We snap our fingers in resonance, and distant things will be shattered, and the people in front of us will not know at this time.
After the success of "Hidden Corner", director Xin Shuang lost interest in conventional suspense dramas. At this time, he received the script of "The Long Season", which takes place in his hometown Northeast, without the taste of dark and strange feelings, but the flow of life. This is the bullseye of the spicy "anti-genre" creation, and he specially invited writer Ban Yu to polish the script, so that the dialogue of the characters really landed in the northeast.
Xin Shuang has mentioned in many interviews that he likes to watch the Northeast comedy "Ma Dashuai" repeatedly in his leisure time. Because of this, the drama "Long Season" is like a parallel universe of "Ma Dashuai", which includes the Gui Ying Flavor Hotel and Victoria International Entertainment Plaza, which combines earth and foreign atmosphere. The inner spirit of the series also has a common line.
"The Long Season" was launched for a week, ranking first on the Douban hot list with a score of 9.0, and rising all the way to a high score of 9.2. From "Hidden Corner" to "Long Season", from the sweaty south to the golden northeast, Xin Shuang is constantly exploring the possibilities of suspense dramas.
This article contains spoilers, please read it as appropriate
01. The suspense of life makes people laugh
"The Long Season" exudes an atypical suspenseful temperament everywhere. It opens not with a homicide, but with a ridiculous oolong case - the deck car hit and run, and the real owner is impounded. The investigator was not a professional policeman, but a pair of brothers-in-law who did not look very reliable.
Brother-in-law Gong Biao (played by Qin Hao) is as his name suggests, he is a big wrongdoer who was impounded by the car, and he is stunned and lacking in heart. The front foot spent his wife's private money to buy a car soaked in water, and the back foot found that the license plate was illegally applied. It is customary to be stubborn in the mouth, hide behind in case of accidents, and take advantage of others' credit afterwards. The only advantage is blind optimism.
Brother-in-law Wang Xiang (played by Fan Wei) is old and heavy, and his observation is also amazing. The surveillance video has only been seen once, and the picture quality is not much clear, which can accurately describe the injury characteristics of the parties. But he is old, his hair is gray, his physical strength and reflexes are deteriorated, and he is naturally not an ideal candidate for investigation.
Amazingly, this contrast creates a breathable sense of humor in the play. "The Long Season" is not without the thrilling drama of conventional suspense dramas: in the bridge section of chasing the deck car, Wang Xiang drives the Santana taxi out of the momentum of the car, and the smoke and drift do not fall. But after he managed to stop the deck car, the driver slipped into the cornfield. Wang Xiang gasped and said "Patience", not convinced but had to obey the old man.
Suspense dramas don't have to be bitter and bitter all the time, and the director Xin Shuang wants to present a heavy lift. "It's obviously a very heavy thing, but you can dissolve it with very living things." For example, when the oolong case escalated into a homicide case, Wang Xiang and Gong Biao were terrified on the way to meet the suspect, but they discussed the problem of "right eyelid jumping". The final result of the discussion was to glue white paper to the eyelid and make it "jump in vain".
This lightness is especially evident in the timeline from 18 years ago. Around the Hualin Iron and Steel Plant, corpse cases occurred one after another, and the deceased and murderer were unknown. And the director is dismissive of the puzzle solving process, and the action of throwing the hook is also careless, and he is more enthusiastic about the trivial matters of life. After shooting 30 seconds of throwing the corpse, it is necessary to shoot 5 minutes of complete breakfast for the whole family, and then use a large section to shoot how ordinary people are accidentally hit and embarrassed.
At that time, Wang Xiang was in the prime of life, a locomotive driver in a steel factory, and a self-styled "security activist". I wanted to enthusiastically solve the problems of the police at the scene, but I didn't wait to see any bloody scenes, but I vomited wildly when I heard that the broken corpse was found. He vomited in the ambulance, vomited to the hospital, and vomited as a "security activist" who was published in the newspaper with condolences from the director of the factory.
In the script of life, light and heavy, life and death, flirting and crushing corpses do not hinder each other. Sister Xu from the cold noodle shop asked her friend to help unclog the sewers, and invited him to "go into the house to warm up and warm up" while sipping melon seeds. After digging up the shredded corpse, the two people sat in the house dumbfounded, and when questioned by the police, they also said "We are fine, we are ordinary friends."
Life is inherently full of suspense and has no regularity to follow. So the suspense of the top frame may be to present life itself. Psychologist Pete McGraw's analogy is apt: "Life is like a creepy person who wears a black trench coat and wants to make you laugh." ”
02. The last echoes of the golden age
Similarly, in The Long Season, the stereotyped northeastern image no longer exists. Xin Shuang gave up the cold and solemn winter and embraced the golden autumn instead. The autumn sun runs through three parallel timelines, and the pre-90s layoffs are like a gold era filter.
That was the last golden age of the Northeast State-owned Factory, and it was also the last golden age of Wang Xiang, the "second generation of the factory". He is proud of his status as the successor of "Root Zheng Miao Hong", and he became a model worker in 90 years. Everything is still brand new and brilliant, and colorful flowers are still blooming under the huge cooling tower. Xin Shuang said that the steel mill is Wang Xiang's Disney, so he made this paragraph "always stay half a meter above the ground", romantic and surreal.
