Southeast Asian Culture Rubik's Cube in "Barbarian Invasion": Who is "I"?

Malaysian Chinese director Chen Cuimei's feature film "Barbarian Invasion" was released in China, although the schedule was limited, but it received a good reputation.

What is a barbarian? The film quotes the German female scholar Hannah Arendt: "The birth of every child is an invasion of this civilized society by barbarians." ”

In the film, Li Consummation, played by Chen Cuimei herself, describes her pregnancy experience and says that she is very unhappy to hear others say that "children are your best work", because "a mother is only a passage for children to come to the world, similar to some kind of advanced 3D printer". In the first half of this documentary film style, Li Chengcheng's four- and five-year-old son is indeed like a "barbarian", like a perpetual motion machine, with endless energy, always making trouble, sabotage, and disobeying.

Li Chengcheng in the film is a well-known actor in Southeast Asia, and a single mother who is in a state of confusion and is looking for herself. She spoke Malay to her child, but gave him the name "Universe", pronounced in Mandarin. Meet directors who have worked with them for many years and speak Mandarin; The director took her to the martial arts hall to temporarily hold Buddha's feet, learn kung fu, and speak Cantonese; Indian monks outside the martial arts hall, speaking Tamil; English, on the other hand, is an intermediary between various languages, popping up a few words from time to time.

The movie "Barbarian Invasion" reflects the complex identity connotations of Southeast Asian culture. The picture shows a still from the film. (Infographic/Figure)

The "barbarians" of modern society

Just like at the beginning of the movie, Li Chengcheng takes his son "Universe" ashore from a hazy pier, and when he meets his old friend, he boards another ship, and the film sketches a picture of water, land, boat connection and turmoil. This broken peninsula and archipelago formerly known as the South Sea, the sea and tides bring people of different colors to land and migrate. They are not on a stable and boundless continent, but carry different languages, cultures, histories, and religions, and meet between islands to form puzzles and cubes.

Even the mother and son drew a racial boundary between the pair, the son was accustomed to returning to his own ethnic group, finding children to play games, and the mother brought him to the Chinese, and he needed to constantly "translate" him, both in his language and into his alternative and incompatible nature. As soon as "Universe" entered the martial arts hall, he found a sharp weapon and swung it at people, and his teacher and father were scared out of a cold sweat.

In this disparate, colorful world, are only children barbarians? Each person relative to the other may be a "barbarian". Since the "civilizations" of different groups of people cannot be agreed, everyone may be in a "barbaric" state relative to another civilization. Barbarism is relative, a sense of strangeness that cannot be smoothly recognized and understood.

This sense of strangeness does not only come from language and cultural differences, different genders, generations, identities, and intellectual backgrounds will make the sense of strangeness ubiquitous and infinitely subdivided. Therefore, the title of the film has a philosophical meaning, in the highly mobile and culturally diverse modern society, civilization struggles to maintain a general consensus, but because people do not share stable values like local societies, the community of blood and geography has long been broken, and each person or small group is a "universe", ready to welcome barbarians.

Digital media is another ghostly barbarian of modern society. Although digital products appear in an advanced and convenient appearance, all kinds of lenses, surveillance, live broadcasts, screens, ubiquitous performances, interactions, beauty, and talking to the mirror have long invaded real life, and all real details are glowing with the soft light of Truman's world, which is the paradox of mediated survival: replacing civilization in the name of civilization. Li Chengcheng in the film is an actor and star, originally shuttling between reality and fiction. Thus, cinema, and the fictional encroachment on life that cinema represents, is also like a barbarian invasion.

From "I" is everything, to everything is "me"

The director of the film, Hu Zijie, tells Li Chengcheng the story of a Japanese kendo master Miyamoto Musashi. A young man asked Miyamoto Musashi to compete, but Miyamoto did not appear, the young swordsman was anxious, and just when he thought that Miyamoto was going to make a good appointment, the master finally appeared. At this time, the setting sun, Miyamoto deliberately stood on the side of the back sun, the young swordsman was so shaken by the dazzling sunset that he could hardly open his eyes, Miyamoto Musashi shot and killed with a sword. The director gestured in the backlit water while talking, saying that for young people, the sword is everything, for Miyamoto Musashi, everything is a sword, time is a sword, and the sunset is also a sword. Then, he sent out his own feelings, when he was young, he felt that movies were the most important, movies were everything, and now he feels that everything is movies.

Li Chengcheng quipped and said, are you coming to me to make a movie like Hong Changxiu? Chen Cuimei likes Korean director Hong Chang-so, and he always makes the story take place between three or four people, they are directors, writers, intellectuals, artists, or young people who are embarking on the creative path. Hong Chang-so's favorite location is a bar in Seoul, South Korea, with a very literary name called "Novel".

But "Barbarian Invasion" is obviously not Hong Chang-so-style film, or rather, it nests a Park Chan-wook-style action genre film into Hong Chang-so's "cinematic reflexivity". Like Hong Changxiu, Chen Cuimei talks about movies in films, parody previous films, and deconstructs the spectacle and illusion created by the film by exposing the filmmaking process.

