Author | Thoughts
Edit | Lu Yiming
Title map | "Remembering a little"
Last year, Sugata shohui and Jun Arimura starred in "Bouquet of Love" (hereinafter referred to as "Bouquet") online in China, as a literary film, not only won a high score of 8.6 points on Douban, but also received nearly 100 million yuan at the box office.
Recently, domestic theaters have introduced a "A Little Remember" (hereinafter referred to as "Slightly"), and the two Japanese romance films are inevitably compared because of their similar themes.
In terms of narrative form, "Bouquet" is a regular love narrative of "acquaintance, acquaintance, love to forget each other in the rivers and lakes", and "Slightly" uses flashbacks to take July 26 (the male protagonist's birthday) as a memory point every year to capture some seemingly precious, but ultimately incomplete joys, sorrows and sorrows between lovers.
Stills from "Remembering a little".
Whether we are in an intimate relationship or not, we will always be touched by some fragments of our former relationship. As the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak said, "Man does not live a lifetime, not for years, months, days, but for a few moments."
If "Bouquet" is a brilliant firework that ends in nothing, "Slightly" is a glass of slightly bitter draft beer. The director poured back from the place where love ended, and the story was as bland as boiled water, but it pierced people's pain points. This is not a love diary, just some seemingly special fragments of memories.
Flashback version of "Bouquet"
Compared with last year's hit "Bouquet", "Slightly" is a typical applause.
"Slightly" has 7.8 points on Douban, but the box office is less than 2 million yuan in half a month after it was launched, and the attendance rate and film scheduling rate are not high, which is not unrelated to its too detailed shooting methods.
Director Matsui Daigo's shooting technique is special, although it describes a love story, it flashbacks from the point where love has ended, and the "union-division" of a relationship is gradually built up in retrospect.
The heroine Xiaoye is a taxi driver. At the beginning of the film, she carries various passengers through the streets of Tokyo. The camera turned, and the male protagonist who is a lighting engineer watched "Earth Night", drank beer, and opened his birthday in the new year. This is the first time the camera froze on July 26.
On the clock, the date "July 26" is constant, implying that the time flows by the "day of the week" displayed on the clock.
With this as a fixed point, a little bit of backtracking, when the picture froze for the fourth time to July 26, it was already the day when Xiaoye and Terui broke up after arguing.
Zhao Sheng injured his foot and faced a professional crisis of "whether he can continue to dance", and has not replied to Xiaoye's message for two weeks. Xiao Ye waited for two weeks, and couldn't help but bring cakes and flowers on Zhaosheng's birthday to take the initiative to find him, but the other party said, "I hope you can wait for me again."
A non-violent quarrel in the taxi pulled the hearts of the two who clearly wanted to get closer to each other, and since then, they have been separated from each other, leaving only a bouquet of flowers that have not been sent.
The previous two years were sweet love times. On Zhaosheng's birthday, Xiaoye gave him a hairpin, and the two sneaked into the aquarium to hide from the security guard to kiss but were seen by polar bears, hugging each other and eating cake on the sofa to watch "Earth Night".
The jumping scene is brutal, and the time is turned back to the last July 26th, the day Terui and Koba first met. Xiaoye was invited by a friend to watch a dance drama, and at the celebration banquet at the end of the dance drama, Terui talked to Xiaoye and asked her about her feelings about dance choreography.
Xiaoye bluntly said that she felt that the dance did not fit the theme and could not play a role, and then learned that Terui was the choreographer director and left the scene embarrassed.
Terui and Xiaoye talk about this dance.
But there are always some coincidences, Xiaoye is accidentally locked up on the rooftop, and is not "rescued" until Terui opens the door. So the two drank beer and strolled down the long street. Suddenly, Xiaoye imitated Terui's dance moves, and the two danced a pas de deux on the long street. This is the night of the birth of love, and the long shot pulled out illustrates each other's hearts, and the circles of dancing and laughter are the climax of the end of the film.
However, the place where love begins, and where this story of "loss" ends.
In the film, the director seems to be verifying the particularity of every detail, such as the hairpin that makes Terui meditate, the movie "Earth Night" that Terui watched, the strange expression on Xiaoye's face when he heard passengers say that he was on his birthday today (July 26), and Xiaoye's natural stretching movements when washing the car.
Koba and Terui, who mimic the plot of "Earth Night".
As if taking the audience to reveal "why the two became what they are", the director presents a relationship between things and people with many subtle expressions and daily actions.
Is it sane to shoot a love story like this?
However, this kind of shooting method of connecting the plot with special nodes is also dangerous.
As director Matsui Daigo said: The "time jump" in the movie is difficult to understand at a cursory glance, and if the audience does not actively invest, it is difficult to understand what the work wants to express. This kind of narrative requires the audience to mobilize subjective initiative, so it is more difficult to be accepted by the public.
At the same time, tens of minutes of ignorance may have made the audience drowsy; Tasting the details of the memories always makes people feel unproductive; And the plot with weak ups and downs and its loose tonality determine that it can only impress a part of the audience.
