Zhu Yilong's new film won Hu Ge and Zhou Dongyu, and 20 keywords revealed the hidden truth of "Mistakes by the River".

"Humans can't understand fate, so I pretend to be fate and put on the confused and unfathomable faces of the gods." This passage from Camus's play "Caligula" can be regarded as the revelation of the highest theme of the whole film.

Film Review丨Issue 8丨Rational viewing, exclusive film review

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Can't read "Mistakes by the River"? Is it a bad movie or a masterpiece? As an art film, "The Mistake by the River" has Yu Hua's original work as the foundation, and after being shortlisted for the Cannes Unkind of Attention Unit, it won the best film at the Pingyao Film Festival, with a Douban score of 7.5, and many film critics and literary and artistic young people "praised", which proves its reputation in the audience of art films.

However, "the catastrophe of the general public, the contemplation and surprise of fans, and the carnival of film critics" are the fate of almost every art film after it enters the public theater, and behind it is the dislocation of the audience. Interestingly, although "The Mistake by the River" was also criticized by the theater audience for "not understanding", many viewers were willing to sit in the theater seats and search for interpretation stickers while watching it, and even fell into self-reflection - "I found out that when everyone couldn't understand this movie, no one questioned Yu Hua and the director, they all blamed themselves for not having culture." ”

This phenomenon is extremely obvious on platforms such as "Red Shake" and the scarf, and driven by the film's target audience, which is the young group of Kochi, this potential "catastrophe" has gradually evolved into a brain-burning interpretation carnival. The estimated box office of the film has also reached nearly 300 million, and it is expected to become the highest-grossing domestic art film after the Spring Festival.

Hu Ge's "It's Not Worth the Trip" and Zhou Dongyu's "Burning Winter" did not perform as well as "The Mistake by the River"

And the richness of the textual detail of this film can also withstand our microscope-like deep scrutiny. This article tries to start with 20 keywords and do a slightly more comprehensive analysis.

1.

[Camus's lines]

The film begins with a quote from Camus's play Caligula: "Man cannot understand fate, so I disguise myself as fate and put on the confused and unfathomable faces of the gods." This passage can be regarded as the revelation of the highest theme of the whole film.

In Camus's Caligula, the Roman tyrant Caligula, after the death of his sister and lover, suddenly realizes that "men must die, and they are not happy, and sorrow and pain are meaningless". Realizing the absurdity of the world, Caligula decided to "play fate" himself, using his royal power to dictate the fate of others, saying, "The reason why I care about human life is because I myself regard death as my home."

Kang Chunlei as a madman

The madman in "The Mistake by the River" has similar characteristics to Caligula - they are the embodiment of irrational, unpredictable, and absurd fates that kill and rob other lives, and he seems to have taken on the "confused and unfathomable" faces of the gods, leading the endings of his mother-in-law, the poet Wang Hong, the transvestite Xu Liang, and the little boy to death, while he himself wanders outside the laws of the world.

Yu Hua also said when talking about "The Mistake by the River", "The view of fate is more accurate than ours, and we have been living in the unknown." Ma Zhe, a criminal police officer who tries to find the truth to break the unknown and put the madman (fate) in a cage, finally falls into madness after realizing this absurdity and unknowability.

2.

【Rivers & Rainwater】

The river and rain are important images of the film, and they also create a clammy and cruel atmosphere in the film.

The river can be an unpredictable fate, a grand torrent of historical times, a mysterious thing that sweeps away and drowns everything, it bears witness to everything that happens by the river, gushing without intervening.

Rain often appears in crime films, in which it seems that there is rain after every murder, and the place where the story takes place is also called Peishui City. The rain washes away the traces of crime, and it also makes people even more unable to see the face of reality.

3.

[A teenager playing a police officer]

The first scene of the film is a condensation of the story and moral of the whole film. A group of teenagers play the story of the police catching thieves in an abandoned building, the teenagers wear police hats and hold toy guns, knock open the doors of the room one by one to find the murderer, and the last door opens but it is a "dead-end road" facing the street, so that he has no way out and almost falls, and the outside is the real world of smoke and rain.

