Author: Lian Cheng
Perhaps "The Illumination Store" and "Goodbye, Li Kele", "Hachiko the Loyal Dog" and "Life Events" can be classified as the same type of film - "post-epidemic healing films" - they are all about how people face the reality of the death of their loved ones, how to struggle to get out of the trauma, settle down and rebuild their lives. For viewers who have experienced three years of the pandemic, such a story is easy to resonate with.
Fortunately, "The Illumination Store" is not "Late Night Canteen"
"Lighting Store" is based on the popular comic of the same name (Douban score 9.2) by Korean cartoonist Jiang Cao (the recently popular Korean drama "Super Ability Family" and the domestic movie "I Love You!" are both adapted from his comics). The setting of the space and group portrait characters is very similar to "Late Night Canteen", which makes people worry that it will hit the street like the domestic film and television works of "Late Night Canteen"?
In fact, the crux of the failure of the localization of "Midnight Canteen" lies in the director's stiff transplantation of Japanese-style izakaya culture, which is not grounded, coupled with improper casting, exaggerated performances, crotch pulling plots, and the lack of empathy and comfort for the little people, frustrated people, and marginalized people expressed in the original work.
And Jiang Cao's original comic "Lighting Store" is praised as a masterpiece by comic book fans because it boldly wraps warm and heartwarming things in a suspenseful and thrilling shell, which makes people creepy one second and tears the next. The movie cleverly retains this structure, and at the same time adapts the characters, plot and even theme to the domestic film market.
However, there are also things that are difficult to explain.
The glimpse of emotion can't support heavy thinking
The suspenseful and thrilling atmosphere of the film's opening scene is well restored: thunderstorms, lightning, hazy streets, eerie apartment buildings (constant water leaks, power outages for no apparent reason), and eccentric people haunting it. There are men with water flowing under his feet (Bai Yufan), a mother who drags her daughter with gloves (Liu Yan), a girl with two shadows (Sun Meilin), an old man who can't find the door with a yellow umbrella in his hand (Zhang Qi), and a man who mutters to himself in sand (Huang Chengcheng)...... The audience follows the perspective of the heroine Zhang Ruonan and slowly enters a "different world" - a lighting store.
In the setting of the original manga, the living live in the "outer world" of the real world, the dead belong to the "inner world", and the lighting shop is the "other world" of the soul, which can only be seen by the dead and the dying. If a dying person can get a light bulb with his or her name written on it from the shopkeeper, he or she can return to the real world, that is, escape from death, or he or she will enter the "inner world", which means death. Whether or not they can get a light bulb is not entirely determined by fate, but also depends on the will to survive of the dying person: they may choose not to take the light bulb and die willingly because they can't let go of their dead relatives. The deceased, who are their loved ones, are often encouraged to pick up the light bulb and choose to return to the real world to live bravely, even if it means that both parties will never die. The movie completely copied this setting, but coincidentally interpreted all this as a vision seen in the dream of the anxious and trance-stricken nurse heroine Zhang Ruonan.
In the real world of the movie, there was a serious car accident in which a dirt truck hit a bus. A couple, a father, a mother and daughter, a pair of sisters, and a driver were involved, several of whom died on the spot, and the rest were taken to the hospital for emergency treatment. The souls of these dead and dying people (i.e., the aforementioned weird people) and the heroine Zhang Ruonan all entered the lighting store. The dying (Liu Yan's daughter Chen Sinuo and one of her sisters, Sun Meilin) are faced with the choice of whether to hold a light bulb or not, their deceased relatives (mother, sister) are faced with the choice of encouraging them to live or leaving them with them, and Huang Chengcheng, a guilty sand truck driver, urges the dying person he has been involved with to escape death with a light bulb.
In addition to the sand truck driver, the director hopes to use the choice of whether to hold a light bulb in the lighting store through the choice of these souls to provoke the audience to further think about father's love, mother's love, and love: why is the father-son relationship in the film so separated? How can a mother let her daughter be self-reliant? Can love cross the boundary between life and death?
In fact, the original manga has thought deeply about these issues, and there are a lot of details of daily life to show, making the warm reversal of the second half real and believable. It's a pity that the film only scribbled in a very short period of time, trying to depict the life fragments of the relationship between several pairs of characters with a few MV-style scenes, but it did not stack a strong empathy with a large number of precious memories of life details and emotions like "Goodbye, Li Kele", "Loyal Dog Hachiko" and "Life Events". However, a few scattered emotional glimpses simply do not support the heavy emotional issues that the film is intended to explore, nor can they provide a convincing reason for their souls' choice in the photo shop.
In the end, all emotions can only be reduced to "the one who loves us will not leave, but will just change from living by the side to living in the heart". For this reason, the film does not hesitate to forcibly sensationalize: in the car accident scene, the car accident scene is replayed once every time the story of a pair of characters is replayed, and it is repeated four times, and the characters' uncontrolled tears and sensational soundtrack are added to forcibly stimulate the audience's tear ducts. This is really suspected of consumption suffering, which is extremely uncomfortable. On the other hand, Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Next Stop, Kingdom of Heaven" uses only a simple design such as "the most desired memory in my life" to explain life, emotions and love thoroughly, so why be sensational?
The warmth was flipped too violently and turned into sensationalism
The film's adjustments to the characters and plot of the original comics are also too hasty, resulting in some loopholes that cannot be bridged: For example, the heroine Zhang Ruonan is neither a deceased nor a dying person, but at most she witnessed the tragic situation of the victims of a car accident in the hospital and was unsettled, how could she enter the lighting store, a different world that only the dead and the dying can enter? The movie does not explain this.
Secondly, the movie's narration of Liu Yan's mother's death is also extremely sloppy. In the comics, the mother died in a car accident in order to protect her daughter in the real world. She died when she was buried, because her daughter had not woken up in the real world, and followed her to the lighting store "Another World". The daughter wanted to accompany her and was reluctant to take the light bulb. She was hoarse and desperately encouraged her daughter to take the light bulb and return to the real world. In the movie, she didn't die in the car accident, she cried desperately and saved her daughter by digging the soil with her hands, her nails were torn and bloody, but it was only a minor injury. However, then, in the absence of more details to show that she was seriously injured, she was directly covered with a white cloth and declared dead, which is like abandoning (with her) after inciting (love).
The warm flip in the second half of "The Lighting Store" is too strong and becomes sensational, and there are many flaws in the details, which can hardly be called a good film. But from another point of view, the film is still worth watching, because it is very healing: everyone in the film (including the deceased) and every family has a wound that is visible or hidden, and everyone tries to heal it, with kindness and love. Some netizens pointed out that "the lighting store is a transit station for people when they are dying, so that those who have no time to say goodbye can say goodbye." Whether you leave or stay, it's still too late." Indeed, the audience might as well use this movie as a tree hole to express their depression. (CityLink)
Source: Beijing Youth Daily