It's been a few days since I watched The Long Season, and I'm still ruminating it over and over again. It tells the tragedy of a generation in the skin of comedy, an era that runs over people's destiny like a rumbling train, and people are helpless and powerless to resist in the face of an out-of-control fate. However, this work not only takes us back to a lost era in a clever form, but also reshapes our "Northeast Impression" from another perspective.
Many film and television dramas with the northeast as the background, especially suspense dramas, often take place in winter, creating the northeast very dark, depressing, and even dilapidated. This is the case with the Northeast in "Daylight Fireworks", "Undocumented Crime" and "Double Detective", which together shape people's overall impression of the Northeast: the city rises with smoke-billowing chimneys, shrouding people in a haze; Vast snow engulfs cities and primeval forests, and cold erodes people's living space; In the dilapidated streets and alleys, people walk in the night with white breath, and sin grows in the darkness.
Extreme environments are very helpful for the story to unfold, such as in "Double Detective", a girl who has lived in Beijing since childhood is tied up to the northeast, and the unfamiliar environment makes her escape very low, and the snow-covered primeval forest makes her fate full of uncertainty. But at the same time, the extreme environment also makes it easy for the audience to form a "stereotype" of a place.
In "The Long Season", we enter another time and space in the northeast, and the story unfolds in autumn. Between the green cornfields, eighteen years ago, Wang Xiang rumbled by in a train, which was filled with laughter. The camera slowly pulls up with the smoke of the train and moves to the sky overhead, the sky is also bright, although it is not blue, but it is not cloudy, it is a bright color reflected by white clouds. This also sets the main tone of the film, although the fate of the protagonists is tragic, but in the environment and atmosphere, there is no deliberate rendering of that heaviness. The changes of the times and the sharp turn of the fate of the characters all happen on ordinary days, the seasons rotate as usual, the sky should be bright, the sun is still dazzling, but the birch steel is slowly collapsing, the shadow of layoffs hangs over people, the cloud of shredding corpses also descends overhead, and people's fate is like a runaway train, heading to different ends.
Like telling tragic stories in the form of comedy, "The Long Season" actually wraps a bright skin for obscure stories in color. It tells about fate, but does not use extreme circumstances to set up fate, nor does it set up doubts, but allows the transformation of fate to happen in daily life, even if it is the discovery of the shredded corpse, it is on a sunny day.
Director Xin Shuang said: "What I want to prove is that there are also four seasons in the northeast. In fact, I did not want to restore the stereotypical old northeast, but I wanted to present the northeast in my mind, where it can also be colorful, the sky can be very sunny, and everyone is actively living. ”
Obviously, he did it, the northeast under his lens is indeed refreshing, whether it is 98 or 16 years, the colors are saturated, which can also dissolve the depressing feeling brought by the fate of the characters to a certain extent, making the viewing process easier from a visual point of view.
"The Long Season" really broke my depressed and obscure impression of the Northeast, and made me realize that in fact, the Northeast is not much different from the city we live in in other seasons, with lush vegetation, babbling water, colorful street market stores, and all kinds of roadside stalls.
In addition to breaking the "stereotype" of the Northeast environment, "The Long Season" also reshaped my impression of Northeasterners. Most of my previous impressions of Northeasterners came from the popular Internet conversation "What do you see?" "Look at you", and "Once Upon a Time in the Northeast". Of course, the shouting Mai culture also gave me some preconceived ideas about Northeasterners, making me think that it was full of social people with tattoos and gold chains.
For no reason, Northeasterners seem to have a reckless and quackish atmosphere in my impression, as if their character is to do it without saying a word - "if you can do it, don't talk about it".
But in "The Long Season", a group of stoic, tenacious and optimistic people are created.
Wang Xiang lost his only son, Wang Yang, lost his wife, and his family was destroyed, but he raised Wang Bei and continued to survive. He was an outcast of his time, but he brought home the outcast on the railroad tracks, rebuilt his life, and learned how to be a father again. For more than ten years, he has also been living in the past, trying to chase down the murderer and give an explanation to his son and wife. Compared with his younger self, he lives a much more peaceful life, no longer a whistle, but an old man who is calm, not shocked by changes, and laughs at life.
Biao Zi is actually more in line with the northeasterners in the impression, but only on the surface, he does not like to make trouble in his bones, and even a little prodded, but he never admits defeat on his mouth, and he is a thief with a mouth, such as bragging with Xiaolu, fighting with Ma Desheng, simply the king of mouth cannons. Because of this, Biao Zi also contracted most of the laughs in the play almost by himself. In fact, Biaozi also has an innocent and cute side, and was regarded as a takeover by Liru before marriage, he knew the truth, he could ignore the future, beat the factory director with the iron fist of the working class, and afterwards, regardless of gossip, married Liru. After knowing that Liru was in love with someone else, she was not stalker and chose to divorce. Although he is an ordinary man who has achieved nothing, he is indeed an optimistic and good person, he has seriously loved Liru, and he happily faces the ditches and bumps in life, Liru can't get pregnant and raises pigeons, and dances when she is divorced, as if there is really nothing in life that can't be passed. It's just that fate seems to have played a joke on him, and he had a car accident when his life turned around.
Of course, "The Long Season" also shows the cultural and artistic side of Northeast China, and Biaozi and Wang Yang are both literary and artistic youths. This almost subverts the impression of Northeasterners as "reckless".
Biaozi's bedroom has a pile of books, as well as Freud's "The Analysis of Dreams", and the girl asks them to watch movies and talk about literature and philosophy. And when Liru encounters problems in life, she also chooses to find answers in books and borrows books from Biaozi (although this may be an excuse to meet Biaozi).
Wang Yang is more like a literary youth, Shen Mo asked him what kind of person he wanted to be, he said that he wanted to be a poet, and when he dated Shen Mo, he read her the poems he wrote. He asked Shen Mo to watch "Titanic", and like Jack, the male protagonist of "Titanic", he sacrificed himself to save his lover.
I guess that writing poetry is an exploration of Wang Yang's face of an unknown life, and it is also a kind of sustenance for him when facing his confused youth.
"The Long Season" shows the other side of Northeasterners - the literary side. They are not as cold and violent as many film and television works, they are no different from us, and have rich emotional and spiritual corners. They also crave to be recognized, to be understood, to snap their fingers with a resonance and shatter distant things.
Although the background of "The Long Season" is tragic, it shows a different Northeast and Northeast people, which also makes it stand out among film and television dramas with the same background and become a unique one. And as more and more people see this drama, Xin Shuang's desire to reshape the "Northeast Impression" may be realized.