Baby Anne has changed its name to Gyeongsan Pain Youth has passed

◎Stones like jade

At two o'clock in the afternoon on weekdays, the cinema in the core business district of the first-tier city screened "August Weiyang", plus a total of 4 audiences. A young boy left the scene halfway through, and the two young girls chatted in small pieces, occasionally emitting a low, not disturbing laugh. The direct reflection of the audience is consistent with the evaluation of netizens, and on the 4th of the release, about 12,000 people evaluated it, and the Douban score was 3.9.

The film is adapted from Baby Anne's short story of the same name, published in 2001, and belongs to the author's early masterpieces. Although the second creation of the novel to the film is not judged by the degree of reduction, it must be admitted that this film has a high degree of reduction to the original. From the perspective of character image and storyline, the film retains the main trunk of the novel: Wei Yang was abused by his mother since childhood, and the mother and daughter were dependent on each other, and later Wei Yang lost his hand and pushed his mother down the stairs to death. After growing up, Wei Yang and Xiao Qiao met and became friends in the Japanese class, and then had a relationship with Xiao Qiao's fiancé Chao Yan. Chao Yan breaks up with Xiao Qiao and asks to be with Wei Yang, who declares that he wants to keep Xiao Qiao by his side. In the end, Xiao Qiao committed suicide, Wei Yang found out that she was pregnant, and decided to give birth to a child.

Judging from the lines and audiovisual effects, the mysterious atmosphere that is obviously deliberately created but not disgusting is very Anne baby. However, the Douban score of Anne's baby works is 7 to 8 points, which is not low in terms of attention or evaluation. Why didn't the aura of the original film envelop this film?

The changing pain of youth

A little glance at the film's reviews makes it easy to extract the keyword "painful youth." "When I saw the love scene on the screen really reappearing on the screen of a girl who had lost love, cut her wrists in the bathtub, and mixed blood and water, I confirmed with horror that this year is really 2021." The comments of netizens can't help but remind people of the melon-eating masses of the past few years of ridicule for Ma Sichun's addiction to "painful youth".

In fact, not only Baby Anne and Ma Sichun, but also youth literature and movies, including Guo Jingming, Luo Luo, Rao Xueman and others, have been steadily at the bottom in recent years, and the overwhelming ridicule seems to vaguely point to "youth", especially the pain of youth. There are many kinds of emotional narratives about youth, and today, the one of loneliness and sadness is obviously no longer popular. Take a closer look at the Douban pages of works such as "August Weiyang" and "Farewell to Vian", most of the praise that has a lot of affection comes from before 2010. There seems to be a law in the film and television industry: when certain phenomena and things are classified and named, it often means that it is going to pass. "Big heroine" is like this, and so is "pain youth".

However, the pain of youth itself is not a false proposition. The so-called youth, the so-called growth, generally refers to the process of a person establishing a relatively complete self-knowledge and establishing a relatively stable relationship with others and society. This process inevitably encounters setbacks large and small, and experiences the pain of growing up. There are two major sources of youth pain: one is love and friendship, and the other is the original family. In the era of Baby Anne's popularity, the former was clearly the narrative focus, and the theme of campus fiction was always the love triangle between good friends, both male and female writers.

Also Baby Anne, "July and Ansheng" was published earlier than "August Weiyang", and the core of its story is also the maturity of girls in the contradictions and conflicts of love and friendship. Zeng Guoxiang's secondary creation can win the double harvest of word of mouth and awards, because its convergence restrains the external conflict between the characters, and gives the two heroines a relatively rich inner layer. As for a large number of assembly line youth films, the "tear-abortion-going abroad" trilogy around the love triangle has been uniformly evaluated as "dog blood". Although "August Weiyang" did not openly fight to grab boyfriends and did not have abortions, the degree of horse grabbing in the bathtub suicide was enough to shock the current young people.

The reason for the shock may be that the current narrative of youth seems to focus more on another source of pain. Douban's "Parents Are Scourge Group" or new types of youth stories such as "Dog Thirteen" and "Over Spring", the focus of the narrative has shifted to the individual emotional trauma brought about by the original family. Although "August Weiyang" also shows the twisted and vicious relationship between Weiyang and his mother, if according to the current narrative inertia, Weiyang faces Xiao Qiao, who looks very similar to his mother, it is impossible to produce soft emotions of protection or cherishing, and it should be more about control or possession related to the desire for power.

Logic aside and reasonableness, the film's faithfulness to the original work here inevitably produces an atmosphere of "old fashion", which is quite similar to the old Shanghai flavor deliberately created by the film around Weiyang's childhood. It's just that the director probably forgot that if Wei Yang is 25 years old at this moment, then her mother can't be a Republic of China dancer dressed up.

A new generation of "attribution impulses"

If Wei Yang's mother-daughter relationship is an "old fashion", then the film's addition to Xiao Qiao can be regarded as a new era label. Young people in the new era are not sad about the loss of love, not that they do not want to fall in love, but they want to know how our love is successful and why it fails. The film sets up a father who cares for his daughter with money after divorce as a reason for her eagerness to build her own small family. This is a bridge segment that is very much in line with the current cognitive model.

Psychoanalytic theory tells us that each person's marriage and intimacy is a projection of the parents' marital relationship—unconscious replication or conscious resistance. To borrow a line from Baby Anne, it's "in the end". This kind of "in the doom" has probably become the source of anxiety for many young mothers at present, afraid that they will not accompany their children enough, love them wrong, and leave emotional wounds that are difficult to heal.

It is not intended here to criticize or refute expert opinion, but only to be interested in the strong "attribution impulse" in the emotional narrative of this era. "There is no unprovoked love, and there is no unprovoked hate": in the fairy fantasy, love is bound to past lives; in the modern city, encounter is a reunion with a small loss; in the delay drama where the lover becomes a confidant, a childhood teacher brotherhood is also needed to clarify the relationship.

And ten years ago, when Baby Anne was popular, the weather vane of emotion didn't seem to be like this. Whether it is Xiao Qiao's ten-year relationship with Chaoyan, or Chaoyan's empathy, the novel has no explanation. The arrangement of the film is clear: Xiao Qiao is the original family lack of love, Chao Yan explains that "I and Xiao Qiao are just a habit", as to why Chao Yan fell in love with Wei Yang, it is naturally a return of the motorcycle worn down by daily life and The return of Haruki Murakami's former hobby. Believing that there must be a reason for ethereal emotions, and trying to name irrational passions is more or less a kind of caution that belongs to contemporary people. The inexplicable or unrepentant in youth can be there, but in a large era of increasingly compressed fault tolerance, it is best to end as soon as possible and mature as soon as possible.

Anne's baby-like traumatic youth is conclusively obsolete, and there's not much to be sorry about. It is not tired of the so-called disease-free moaning of the pretense, whether this is a true feeling or a pretentious gesture, the pretense is often just a stigma of sensitivity, sensitive and shameful, just as like Anne Baby or Guo Jingming is not shameful. Their obsolescence is nothing more than a law, and people will always grow up, just as Baby Anne has changed its name to Gyeongsan. Gyeongsan and Baby Anne have different readers, and this generation cannot reproduce the youth of the previous generation.

What is really worth noting is the changes in the imagination and speech of youth: from "pain" to "trauma"; from confusion and confusion to "secondary two" and "hot blood"; from loveless abortion and betrayal to "sugar abuse of dogs" and "sugar with knives". The "urge to attribute" and the obsession with THE HAPPY ENDING are actually issued in conjunction with complex and profound psychosocial projections, the easiest of which is probably the young generation's hidden desire for stability and order in a life that is increasingly solidified and risky.