Three years after skipping tickets, "More Than Endless" finally came.
It was rumored to be the second "I Am Not the God of Medicine", but compared with it, "More Than Endless" is almost hot in terms of appeal and impact, as well as the impetus to reality.
However, on the whole, "More Than End" is also a good movie, and it is excellent in terms of philosophical concepts, existentialism, humanism and audiovisual language.
The first is the philosophical concept.
Three questions have been explored in the film, what is the essence of society?
What are the fundamental laws of social development? How is the fundamental relationship between human thinking and existence connected?
Society is a community, individuals may seem inconspicuous, but behind a small behavior may be a butterfly effect of a group.
For example, the truth of the Baike investigation proxy inspection is not only their illegal behavior, but also 90 million hepatitis B carriers who have been discriminated against in their lives and work.
Since the essence of society is community, how does this huge system operate and develop? Understanding and inclusion.
Han Dong, played by Bai Ke, is out of high school, has no money, no education, no background, even if he has strong writing skills and news sensitivity, he is still not valued when applying.
My friend Zhang Bo took the postgraduate examination for two years and passed the admission score line every year, but every time he was stuck on the physical examination, because he was a hepatitis B carrier, so he was not accepted.
It was based on the same experience of being discriminated against that Han Dong empathized with Brother Biao's monologue, and Han Dong gave up front-page news and insisted on the ethics of a reporter.
What is the bottom line for journalists? Truth-seeking, rumors are not news, taking them out of context for traffic eyeballs is not news; Speak up, speak for the little people, speak for the vulnerable, speak up for the misunderstood truth.
Han Dong's "Anti-Discrimination Propositions of 100 Million People" written with a pen is not only truth-seeking, but also a voice, awakening social tolerance.
It also combines the interview picture with the film in the form of a pseudo-documentary, making the film more realistic, which is also a reflection of the transformation of Han Dong's mental journey.
The third question concerns existentialism.
People live one life, for what? Live a life in confusion, vigorously do a career, or seek a stable life?
For most people, the choice is the latter, because to do meaningful things is to live well, which is also self-achievement in existence, living wonderfully.
Everyone in the film wants to live well, but reality always makes them powerless.
Han Dong wants to be a journalist, but his education is too low, Zhang Bo wants to go to graduate school, but he can't pass the physical examination, and other hepatitis B carriers want to get a job that can support their families, but they are always discriminated against.
Their approach was to find a proxy inspector, and after being investigated, they gathered around to complain, and the next day they continued to despair, and it was Han Dong's appearance that awakened their humanism that opposed discrimination in their hearts and called for freedom and equality and self-worth.
This kind of attention to marginal characters, the analysis of confusion and confusion is a continuation of the authorship in Jia Zhangke's films, and director Wang Jing, as a member of Jia Jiaban, inherits this style.
In addition to ideas, audio-visually, "More Than Endless" is also very similar to Jia Zhangke's films.
The photography of "More than Endless" is Jia Zhangke's royal photographer Yu Liwei, and the team is composed of Jia Jiaban, so when expressing artistic conception and context, it is full of Jia Zhangke's taste.
Most of the shots of the movie are close-up, medium scene, close-up, plus handheld photography, so that the audience's perception is more direct, the impact of the picture is stronger, and it is also close to reality and faces the characters directly.
There is also a slightly shaking empty shot, although flashing, but also rendering the background of the film, so that the camera is no longer a cold recorder, but an objective narrator integrated into the film.
Sound is also an important part of Jia Zhangke's film elements.
Mainly divided into two categories, noise and pop songs, he uses these two ways to revive history while also representing the carrier of an era.
In "Endless", pop songs hardly appear, more cars, trains, noises, city sounds, and noisy sounds, through which the memory of the times is summoned and the narrative tension is broadened, but in symbolism and flexibility, Wang Jing is still not skilled enough.
Especially in the structure of the script, it cannot be the same as Jia Zhangke.
"More Than Endless" is similar to "The Good People of Three Gorges" in the script structure, but it does not learn the essence of "The Good People of the Three Gorges".
"The Good People of Three Gorges" is two complete story lines of Han Sanming and Shen Hong, divided into four paragraphs of tobacco, wine, tea and sugar, although they do not intersect with each other, but the themes are all seeking.
The focus is on seeing the world, human warmth and changes through the word "seeking", and examining what is left or lost after the change of times through the eyes of a poet.
"More Than Endless" is also four stories, North Drift, Mining Disaster, Proxy Inspection, Discrimination, and the director also seems to want to make a segmented story of chapters, but there is a problem with paragraph allocation.
The focus is relatively vague, and the storytelling method of the flat narrative has been biased, which was originally narrated in turn according to the needs of plot development and time changes, but "More than Endless" always has the perception of a hammer in the east and a stick in the west.
This leads to the theme of each story is different, North Drift and discrimination is anti-discrimination, mining disaster and proxy inspection is truth-seeking, or Beipiao is anti-discrimination, mining disaster, discrimination, proxy inspection is truth-seeking, no matter how to order, there is no unified theme.
At the same time, "More Than Endless" does not have a main line running throughout.
If it is the growth line of Baike as a journalist, but Baike does not reflect growth from beginning to end, if it is anti-discrimination, then the chapter of the mining disaster is somewhat redundant, and the result of blurring the main line is insufficient impact.
Unlike "The Good People of Three Gorges" which uses "seeking" to connect the whole article, there is no sense of clutter in the structure, but as a debut film of a new director, "More Than Endless" is still worthy of praise.
At least in the surrealist part, director Wang Jing learned the skills in Jia Zhangke's "The Good People of Three Gorges".
There are two surrealism in the film, one is that the pen in Baike's hand flies weightlessly and disappears in the sunlight, and the other is that the newspaper in the hand of Miao Miao at the end of the film floats.
The former implies that the pursuit of light is very dazzling, and it will also burn oneself and others, so whether the belief that as a journalist and only serves the truth should be lost, this is the confusion of the white guest.
The latter newspaper swept through the crowd, first the page of the Spring Festival, and then flipped over, and the "anti-discrimination proposition of 100 million people" was published on the front page, indicating that the current situation of hepatitis B carriers will be seen, which is the firmness of white customers.
As soon as these two surrealisms came out, the tone of the entire film for the voices of the little people was established.
Like Jia Zhangke, Wang Jing is not focused on the lights of the big city, but on the struggles of the little people in the corner.
They all push the squashed little people of this era to the front of the stage with a rational lens, and hit the era in a poetic way, and this kind of film is indeed rare in this era.