♪ You are so special, how can I be disappointed ♫
Every day at 9:30 a.m., Sister Yi is waiting for you here
Text | Sister Yi (Zhou Guiyi)
Late night, Beijing, subwoofer, crowded heat wave.
In the midst of the chaos, the call from his mother, Arus (Idel) missed it again.
And his brother Chao Lemen (Su Riya), who is far away in Inner Mongolia, is very difficult, and his entire family is once again in conflict.
Mother Narenzog (played by Badma) has suffered from Alzheimer's disease for five years, she constantly proposed to "go home", ran away from home many times, and Chao Lemen was overwhelmed by constant conflicts with his wife.
Arus returned to Inner Mongolia, witnessed all this, couldn't bear it, decided to drop everything, accompanied her mother to find the "tree of life" she had in mind, and by the way, collected style for her music.
Once he actually hit the road, he immediately found that the reality was crueler than he thought, and his mother's behavior was often uncontrolled, and there was a danger of slipping into the water.
Late at night he would go out quietly alone, and Arus almost lost his mother and searched all night.
Forced to desperately, he thought of a way to tie his mother and himself with a thick rope to ensure the absolute connection between his mother and himself.
This rope is like an umbilical cord.
The story, just from here, goes on slowly.
"The Umbilical Cord"
This rope, which is a metaphor for the "umbilical cord", is imaged throughout the film.
When the elder brother came to visit Narenzoge and Arus with the horse head piano, the mother circled the brothers a few times and used this rope to wrap the brothers together.
After my brother went out, my mother said, "My little birds have grown up and flown away." ”
The rope is untied for the first time, and Tana, a steppe girl, comes to the house in a pickup truck and finds Narenzoge tied to the end of the bed, urinating urgently but unable to go out.
Tana untied the rope and said, "You can't tie it like this." ”
The second time the rope is untied is at the end of the film, around a campfire, Arus dances with his mother, who looks at Arus's sad face.
With tears in his eyes, Arus completely cut the rope and set his mother free.
Heavy lighting equipment is not allowed on the grassland, and this scene has high requirements for photography, and can only use the light of the bonfire as the main light source of the movie.
But this scene is too beautiful, the hazy moon, the blue lake, the flying Mars, everything is like a dream.
Domestic three-gold Grand Slam photographer Cao Yu (who has won three Best Photography trophies at the Academy Award, Golden Horse Award and Golden Rooster Award), is one of the producers of "The Umbilical Cord" and the director of photography of the film, which is the scene he shot the most.
There is a behind-the-scenes story of this scene, just a few days before this filming, Cao Yu lost his mother.
"In the year of filming 'The Umbilical Cord', I also lost my mom... She is a very elegant traditional intellectual, and the most interesting thing is that I myself am also the second eldest in the family, like Arus, who left home at a young age and spent many years wandering away for dreams. The day after my mother's funeral, I rushed back and filmed this bonfire scene. ”
("Umbilical Cord" executive producer & director of photography Cao Yu shared at Aranya premiere)
Life and movies are sometimes really dreamlike juxtapositions and reflections.
A Douban reader Meroyang's comment on this scene of the bonfire scene is hard for me to forget.
"Death passed by with torches in the dark night outside the window, and the moonlight lit the surface of the lake and was lifted into the air by the wind. You're going to go home one day, you're going to let go someday. ”
When I saw that scene, I shed tears.
At that moment, I suddenly realized that Arus in the movie, Cao Yu, the film producer outside the movie, accepted life and faced the farewell, and that feeling was like saying softly to my mother -
"Mom, please throw away all the roles in your life and return to your place lightly and cleanly."
Regular readers know that I have a relatively close relationship with Mr. Zhou Guoping's family.
In 2020, when I was pregnant with my second child, I had a party at his house, and he had just visited his 103-year-old mother.
I asked him if he was happy at the party, and he laughed and said that his mother didn't remember him for a long time.
Zhou Guoping's mother has four children, and from childhood to adulthood, she is the most "biased" to Zhou Guoping.
But when my mother really entered the end of her life, she was the first to forget him.
Teacher Zhou Guoping couldn't accept it at first, feeling lost, but later relieved.