There is a large swimming pool behind the video hall, and the exhaust smoke from the factory has a beautiful fireworks at night. "When it burns to carbon monoxide, it is blue, and when it burns copper ions, it is green." Wang Xiang's son, who grew up in the factory dean, shows his familiarity with steel plants. But in his generation, he could not enter the factory smoothly like his father's generation.
The final golden age still landed in a way of life. Especially small people like Wang Xiang can best catch signs of decline in the smallest details. Once he had no reason to believe that "whoever stops, birch steel can't stop", but when the number of carriages carried by the locomotive decreased sharply, there were no longer large fat slices for breakfast in the canteen, and the heart stent installed by his lover could not be reimbursed for three years, he understood everything in his heart.
He could not stop the wheel of the times from running over, so he had to try to maintain the last decency. The people in the factory compound are so affectionate, he thinks he can play well. The first meaning is not to say it thoroughly. Xing Saner, the head of the security section, secretly trafficked the factory's machinery and bribed him with cigarettes. His polite refusal was "grinning, not hitting him in the face, and making him unable to say anything".
The second important meaning is to leave a line. The police came to the factory to investigate the case, and in the blink of an eye, the tires on the car were stolen. Wang Xiang immediately locked up the thief, the son of his factory friend who died early. But he did not choose to report in front of the police, because he felt that "he is also a bitter child, without adults to carry it, [so] it is easy to learn badly." ”
The so-called do not say thoroughly, leaving a line, seems to have a smooth measure, but in fact retains the bottom line. Because for Wang Xiang, the last decency is integrity and goodness. Even when it comes to self-interest, it does not waver. For example, for his son to enter the factory to give gifts to the leader, in the heart of this pass is absolutely unpassable.
In the dark waves of the era of variations, Wang Xiang's decency is the "axis" in the eyes of the fly camp dogs. Therefore, it is inevitable to block people's wealth and attract retaliation, and it is inevitable to catch up with the first batch of layoffs. But "axis" is not "axis" is not a big deal, fate snapped its fingers, and a whole golden age was over. Just like the transitions of time and space in each episode of the play, there are always shadows under the sun, and the grass snake gray line has long been written, and everyone has no other way but to accept it.
03. People are the scale of time
Behind the frequent changes in time and space is the ultimate expression of the director's spicy - how time passes by people, and what traces it leaves behind. The audience will not feel separated between the showy transitions, precisely because people are always the scale of time, and the story is always told with people at the core. The audience sees the continuation of people in time, and also sees the changes of people in time.
Xing Saner, the head of the security section, is the epitome of the Huagang group portrait. Before he was laid off, he liked to wear a long black tweed coat, and he carried things into the coat with his toes high. Even if it is speculation, the people in the factory have to give him a little thin noodles. After being laid off, he still wore a long black tweed coat, but the only way to survive was speculation. He was in the illegal deck business, putting fake license plates in his coat.
Deeper and turned out by the old man of birch steel, is a glaring urine bag. It turns out that the tweed coat is no longer the yellow horse coat of the fox fake tiger power, but the last fig leaf. The fig leaf is ripped off, and his human dignity is gone. Wang Xiang asked him: "Is there a cure for (uremia)?" He looked indifferent: "If you can't cure it, deal with it alive." "Such Xing San'er is compromised and tough like a weed. No matter how you live, people always have to live.
Thomas Shatz, author of Hollywood Genre Cinema, argues that "a genre character is psychologically static—he/she is just a physical embodiment of an attitude, a style, a worldview, and a predetermined and essentially unchanging cultural gesture." "And there are no genre characters in The Long Season, everyone is dynamic in nature, so they are all three-dimensional.
What is even more valuable is that the audience also sees the relativity of time in the characters. Autumn in the northeast is notoriously short, but in the trailer, Wang Xiang has a line: "How can this autumn be so long, like a lifetime." "Since his son jumped into the river without a trace, he has been trapped in the fall for 18 years.
In the past 18 years, he has taken off the red sweater given by his son and is reluctant to take it off. He had never moved, fearing that his son would not be able to find a home if he returned. He has always regretted that he did not want to understand his son and did not support his son to go far away from Birch Steel. He trained himself to have eagle-like eyes, bear-like guts, and wolf-like spirits in order to complete the puzzle of the past.
The whole drama has traveled to this point, and it is time to recycle the foreshadowing. Xin Shuang is still tirelessly changing time and space, telling stories in a delicate way. He wants the audience to "forget time when watching, and watch all the stories happen at the same time, as if an all-knowing and all-powerful person is observing everything."
Xin Shuang has mentioned in interviews many times that he likes the suspense drama "Twin Peaks" by ghost director David Lynch because it is full of mysterious doubts and has no real ending to speak of. Whether Wang Xiang can finally complete the puzzle pieces of 18 years ago, hopefully he can at least get out of the autumn after being trapped for 18 years. No matter what season it starts, time can flow again.
"The Long Season" can have no ending, but it needs to give hope to those trapped in time.
Resources:
1. Xin Shuang pushes stones up the mountain for the second time | T Chinese edition, Wu Zhong
2. Mode fusion, author's style and cultural change: cross-genre, anti-genre and super-genre of American new crime films "Contemporary Cinema", Cui Chen
3. Interview with the director of "Hidden Corner" Xin Shuang: This is a story about love | Interface News, Dai Tianwen
4. "Long Season" tidbits: production special丨Official
Written by: Brie
Executive Producer: Master Mao
Pictured: "The Long Season"