In fact, when it was promoted to the market as a niche literary romance film, there was already a natural audience choice: literary youth.
Teruo, 34, stretches along to music.
The original definition of the film by "Heguan Image", the importer of "Slightly", was "a film more suitable for film festivals or video platforms". But after the Beijing Film Festival screening venue was full and the Douban score went all the way up, "Slightly" had the opportunity to be put into theaters.
Romance films are a kind of commercial genre films with a clear genre identity, which often shows the process of the male and female protagonists from the emergence and development of love and overcoming obstacles. Love created in art is absolutely transcendent, and this characteristic has also made many love-themed movies classics, such as the recently re-screened "Titanic".
However, many pure love films in Japan do not show the absolute transcendence of love, but only present a kind of "realism". The delicate, unexplainable atmosphere of love, and the termination of the relationship because of some seemingly insignificant little things, are the real state in love.
Stills from "Remembering a little".
It is these peculiar feelings and ordinary trivialities that make up the outline of love. There is no "cheating, abortion, terminal illness" these chickens and dogs jumping plots, the picture is quiet and warm, some are the flow of feelings between the two, and even do not need lines to portray the love story.
The reason for the introduction of "Harmony Image" into "Slightly" is: first of all, love movies are a very attractive movie type, and its narrative form is more exploratory, and there will be a process of stripping the cocoon when watching the movie, which is very fresh and ingenious, making people look very comfortable.
But what "Slightly" presents is not just a literary love story.
Ordinary stories are heart-wrenching
The creation of "Little" originated around the time of the Japanese government's first declaration of emergency in the spring of 2020.
Working photo of the movie "Remembering a little": Ikematsu Zhuangryo, Matsui Daigo and Ozaki worldview.
On the show "Our Time", CreepHyp's lead singer Ozaki Worldview said that at that time, the big show was forced to abort and he was in a state of painful mental instability. The uncertainty of the future tormented him, and he wrote the song for this.
Subsequently, Ozaki sent the song "Earth Night" he composed to Matsui Daigo, hoping that Matsui would use this song to compose. Matsui said, "I think this is Ozaki's distress signal. ”
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, people had to stay in the same place all the time, which also inspired Matsui. After repeatedly watching Jim Jamusch's "Earth Night", he decided to create a story that happened in the same place and at different times, using fixed-point observations, going back a year at a time.
Keeping close to the environment and creating a meticulous love story of small characters is a characteristic of many Japanese pure love films. For example, the classic "Tokyo Love Story" is a love story depicted in the early 90s during the Japanese bubble economy.
A still from "Tokyo Love Story".
"Little" was created in an era of pandemic, when people were worried about a downward economy and panicked about an unstable life. It is in this context of the times that "Slightly" tells a story of "never going back", which is more poignant. What can't be returned is not only the broken relationship, but also the life of close contact with people.
During the epidemic period, Xiaoye and Zhaosheng went to work for daily protection and testing.
Therefore, although this is a romance literary film, it has a strong realism color.
The reason why Japanese pure love movies can achieve good results in the Chinese market is precisely because they accurately hit the pain points of young people.
Yuji Sakamoto, the screenwriter of last year's popular "Bouquet", is best at describing the ordinary and cruel love stories of Japanese young people. He has created many classic works, such as "Tokyo Love Story", "The Most Perfect Divorce", "Quartet" and so on.
In his works, the contradictions, desires, ideals, and views of marriage and love of young people are expressed in the most ordinary stories and the most straightforward language.
A still from "Bouquet of Love".
In the letter of the male protagonist Guangsheng to his ex-wife in "The Most Perfect Divorce", he said: "After marrying you, I learned a lot of things. Toothbrushes side by side on the sink, feet in the bed, pudding in the fridge that disappears sometime, going down the stairs first and up the stairs behind you... Love will one day become life, and life will become joy. ”
Even if you recall what you learned in marriage, it is still a daily scene, and the contradictions of marriage, love and life invade every little detail of life. Ordinary details can embody love and defeat love.
The golden sentence of Yuji Sakamoto in "The Most Perfect Divorce".
The social dilemmas faced by young people in East Asian countries have too many things in common, such as unaffordable housing, jobs that occupy life, diminishing desires, and romantic feelings that cannot be sustained.
In a society where uncertainty spreads, people choose to keep themselves, stop talking at every moment when they should be clear, and say a word when they clearly remember a lot of sad past, but only "slightly remembered some".
Stills from "Remembering a little".
At the end of "Slightly", Terui stands in front of the faint window of the morning light like a pictorial, the picture is still for more than a minute, and the ending song slowly sounds. Such a large area of white space gives the audience plenty of room for imagination, director Matsui said, "I hope the audience finds themselves in these white space."
Terui standing quietly in front of the window.
Perhaps young people lack the security to bravely make the distribution of romance and reality, but in any case, we still can't give up some quiet warm moments.
Proofreader: Huang Siyun
Operation: Ono
Typesetting: Han Bofei