yunpeng, and Wei Xiang shows that the film is not lacking in comedy. The film superimposes costume history, suspenseful reasoning and comedy genres – as if a hybrid of its predecessor "Three Guns Shooting Surprise" and "Above the Cliff" – to broaden the audience and enhance viewing appeal as much as possible.
It is worth mentioning that in recent years, there is no shortage of successful domestic films trying to mix genres, but cases of failure are even less rare. Simply adding different genre elements and techniques will only lead the film to a messy and broken text – everything you want to put in, but because of the incompatibility between them, it becomes strange and difficult to swallow. Effective genre hybridization is to "organically" combine various types of elements, and then produce narrative interaction to form a holistic narrative method, and "Manjiang Hong" can be said to have made a useful exploration in this regard.
The film is 159 minutes long, obviously relying purely on the comedic effect generated by lines and language is difficult to achieve the effect of continuously attracting the audience's attention, after all, this is not a ten-minute Spring Festival Gala sketch program. The linear appeal of unsolved reasoning can complement the momentary pleasure of stagnation created by the line design. The plot evolution in the fusion of genres requires the effective narrative wisdom of the film creator, for example, at the end of the film, Qin Hui's impassioned recitation and sudden suicide are all unexpected - it is not difficult for the viewer to have doubts: even if he is coerced by Sun Jun with a knife, Qin Hui will sincerely agree with the meaning of "Manjiang Hong"? Is it possible that such a cautious life-saving official will take the initiative to kill himself? The subsequent plot reversal dissipated these doubts one by one.
In fact, the perpetrator of these two actions is Qin Hui substitute - "stand-in" is also the key setting in Zhang Yimou's previous work "Shadow". Agitated recitation and decisive self-slaughter are just a stress reaction after serving as the "shadow" of others for a long time, suppressing, sad, angry, fear and other complex emotions, and this reversal treatment is also serving the character shaping of the biggest villain - Qin Juniper and Cunning Rabbit Three Caves, whose sophistication and insidious cunning make people shudder.
The film begins the narrative with a stolen letter, because the letter may involve Qin Hui secretly communicating with the Jin Kingdom and the stakes are very important, Zhang Da and others must find this letter to save their lives. However, strictly speaking, letters are like Hitchcock's so-called "MacGuffin", which is a virtual plot clue, the object and carrier of action and desire, and the theft of letters allows different types of elements such as political intrigue, espionage suspense, murder reasoning and so on to have a soil for continuous growth and fermentation in a specific space; As the narrative progresses to the middle stage, the forced task of finding letters quietly shifts to the active mission of assassinating Qin Huan. This plot "shift" also means that the protagonist changes from "fear of death" to "going to death", and the style and tone are correspondingly "from joy to sadness".
Of course, the film can be regarded as a retelling of the "Yue Fei story", but it is quite interesting that the visual image of Yue Fei, a historical figure, is not presented in the film at all, and this method of "removing practical retreat" is undoubtedly closely related to the theme that the film wants to express. From Yue Fei, a famous anti-gold general, to the lyrics of "Manjiang Hong", and then to the feelings and spirit of loyal service to the country derived from the first two, it is the gradual symbolization process from reality to fiction, from figuration to abstraction.
Little soldier Zhang Da, deputy commander Sun Jun, Genfu Ding Sanwang, Mafu Liu Xi, dancing girl Yaoqin... These little people in big history were inspired and guided by Yue Fei's spirit of serving the country, and went forward and sacrificed their lives for righteousness, which is obviously more realistic and characteristic of the times in the "era of storytelling". It is not difficult to find that the spiritual leader as an absent existence, turned to the narrative perspective of many civilian heroes, "Manjiang Hong" and Chen Desen's "October Siege" have similarities. It is a slight pity that these group portraits, each with their own past stories, what prompted them to come together to complete seemingly impossible tasks, the film does not have enough ink.
In this sense, the shift from "Hedge" to "Passing Words" is both unexpected and reasonable. "Angry and rushing to the crown, by the railing, the rain stops. Raise your eyes, look up to the sky and roar, and be fierce. Thirty meritorious fame dust and earth, eight thousand miles of clouds and moons. Don't wait idle, white young head, empty and sad..." The words "Manjiang Red" are indeed the starting point and drama of the entire film, and the patriotic feelings and majestic momentum contained in the words have extremely strong sensationalism and appeal. As the line in the film says, "preserving true memories is more important than killing individuals", so that the poem "Manjiang Hong" and the life value and meaning of life contained in it have been praised by thousands of people and passed down through the ages, which is undoubtedly more worthy of remembering than simply assassinating a specific villain.
The deep confrontation in the film is actually the struggle between "memory disappearance" (Qin Huan) and "memory return" (Zhang Da and others). As people say, the key words of oral communication are "public consciousness" and "public memory", so the film narrative potentially touches on the dialectical relationship between media communication (the sound transmission form of words and lyrics) and memory (the generation and inheritance of folk memory and collective memory).
The effective combination of commercial genre and mainstream value is a creative proposition that domestic new mainstream films have been actively exploring in recent years, tall character shaping and slogan-style line design are increasingly abandoned by creators because of their abrupt and stiff feeling, "Manjiang Hong" in this regard to adopt a strategy is: follow the law of genre, mainly with suspenseful reasoning and comedy effects to promote a highly conceptual story with strong ornamentation, so that the audience's brain, vision and hearing are fully mobilized, and when the narrative enters the second half, Let the action tasks carried by the characters be transferred multiple times, and then sublimate the main idea of thought.
Objectively speaking, this film still has some narrative drawbacks, such as some plot reversals that lack convincing foreshadowing, but on the whole, it is flawed, and its genre composite techniques and the interpenetration and integration of commercial types and mainstream values have left a lot of inspiring production experience.