The boy is like Ma Zhe, who can't find the truth of the world, and leads himself to the "abyss".

4.

【Stone and Water Clothes】

When the madman first appears, the camera very clearly emphasizes the leaking ass under his clothes, which are a kind of object of shame and concealment, symbolizing the discipline of society, and the group of madmen is obviously not bound by this discipline.

The children in the film throw stones at social outliers like the madman, and the stone becomes a weapon to strangle the other, and the madman borrows this weapon by putting clothes that symbolize discipline into the water and pressing the stone on top of it, forming his rebellion against social discipline.

When Ma Zhe first met the madman by the river, he also imitated the madman putting his coat into the water, a gesture of trying to communicate on an equal footing, suggesting a certain "identity" with him—in his heart, there was actually a "madman" who was not disciplined by society.

5.

【Leather Jacket & Police Uniform】

Ma Zhe, played by Zhu Yilong, wore a black leather jacket as soon as he appeared, whether it was a meeting or a group photo, he looked out of place with the neat and uniform police uniforms of his colleagues, and the leather jacket was an externalized symbol of him as an "alien" and a certain degree of "madman".

As mentioned above, when he first met the madman, he had taken off his leather jacket and reached some kind of "assimilation" with the madman, and the madman was also attracted by his leather jacket at the time, at the end of the film, Ma Zhe put the leather jacket on the bank and dived into the river by himself, at this time the madman appeared, put Ma Zhe's leather jacket on his body, Ma Zhe then knocked down the "madman in Ma Zhe's coat", and then he was added to the police uniform to accept the collective commendation, and even his wife "persuaded" him in the photo studio: This police uniform is very good, don't change it.

From leather jackets to police uniforms, Ma Zhe killed the madman inside and returned to the embrace of the system.

6.

【Director's Table Tennis】

Table tennis, as a national sport, is already beyond the existence of sports itself, and on the short video platform, "Accompanying the leader to play table tennis is all about human feelings, and it's time to perform real technology" has become a traffic password.

The director's first appearance was to be surrounded by table tennis, and a meeting was held to make everyone attach great importance to the evaluation of advanced collectives. The rotten style of the organ revealed in the film has the flavor of black satirical comedies such as "Back to Back Face to Face" and "Black Cannon Incident" in the 90s.

In the film, table tennis is an olive branch thrown by the system, and it is a recruitment order for Guishun, but Ma Zhe ruthlessly smashed when playing table tennis with the director, and the director unconsciously took a sentence, "This mistake must be corrected", when a box of table tennis balls accidentally rolled down all over the ground, and colleagues rushed to pick it up, Ma Zhe stood there alone and pondered, and later Ma Zhe dreamed that the director used table tennis as a lottery ball to draw a lottery for him, and he finally got the system's commendation as he wished.

At the same time, the chaos of the ping-pong ball when it rolls to the ground is also an allusion to Ma Zhe's increasingly divided spiritual world.

7.

【Abandoned Movie Theater】

Director Wei Shujun continues his penchant for "meta-cinema" (films that tell the story) in "Wild Horse Mane" and "Yong'an Town Stories", with abandoned cinemas, dismantled Wanning cinema signs, burning projectors, etc., but his use of meta-film elements is not limited to the fun of film.

In the film, the director asked Ma Zhe to move the office of the criminal police team into the theater, so the police case became a scene on the stage, Wei Shujun said: "The setting of the cinema is a perspective, and Ma Zhe is placed on a stage, which provides us with an angle to watch him and adds a kind of fiction to the film itself." So when the audience realizes that Ma Zhe is "insane", they can't help but think, so is the previous narrative real, could it be Ma Zhe's fantasy? Even, this is actually a historical stage full of irony.

