Human nature comes from spirit, animal nature comes from desire, one is pursuit, one is filling.
Because of a corpse case, in a barbershop with cold and warm colors and strange colors, two suspects squatted on the ground, and the three policemen were still out of breath.
The audience saw that an arrest had just ended, and it was expected that it would be another victory for the people's police.
But tragedy always happens out of reach in what looks like comedy.
Captain Zhang Zili found a piece of clothing, and he asked his colleagues to pick it up and look at it.
As a result, a gun fell to the ground unexpectedly, and after three seconds of blank space, it was a sudden tragedy.
This is perhaps the moment when Chinese film noir is closest to the Coen brothers, bringing the audience in addition to shock or shock.
This clip is from director Diao Yinan's berlin film award-winning film "Daytime Fireworks" in 2014.
You might think it's a movie about a suspenseful crime, but it's actually a black fairy tale about wild beasts rounding up prey, human nature and desire.
A story of beasts and beauties in the snow and ice.
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Red faces and bad water, they all think that the charm of women has produced original sin, but in their bones, it is men's desires that are at work.
The first "beast" in the movie is the criminal police officer Zhang Zili.
He and his ex-wife play poker at a hotel, and then the camera turns around with two pairs of intertwined hands and murmurs, while the sheets have a crushed insect carcass.
It is a metaphor for sex and death, which is also the theme and tone of the whole film.
"Sex" is the easiest expression of human beast instinct under the benchmark of human nature, but it is also the easiest to hide the dangers of human nature.
When bidding farewell to his ex-wife at the train station, Zhang Zili ignored his ex-wife's warning that this was the "last time" and threw her into the sand pile in broad daylight, at this time his animalism prevailed.
The film does not explain the reason for Zhang Zili's divorce, but it can be seen that his "bestiality" has not been satisfied.
Subsequently, a case of broken corpses pulled him back to human reason.
This is the sin committed by another beastly man, and we later learned that the origin of the murder is also "sex".
In the battle between human nature and desire, as long as you set out toward desire, human nature will become difficult to understand, and the difference between man and beast will gradually blur.
Just like the beer bottle that Zhang Zili kicked down the stairs, once it set off, it was pulled by the force, and it was difficult to stop stumbling until it was torn into pieces.
Is death the end of the temptation?
At least in the movies, we see that death is the result of desire.
And the starting point of these male desires comes from a woman named Wu Zhizhen in the film.
Director Diao Yinan's scene in the barbershop has actually alluded to the relationship between women, men and death in this story.
Xiao Wang, a policeman played by Yu Haolei, and his colleagues walked into the barbershop, and we saw a huge poster of a woman posted on the entrance.
In this shootout scene, there are only five male characters, and after the tragedy, this place is like a shura field. But if we look closely, we will find that under the sign with the exit is also a huge poster of the woman.
It is implied that because of the murder led by a woman, a group of male beasts are taken to the field of desire, and the entrance and exit of desire are still women.
The only zhang zili who survived the tragedy was the beast that finally found the exit.
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Things started because of her and will end because of her.
The whole story looks like the redemption and solving of the old criminal policeman Zhang Zili, but in fact, there is a hidden real protagonist, the beautiful woman Wu Zhizhen, the eye of 4 murders.
Wu Zhizhen (Gui Lunmeng)
Without Wu Zhizhen, there would be no story, and the closed loop of this Shuluo field.
We can see that Wu Zhizhen, played by Gui Lunmeng, is the most beautiful of the main characters in this movie, and the men around her mostly look abominable and untrimmed.
On the surface, it is Wu Zhizhen's "charm" that stirs up the whole story, but in fact it is the desire of these men that makes them hunt like wild beasts.
The first shot of Wu Zhizhen's appearance, across the curtain, only a pair of white and tender legs, when the criminal police officer Xiao Wang stepped forward, her feet involuntarily retracted backwards.
Withdrawal, the animal's instinctive reaction in the face of a threat, hints at the character nature of the character, the prey.
In her first husband, Liang Zhijun, he lived in the shadows in anonymity so that she could be a dead man. But he brutally killed every man who was close to her.
It looks like Wu Zhizhen is Liang Zhijun's captive pet, but in fact, she is the person That Liang Zhijun desires and cannot get, and Liang can only secretly care for his prey like an anxious beast and eliminate all the robbers.
Here we have to introduce the hidden logic of the film, "sex".
Although it is not clearly stated in the film, Liang Zhijun is likely to be a person with "sexual" obstacles, and the skate and ice knives everywhere in the film symbolize the reproductive ability and aggression of the male.
But Liang Zhijun always hung the ice knife around his neck, and the more ostentatious he was, the more he showed his weakness.