He realized that this was right-
"Before leaving, the most difficult thing to give up in the world must be the first to give up."
Mothers cannot raise their children forever, children cannot stay with their mothers forever, and this bond must be cut after all.
At the first moment of coming into the world, or, the last moment of leaving the world.
"The Umbilical Cord" tells everyone in the most beautiful and gentle way, understand goodbye, learn to say goodbye, and say goodbye gently.
The mother Narenzoge in "The Umbilical Cord" once said: "Time will always go forward, just like the horse orchid on the steppe will not grow green." ”
Director Qiao Sixue, herself from Inner Mongolia, said she hoped that everyone would "be like a shepherd, accepting impermanence is accepting life itself."
When the movie was on the roadshow, there were two readers' stories, which left a deep enough impression on the screenwriter and director Qiao Sixue.
● A boy in Hangzhou said that his grandfather with Alzheimer's disease left last year, but before leaving, it was inconvenient for him to walk, and the only thing he remembered was to return to his hometown. He always took advantage of his family's absence to pack up his things and want to go back to Northeast Daqing alone. The movie made me understand that obsession with going home. ”
● A girl in Wuxi Field said that her grandmother had been gone for a long time, and this movie brought her back to the last day she spent with her grandmother, and she could feel, "The wind blowing through my face, the frog call in the field that day, the smell of my grandmother's body and dirt, all so clear." ”
"The Umbilical Cord" is about "how we say goodbye", but in this farewell, there is not only sentimentality, it has looking back, tenderness, healing, and renewal.
Like the tree of life at the end of the movie, it is half dead and half blooming.
Even if her mother's life dies, her roots are always there, sustaining Arus and giving him the strength of peace and love.
The screenwriter and director of the movie "Umbilical Cord" Qiao Sixue is a newcomer, but the film team is extremely mature and gorgeous.
In addition to Cao Yu and Yao Chen co-producing the film, the editing director is Zhang Yifan, who was shortlisted for Best Editor at the 4th Asian Film Awards and won the "Best Editing Award" at the 44th Taiwan Film Golden Horse Awards for "The Sun Also Rises".
He has been shortlisted for the Golden Horse Award several times, and Beverly, who won the "Best Sound Effect Award" at the 51st Taiwan Film Golden Horse Awards with the movie "Tuina", served as the sound director of the film.
There are also art director Zhao Ziran and styling director Li Zhu have been the core forces behind the production of popular films such as "Eight Hundred" and "My Motherland and Me".
Golden Rooster Award "Best Actress" Badma, is also the heroine of the 1991 Venice Golden Lion Award movie "Set of Horse Poles". She delicately interprets the mother with Alzheimer's disease, and her face seems to write her mother's tenderness and love, which is reassuring.
"Umbilical Cord" is the journey of son Arus to accompany his mother to find his way home, and it is also the inspiration journey of musician Arus.
The music is beautiful and pleasant, and I sincerely hope that readers can open this video, listen to the theme song clip of this more than minute long, and feel the plucking of the soul of grassland music.
"The Umbilical Cord" was shortlisted for the "Asian Future Unit" at the 35th Tokyo International Film Festival as the only Chinese mainland film, and was awarded the "Best Technology Award" at the 4th Hainan Island International Film Festival.
The subtle throbbing of the movie, the words are difficult to convey, you can only enter the theater to feel it yourself. The meandering rivers of the steppes are like umbilical cords, planes brush the moon, bonfires light the night... Nature's gifts are far more precious than special effects.
In the current film market, with such a small cost film, it is difficult to say what to expect commercially.
As producer Liu Hui said, "The Umbilical Cord" has been a lonely marathon from the beginning.
But precisely because it is so "non-commercial" and treated so carefully by people in the industry, its sincerity is therefore extraordinarily moving.
Executive producer Yao Chen was even more blunt, saying: "This is a poem for my mother. ”
Just on March 18, the movie "Umbilical Cord" is about to be released nationwide, may you empty your heart, go to the theater, feel the wind blowing from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the freedom of roaming the blue, and the throbbing brought by the music of the shepherd.
The most important thing is to feel the preciousness of this moment, and before saying goodbye, please love the worthy of love more attentively.