In the film, Ma Zhe was originally a "man in the painting" who was watched on the stage, but later he withdrew and became an audience in the theater seat, and the screen showed the dream that connected the process of the madman's crime, which belonged to Ma Zhe's "Truman world", he finally realized that he was in the story, he stood up and looked at the audience blankly with his back to the screen, which was the director's blatant reminder of the fictionality of the film.

In addition, Wei Shujun is also good at using clever "self-reflection" to interact with fans, when he was at a loss for the murderer, the apprentice said to Ma Zhe, Master, I have seen a movie in which the deceased's father is a participant in a war of aggression, don't you think the same way? It seems to be teasing us off-screen, trying to break our expectations of certain narrative routines, and also using self-mockery to dispel our potential dissatisfaction with the film's lack of routines.

8.

[Masochism, transvestism, extramarital affairs]

Mother-in-law, Wang Hong, and Xu Liang, the three deceased have a common characteristic, they are all outliers who cannot tolerate the mainstream of society.

In the original novel, she adopts a madman, and she enjoys the pleasure of being whipped by a madman, because it is similar to her dead husband's domestic violence against her. In the film, which is more subtle, Ma Zhe discovers whip marks in her room and on the roof, and finally reveals her masochistic tendencies in a dream.

Xu Liang was given the setting of transvestism, and Wang Hong was endowed with the identity characteristics of underground lover/poet, so that together with the mother-in-law with masochistic tendencies, they formed a group portrait of a social "alien", and died from the secular gaze and the strangulation of the collective consciousness of another society.

9.

【Imagery of a madman】

Wei Shujun's rich adaptation of the background of the original Xu Liang, Wang Hong and other characters, although it is more in line with the requirements of film visualization and character logic, weakens Yu Hua's original work as a warning for reflecting on literature.

In the original book, Wang Hong and Xu Liang and other characters repeatedly appear "None of you doubt", "I never believe that others will believe me", "I know that I can't escape any matter what", because in a crazy era when "desire to add crimes" is rampant, too many people can't escape the irrational collective attack, and Xu Liang in the novel even has to prove that he is a murderer, and uses self-destruction to gain control over his own destiny.

As an image of absurd fate and irrational times, the madman is embodied in the film because of the setting of "heterogeneous group portraits" of masochism, transvestism, and underground affairs, and is embodied into another social mainstream consciousness that is more secular and universal, but also lethal.

10.

["Moonlight Sonata", "Flower Heart", "Drunk", "Teasing You"]

Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" appears many times in the film, it is not as quiet and gentle as the title of the song seems to be, on the contrary, it has a deep and uneasy tense atmosphere of falling, and director Wei Shujun even tasted the horror of killing, so he used this piece in the film.

Another recurring song is Zhou Huajian's "Flower Heart", which is the "glamorous sound" from Taiwan in the 90s, when it appeared in Qian Ling's tape, it was brainwashed by Ma Zhe's apprentice and sung repeatedly, and finally when Ma Zhe left his job and returned to his family, it was this song from the scene of the murder that he sang for his wife's "romance" - the existence of a madman has been deeply imprinted in his heart, even if he chooses to avoid it. At the same time, the lyrics of "Flower Heart" also echo the story of the film: "The heart of the flower is hidden in the stamen... It's never easy to understand."

When Ma Zhe and his apprentice were in the tavern, Hou Baolin's cross talk "Drunk" was played in the background; When Ma Zhe encountered a madman in the tavern, Ma Sanli's cross talk "Teasing You" was played in the background, and the madman laughed wildly behind Ma Zhe's back, full of mockery.

11.

【Pregnant Wife and Puzzle】

Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" was playing on the radio, and the coherent music connected Ma Zhe's case space with his wife's living space. As soon as his wife woke up, she said that she had a dream, and after Xu Liang's death, his wife had a similar big wavy hairstyle, etc., all strengthened the psychological atmosphere of the film.

When his wife weaves wool, Ma Zhe puts woolen coils on his hands, as if he is wearing a pair of handcuffs, and there are a large number of shots in the film that place the characters in cage-like door frames, iron windows, and separation belts, alluding to the predicament of the characters.

