Japanese-style blind date adventure
The woman in the pearl necklace, with a frosty face, took a taxi through Tokyo's bright and cold night to a New Year's family feast in an upscale hotel. When everyone was eagerly awaiting her fiancé, who should appear at the same time as her, the woman apologetically announced that she had been broken up.
Watching "Tokyo Noble Woman" on the last day of the Shanghai Film Festival, the beginning was the heroine's embarrassing and anxious unmarried state, which made me suffer at the same time.
For nearly half an hour, the audience was involved in a "blind date adventure" with the rich woman Hanako Haruna, and the situation was pushed to more embarrassing and anxious by repeated setbacks. Doctors with rude manners, veterans with soft words, frightening cheap taverns... The blind date farce that has long been filmed in domestic film and television dramas has echoed one by one in the context of Japanese films. The author of the original novel of the film, Mariko Yamauchi, is a small-town youth who dreams of going to Tokyo with a writer's dream, and in her imagination space, the so-called marriage troubles of the nobles are not much different from those of ordinary people.
Of course, all the frustration was laid out for the appearance of the "True Destiny", And Hanako showed a dreamlike expression and asked herself: Is this true? The urban women who have been looking for a long time know this mood too well, and they also have a premonition that everything is not so simple.
Hanako meets Koichiro Aoki, who is handsome and personable, and whose family is more prominent than her own family, and things are quickly on the right track. On the night Koichiro took out his ring and proposed, Hanako saw a woman's name in a letter from his mobile phone: Miki Tokioka. The first chapter of the film, "Tokyo", ends abruptly, and the second chapter, "The Outside World", begins in Miki's withered and remote hometown.
Tokyo's "Nourishment"
It's been at least a decade since Miki dropped out of the prestigious Keio University. On the first day of school, she saw a group of men and women sitting outdoors, and learned that they were "internal students" who had been promoting from kindergarten step by step, and there was a distance visible to the naked eye from the "external students" who needed to nibble on books. Among the privileged groups that Miki looks at is the young Koichiro.
Later, the story is very "evil capitalism": because her father is unemployed and cannot afford to pay for school, Miki drops out of school to go to a nightclub to accompany him, meets Koichiro again, and begins a ten-year-long relationship.
The class topic that the film touches on from time to time from time to time from the beginning is the most acute in the chapters of Miki. Her perspective is consistent with the popular drama "Tokyo Women's Illustrated Book" in previous years: the young women of the foreign town look up and climb the city. The price of afternoon tea with her local Classmates in Tokyo surprised her; she had been in a relationship with Koichiro for a long time, but she was never in the category of marriage with each other; and her compatriots who were floating in Tokyo had taken detours and stood alone, laughing and talking about "we girls are the nourishment of Tokyo."
Mixed-race model Yukiko Mizuhara plays this role, with a kind of wild and stubborn, aura does not lose the classical beauty Hanako played by Munaki Mai. In the third chapter of the film, Hanako's hair discovers the relationship between Miki and Koichiro, and the two "love enemies" have a face-to-face meeting.
As soon as Hanako met, she took out the envelope. The audience was silent, thinking that it would not be so old-fashioned, right? This is one of the humorous brushstrokes of the creator: posing as "the main room uses the breakup fee to dissuade the little three", in fact, the envelope contains the ticket for the puppet exhibition.
Without pulling the head flower or other signs, Miki generously apologizes, while Hanako wants to know the other side of her fiancé, which is more like a meeting between girls. After the meeting, Miki proposed to Koichiro not to meet again, and gave her hometown snacks as a parting ceremony - everything was decent, thoughtful, and the women were always so sensible. Hanako also never mentioned it to Koichiro, and even if she encountered infidelity during the relationship, it was regarded as a "problem of the opposite sex" that a man like him must have.