His tragedy also stems from another owner of 20,000 leather clothes who has a need for "sex", because of "sex", the person let Wu Zhizhen pay compensation, which led to the disaster of killing.
From then on, Liang Zhijun hid and killed all those male beasts that had sexual desires for Wu Zhizhen to compensate for his desires and unattainable desires.
But how can desire be filled?
Therefore, each of Liang Zhijun's killings is done with his mounted ice knife, symbolizing an alternative release of his sexual desire.
In contrast to Liang Zhijun, Zhang Zili is the other extreme of sex, he is capable and not easily satisfied. But what they all came to as Liang's was that they all regarded Wu Zhizhen as their prey, and sex here can be seen as a representative of human animal desires.
Although Zhang Zili has been struggling between human nature and animal desire, in fact, in the end, human nature and desire are not even clear to himself.
In addition to Zhang Zili and Liang Zhijun, the owner of the dry cleaning shop in the film, because of his sexual impotence, harasses Wu Zhizhen all the time.
The police, represented by Xiao Wang and Liu Team, are also hunting Wu Zhizhen for the sake of the truth.
This game of beasts and beauties brings Wu Zhizhen a sense of powerlessness, just like her lines say: "If you want to escape, you can't escape."
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The temperature of minus 30 degrees Celsius in Heilongjiang is the background of this story, because only when human nature drops to the extreme temperature can the heat of desire be highlighted.
For most of the film, the character of Wu Zhizhen is cold-colored, the mood is cold, and the color of the costume is also cold.
Color represents the heat of desire.
Such a metaphor can actually be seen in the same room as Liang Zhijun and Wu Zhizhen, Liang Zhijun is wearing warm-colored clothes, while Wu Zhizhen is gray and cold. Active hunters and passive prey are clear at a glance.
But since meeting Zhang Zili, Wu Zhizhen's color has gradually become brighter.
In the last third of the film, she puts on a red sweater and begins to apply bright lipstick. Finally, when she and Zhang Zili went on a date, she put on a fiery red scarf.
After the two had a relationship, she easily applied lipstick in the breakfast restaurant, and took the initiative to ask Zhang Zili before leaving: "See you at night?" ”
This sentence means that at this point in the movie, the prey is finally gone, because she has been captured by Zhang Zili.
Then, the next step is the disposal of the prey.
In the previous date between the two, with the slowly rising Ferris wheel, the faint light of the four words "daytime fireworks" in the distant night was like a flashlight to find out the truth, shining on Wu Zhizhen's face.
Zhang Zili constantly asked her to tell the truth to herself.
Wu Zhizhen knew that the fact that he had killed people could no longer be hidden, and the only possibility was Zhang Zili's choice.
Just like the choices we all face, sometimes human nature and desire confuse the goal and are pushed forward in a vague way.
From the beginning of the film to the end, Zhang Zili's humanity and desire have been at war.
His motivation for contacting Wu Zhizhen has a self-redemption purpose, but in the process he develops lust for Wu Zhizhen.
The pursuits of human nature and the filling of desires were stirred up in him.
In the end, Zhang Zili still "chose" to "sell" Wu Zhizhen, you can say that he once as a policeman could not avoid the condemnation of the criminal's conscience, you can also say that he returned to the system in order to get the approval of the organization.
In any case, Zhang Zili objectively got another goal he pursued, and the price was his "prey" Wu Zhizhen.
During the banquet, Zhang Zili's emotions were always excited, but the expression on his face had a feeling of wanting to cry without tears
Speaking of which, I have to mention the solo dance that can be called the stroke of God.
After the police arrested Wu Zhizhen, Zhang Zili came to the dance hall alone, and under the soundtrack of Ouyang Feifei's "Yearning", Liao Fan presented us with a performance that conquered everyone's knees.
That forceful expression, I don't know whether it's intoxication or pain, just like we sometimes don't understand whether it's human nature or desire that drives us.
At this point, the 4 series of murder cases led by Wu Zhizhen also came to an end.
In the 110-minute stretch of the film, we see the cold style of black like the Coen brothers, and also see the killing of the men like beasts in the film and the filling of desire behind it.
At the end of the film, those daytime fireworks shooting at Wu Zhizhen are explanations and corrections to this desire, compared to the temperature perception brought about by the color difference of the fireworks in the night, the daytime fireworks are cold and clear, or you can say that it is beautiful and clean.
If only when human nature drops to the extreme temperature can the heat of desire be highlighted, then when desire loses its heat like a daytime firework, is it the warming and return of human nature?
Compared with this scene, Wu Zhizhen, who is about to enter the prison car, may have the right intention.
(Text/Porco Rosso)
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