The second half of the film directly shows a Southeast Asian version of the low-cost "Spy" in the form of meta-movies and play-within-a-play. There are a large number of film history masterpieces, all of which are meta-films, such as Fellini's "Eight and a Half", Truffaut's "Day and Night", Woody Allen's "Cairo Purple Rose". No other art form is as suitable for self-referential as film, and perhaps film directors are people who are both narcissistic and reflective. But "Barbarian Invasion" obviously wants to be more weighty and create a comedic effect, more like the Japanese movie "Don't Stop" a few years ago that ironically recreated the thriller production process.

The pressure and embarrassment in reality directly affected the filmmaking, and Li Chengcheng had to face the requirements of the capital and the embarrassment of setting up a love scene with his ex-husband. The martial arts practiced hard in reality were soon used in the film for the fight of real knives and guns, and they were beaten no less than when they were in the martial arts gym. Lee's Malay ex-husband, whose T-shirt is written by Philip Dick's novel Will a Bionic Man Dream of an Electric Sheep? , Xuanzhi and Xuanzhi's senior monk, suddenly asked her under the tree, do you choose a red pill or a blue pill? This classic line of "The Matrix" is more like a deliberate gang than a miracle walking on the sea.

If we extrapolate from the syntax that the sword is everything/everything is a sword, the movie is everything/everything is a movie, for Li Chengcheng, her transformation is from "I" is everything to everything to everything is "me". In the stage where "I" is everything, she is popular and omnipotent, plays various difficult roles, falls in love with writers, cooks, clowns, lawyers and many other people, "I" is self-sufficient like a star, building galaxies and large worlds, and it seems that starting from "I", you can lead to endless possibilities.

At the stage where everything is "me", "me" is relativized. Because the beauty was late, when the master of the martial arts hall talked about how wonderful a scene he watched many years ago, he didn't recognize this Li Chengcheng in front of him as the starring actor. "I" no longer regard myself as so important, even losing my center of gravity, shaking, and needing to find all kinds of references—children, occupations, bodies—to constantly explore who "I" am. Everything is a mirror of "me", a crutch of "me", and "me" itself is like a container with empty water.

The Southeast Asian nature of Barbarian Invasion

Outside of the Taiwan Straits and the Three Regions, Malaysia is not the region with the largest number of Chinese, but it is the country with the largest Chinese speaking population, which is a unique phenomenon in Southeast Asia and the world. MCA writers, actors, singers and debaters are increasingly active in Chinese mainland. As far as movies are concerned, Malaysia has Venice Golden Lion Award director Choi Mingliang, but, like writer Wong Kam Shu, Tsai Mingliang has long left his birthplace of Kuching to work and settle in Taiwan; There is also the international movie star Michelle Yeoh, who has just won an Oscar, and her stage first in Hong Kong and then in Hollywood.

Chen Cuimei, a Chinese director who grew up in Malaysia, is originally from Quanzhou, Fujian. (Infographic/Figure)

In an interview, Tan Tsui Mei said: "Malaysia has a relatively complete Chinese education system, Chinese newspapers and magazines. The most unique thing is that it is actually a kind of self-organized education system of the people. From another point of view, it also shows that Malaysian Chinese have formed an independent system and have not fully integrated into society. ”

When Chen Cuimei was a child, she only spoke Hokkien with her family; After entering elementary school, her teacher taught her Mandarin; When you go to a public secondary school, you have to learn the official Malay language Chinese; After arriving at a private university and working, you need to communicate in English. In life, speaking a sentence often involves mixing different languages, like Malay salad (a mix of spices and fruits).

Jason Byrne, the protagonist of "Spy", wakes up in the Mediterranean Sea and Li Chengcheng wakes up in the South China Sea, and he or she loses his memory and constantly asks the question: "Who am I"? In the play, Lee speaks Vietnamese, Burmese Kachin, Malay, Chinese, Korean, and Thai. Who is "I" is not only a personal question raised by Li Chengcheng, but also an almost subconscious question by the director about her life world.

In addition to cultural hybridity and the difficulty of defining identity, what does Southeast Asianity mean? The film also provides inspiration from at least two aspects, one is that Southeast Asia, as the middle ground of major civilizations, is not obsessed with originality, India, China, West Asian Islam, Europe and the United States, and more recently Japanese and Korean cultures, have cast heavy shadows here, and the director in the film makes a second-hand "Spy", without psychological baggage. Second, the women who land on the coast in the play appear in the form of refugees, another sense of "barbarian invasion". Lee Chengcheng's role as a Vietnamese bride and Burmese refugee has exposed Southeast Asia as a "wound" in the third world.

Within Southeast Asia, there are also complex levels of economic and social development. The movement of people across regions is often forced by helplessness or even desperation. Many of the invading "barbarians" were just destitute dwellers. When they leave their homeland, it's like a boy named "Universe" leaving his mother. Yes, everything is a movie, only the film is not responsible for providing answers.

Southern Weekend reporter Li Heng

Editor-in-charge: Liu Youxiang