When his wife was arguing with Ma Zhe in the kitchen, disagreeing to kill the child who might be mentally retarded and might become the next "crazy man", she was doing the action of beating eggs, and the child was also facing the fate of eggs, whether they could keep their thoughts. His wife's accusation that "you have no emotion" and that "all this is not an accident is providence", although hysterical, it is a choice for people to retain the brilliance of humanity when they fight against absurd fate.

Every time the wife appears, it seems to be a puzzle, it is a picture of a mother and baby, which is the externalization of the pregnant wife's wish to look forward to the birth of the child, and Ma Zhe, who does not want to give birth to a "crazy man", flushes the head of the child in the puzzle into the toilet. Ma Zhe returned to the family after handing over the task of catching the madman to the apprentice, chatting, laughing, drinking and smoking with his wife, this is the most relaxed and warm scene in the whole film, so that it is a little unreal, when they lean and dance, a complete mother and child puzzle suddenly appeared on the wall, as weird as a ghost, the background in the picture is a dazzling "red sun", and red also appears many times in the film, the red coat that the director appears twice, the blood-red projector on the wall when Xu Liang jumped off the building, the red car and red sweater that Ma Zhe is trapped in it, etc.

Ma Zhe's eyes showed horror as a result, no matter in fact, whether the puzzle and the child were still there, or whether Ma Zhe had mental problems, it didn't matter, this scene was a metaphor, Ma Zhe's attempt to kill a certain madman was unsuccessful, "the madman is not dead", "the madman is back", "the madman has always been there".

12.

【Mother-in-law's Goose】

In Yu Hua's original novel, the geese appear repeatedly, and the riverside scene in the movie also appears many times, geese seem to be often used as a metaphor for the "rabble" in literary and artistic works, and in Jiang Wen's "Let the Bullets Fly", there are also goose cities and people who are incited to revolution.

Yu Hua wrote from Ma Zhe's perspective that "the geese are as carefree as ever", even if the mother-in-law who takes care of them dies, even if there are so many murders by the river where they live, they are dull, stupid, and in groups, drifting with the tide in the water, relying on the goose whip in the mother-in-law's hand to guide the way, just like the foolish, blind, and rabble. It was they that made those Hitlerian madnesses.

13.

【The Secret of Dongfeng Train and Qian Ling】

Ma Zhe found a tape in a bag at the scene of the murder, in which the woman Qian Ling poured out her love to the man Hong, and when she said, "I have a secret", the loud train whimper covered the secret.

Ma Zhe and his apprentices found the driver on the train, and the master confirmed that this was an alarm signal that would only be sent out when the train was out of order, and when they stepped off the train, the words "Dalian Locomotive and Rolling Stock Factory", "Dali (brand)" and "Dongfeng 2642" in the background of the camera were particularly conspicuous, which was a train that dates back to the fifties and imitated the Soviet Union.

That's right, the grand "Dongfeng Train" unexpectedly gave the individual breathing space when it broke down, helping Qian Ling cover up the secret of her pregnancy due to an underground affair (claiming to have eaten 20 dumplings and a faintly bulging belly when she learned of Wang Hong's death), making her the only riverside witness in the film who has a name and a surname and can avoid being strangled by a madman. If this train continues to run as it has done in the past few decades, what will happen to many more people?

14.

【Wang Hong and Poetry】

Playing the poet Wang Hong is the "music poet" Mo Xizi poem, the representative work is the song "If you want to die, die in your hands", his appearance in the film is in a trance reminiscent of Haizi. The background of the film is 1995, poetry from the glorious 80s to the sinking 90s, being marginalized is the fate of poetry, although the poetry recitation in the film even entered the "sinking market" in the unit, but the masses responded with laughter.