Final Fantasy landed
Because, in the film, both women in and out of Tokyo are enduring men's "opposite sex problems". Hua zi's fa xiaoyin witnessed his father cheating everywhere, and when he grew up, he had no intention of marrying, but only wanted to maintain the ability to survive independently. Miki encounters a greasy married male classmate and just squints: Men like you are everywhere.
Yukiichiro, who has more capital than "everywhere", has become the true destiny of all girls to marry, and there is nothing to stop Huazi from running towards her fate after the 9981 disaster.
The final chapter, "Getting Married," is full of Final Fantasy rituals. Hanako holds a white lily in her hand, Koichiro's tuxedo is straight, and it is a big show of solemn and gorgeous old-school. But what's wrong?
Visiting Koichiro's illustrious grandfather before marriage, the camera is extremely patient to get close to Hanako's every move. Dressed in a small fragrant Western-style suit, she pushed open the sliding door of the japanese room, and was possessed by the soul of the kimono, and slowly moved to her seat cushion in a kneeling position. Under this long and unnatural lens, the so-called aristocratic home and patriarchal system's binding on modern women are magnified under the gaze.
Grandfather, the old lord of Akira Kurosawa's films, announces to Hanako, "We sent someone to investigate your background, and now I agree with you and Yukiichiro to continue." "It's really a living fossil."
She was investigated by the other party, but Hanako felt more and more that she did not understand her husband. Even if Miki, who has been dating for ten years, has not even touched the side of this man. Some sporadic side notes: he doesn't like the career he's been assigned; he's never seen a woman cut her toenails since he was a kid (the mansion is too big); he's generally a good guy; he doesn't want to know much about either Miki or Hanako, seeing each other as tool people, and knowing that he was born a tool man
Interestingly, the actor Kengo Takara previously represented as "Seinosuke Yokomichi", the foreign boy Seinosuke who had just arrived in Tokyo and was a silly Rakuten faction, and Koichiro, a noble prince of Tokyo who was separated by a layer of fog, which can be described as the two poles of Tokyo Tower.
After marriage, Huazi is not often seen as a busy husband. The mother-in-law was bent on getting her pregnant and having a baby. The encounter of the divorced woman who appeared at her grandfather's funeral made it impossible for Hanako to integrate into the family safely.
In short, "the world revolves around people like them." Under the barrier of great wealth and power, they have no normal human emotions and do not need to seek empathy with normal people. Eager for a warm heart exchange, and afraid of being crushed by the cold power, Hanako finally filed for divorce and was slapped by her mother-in-law.
Rush into the city and run away from love
From "Tokyo Love Story" in the early 1990s to "Tokyo Noble Woman" thirty years later, the city has evolved into a bigger and more friendless beast, foreign young people see more fangs than embraces, the reduction of the middle class has caused society to fall into the "inferior", and the exploitation of young women has caused "female poverty"... These are all Japanese phenomena in bestsellers.
Similarly, women's growth has been a major theme over the years. Under the helm of female writers and female directors, the female friendship in "Tokyo Noble Woman" is used a lot of ink, and the robbery of men like "Tokyo Love Story" is completely absent.
Miki discussed with her fellow villagers what preparations to make for the elderly if they never got married. After Huazi divorced, she gave Fa Xiao as an agent, and going out to work was like a girlfriend outing. These "escapes" seem somewhat utopian, but at least the pursuit of freedom is the political correctness of modern women's themes. Even the traditional-minded Hanako did not want to pay for the disappointed "True Destiny", preferring to invest in girlfriends.
Writer Han Songluo wrote on Weibo: Seven or eight years ago, more than half of the works in the short film competition had blind date content, but now there is none, and even the theme of love is very rare. It seems that in the pursuit of a modern society of efficiency and everyone for themselves, love has been squeezed out.
But at the end, Hanako and Koichiro meet by chance, as if they can't turn over the fairy tale that life is only like the first time they first saw. Looking across the hall, they were strangers who had made vows and given them for life, and were the heirs of patriarchal capital that had been alienated into instrumental men. Maybe they should understand each other better, maybe a voice in their ears said: What a perfect couple.