The poem given to Wang Hong in the film is very beautiful, and when he dies, the narrator rings his tender farewell letter to Qian Ling: "You are the skylight I opened in the cage, and the shackles I willingly make, you are my stable hometown and the island where I wander." We are the smallest utopia in the world. "Reality makes people powerless," but poetry is not our refuge, when the eyes are opened again, reality comes back to us." This reality is not only Wang Hongqian Ling's, but also poetic.

Wang Hong wanted to come to the river to break up with Qian Ling, but fate made people and the appearance of a madman "fulfilled" his promise - "only death can separate us", and poetry became his original sin. Wang Hong's death was not only because of his extramarital affairs that he did not tolerate in society, but also because of the inevitable exile of his poet status in this society.

When Wang Hong's body was lying on a white cloth, Qian Ling was eating the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden in his poem, and on his lap was Chekov's masterpiece "The Cherry Orchard", in which there were both sighs of life that "life is coming to an end, but I don't seem to have lived yet", as well as a farewell to the beautiful poetic home of the cherry orchard.

15.

【Killed Boy】

The first time a murder scene is discovered is a young boy, but adults would rather watch fake news programs than believe him, and the real is ostracized in the real world; The boy wants to know what the bad guy looks like, just like the innocent Ma Zhe, but when he really recognizes the face of fate and the truth of the world, he is greeted by death, like a merciless mockery of fate: If you want to know what I look like, I will fulfill you. This is similar to the "flag" in Wang Hong's poem - "Only death can separate us".

In addition, there is a very weak connection between the "it turned out to be you" that he said when he recognized the madman and the "child threw stones at the madman" said by his mother-in-law's neighbor before.

16.

["Big Wave" Xu Liang]

In Yu Hua's original novel, Xu Liang does not have the setting of transvestism, he just mutters some abstract words. Although Wei Shujun suddenly led the audience into a confused and chaotic art-film atmosphere in the second half of the film, he did not dare to turn the film into an outright avant-garde experimental film, so he had to give Xu Liang and other characters more easy-to-understand character logical motivations and story backgrounds.

Xu Liang also became a "big wave", a women's clothing boss who was intolerable to the world and had been imprisoned for seven or eight years for trumped-up hooliganism, thus explaining his ignorant words ("Where is the process, talk about a day, won't you wronged a good person?"). Then I know where it goes").

Although Xu Liang's physiological suicide was rescued, the women's clothes that Ma Zhe rummaged through his room had already exposed his secret, and after ironically sending a pennant to Ma Zhe in person, he jumped from the upper floor and fell on Ma Zhe's red car, wearing big waves on his head, facing the camera and Ma Zhe, with a blood-red projector behind him witnessing everything.

Xu Liang is suspected of dying because of him, and this truth finally collapsed Ma Zhe's spiritual world.

17.

【Dreams and Burning Projectors】

Ma Zhe sat in the audience of the theater, like watching a movie, experienced a dream, in the dream, his mother-in-law and others took turns to appear to show their ending, Ma Zhe also dreamed of the director's lottery to reward him, and finally the projector burned, he tried to extinguish the fire with a leather jacket, was ridiculed by the dead, and finally threw the projector into the river.

Ma Zhe connected part of the truth of the case in his dream, but he couldn't understand the truth and absurdity of this world. The projector and the projected photographs were the evidence of the truth in his possession, and the burning at the moment meant that these rational evidence were unreliable, and he tried to save it, but to no avail, and when he woke up, he finally gave up his explanation of the world and offered to resign. On another level, the burning projector is also the director's allusion to the unreliability of the film's narrative, reminding the audience to jump out of the trap of watching the movie and rethink the meaning of the whole story.

18.

["Shooting" the madman]

Ma Zhe saw the madman appear in other people's photos in the photo studio, but no one questioned that there were strangers in the photo, it seems that only Ma Zhe saw the madman, and everyone else collectively and unconsciously ignored it, which is another metaphor for the times.

Ma Zhe encountered the inexplicable laughter and stalking provocation of the madman in the tavern, and the film dealt with it in the same virtual and real, real and illusory, which is not only the entanglement of fate, the ghost of the rage of the times, but also the externalization of Ma Zhe's inner madness, he didn't dare to look directly at the "madman", first smiled bitterly and avoided, and finally mustered up the courage to "shoot" the madman with four shots in the temple, but the camera did not give the shooting scene, but stayed on the "Zhong Kui Ghost Hunting" picture on the wall, which proved the unreality of this scene. In the end, Ma Zhe found the four bullets intact in front of the director.

Ma Zhe said to the director: Everything is arranged by a madman, and if you kill me, it will be complete. He not only fell into the same self-proof as Xu Liang, but also was helpless against the ghost of the madman.

19.

[Catching the Maniac and Third-Class Merit]

Ma Zhe mentioned to the director that he had won a third-class merit in Yunnan, and neither his wife nor his old colleagues remembered it. Third-class merit runs through the whole film, a symbol of longing to be recognized by the collective, a small suspense of the narrative, and after Ma Zhe's child was found to have a genetic defect, it strengthened a foreshadowing that Ma Zhe himself was also crazy, is he really insane, and third-class merit does not exist at all?

Eventually, he was awarded a third-class merit by catching a madman, and the authenticity of the third-class merit became even more suspicious when the ceremony was held in the theater, a place that has been repeatedly accused of being a fictional space.

The award speech mentioned that the madman did not die, but was "properly placed in a mental hospital", you know, the madman originally escaped from the mental hospital and committed the crime again, and the madman escaped the punishment of the law by this, and fate, times, and power can be replaced with the foolish face of a madman, and then wantonly dominate the lives of others and get shelter.

In the original book, the madman was tortured in a psychiatric hospital for two years, and was released because of the government's cost savings, and people shouted in panic that "the madman is back", Ma Zhe killed the madman by the river with lynching, and finally he escaped the punishment of the law by pretending to be a mentally ill person with speech confusion under the arrangement of the director, and he was very ridiculous about this, and his laughter became louder and louder: it was really interesting. One power kills another, but all in the camouflage mask of psychosis, and a madman can never really be put in a cage.

In the movie, the ending of Ma Zhe pretending to be mentally ill was canceled, and it was changed to a commendation meeting, and Ma Zhe's child was used as a metaphor for the continuation and reincarnation of the "madman", just like Ma Zhe's pi, the license plate number 31415.

20.

【Ma Zhe's Child】

From the non-existent third-class skills, the lost and reappeared puzzles, the burning dreams, and the hallucinations of encountering madmen, there seems to be something wrong with Ma Zhe's spiritual world.

But everything is not Ma Zhe's fantasy, whether Ma Zhe has schizophrenia or not, is just a small trick played by director Wei Shujun, we have seen too many movies that use the protagonist's mental or personality splitting settings to achieve plot reversal, such as "Fight Club", "Shutter Island" and so on. But the ambition of "Mistake by the River" does not lie in this, it uses this narrative trap to stimulate the audience's doubts about the story, and then the audience has to jump out of the comfort zone of the genre story they have fallen into before, find and piece together the details and clues in the film, and passively cooperate with the director to complete the in-depth interpretation of the film.

"Ma Zhe" itself is very interesting.

The criminal policeman "Ma Zhe" tirelessly tried to use reason to explore the truth of the world, but he could not explain all the facts and human nature, and the power in his hands even caused the unnecessary death of Xu Liang and others, and finally Ma Zhe himself had self-doubt.

"Ma Zhe" temporarily imprisoned the "madman" in a psychiatric hospital and was re-recognized and commended by the collective, but his children still have a 10% chance of being mentally deficient and become the next "madman".

At the end of the film, Ma Zhe's child takes a bath, dips a striped towel like a mental hospital uniform in water, and presses the toy against it, just like the madman in the film uses a stone to press his clothes in the water.

Is "Ma Zhe" crazy, and will the children of "Ma Zhe" continue to be crazy in the future? No one dared to answer.