In the summer of 2023, the most controversial film is undoubtedly the film "Burning Winter" directed by Chen Zheyi.
is not a romance film in the traditional sense, but a youth film about contemporary young people.
But it was released on the Qixi Festival in the name of a romance film, and the result made the audience feel deceived.
The director said that he started from the anxiety of young people and opened a new paradigm of writing youthful emotions with the body in the film.
From nature to people, and then from people to people, between different physical touches, complete the spiritual healing of young people.
However, in fact, will the film really "heal" young people?
01 The emotional journey of three young people
The protagonists of the story are three young people, namely "Haofeng", a white-collar worker in Shanghai played by Liu Haoran, who was invited to Yanji to attend the wedding.
The other is the Sichuan guy "Han Xiao" played by Qu Chuxiao, his aunt married to Yanji, and he worked as a cook in the restaurant opened by his aunt's family.
There is also a girl, "Nana" played by Zhou Dongyu, who works as a tour guide in Yanji, and for various reasons, has not returned home for 3 years.
Three strangers meet in Yanji, a small city on the border between China and North Korea.
They walked a short journey together, and then left with memories of belonging here.
This is director Chen Zheyi's new film "Burning Winter" presents the audience with an emotional journey of three young people.
The director confessed in the tidbits:
"I make movies, in fact, I don't shoot plots, I always shoot emotions. ”
Looking back at the sequence of director Chen Zheyi's works, it is true that his attention to emotion runs throughout.
Whether it is the emotions of Filipino maids and children in "Parents Are Not Home";
or the experience of Ah Ling and Wei Lun from throbbing to separation in "Tropical Rain";
Chen Zheyi always prefers to land his brushstrokes on the flow and change of emotions.
This preference continues to be reflected in "Burning Winter".
The biggest difference between "Burning Winter" and Chen Zheyi's previous films is that "Burning Winter" depicts the emotions of three people.
The emotions between the three people are more complicated, and director Chen Zheyi is also ready to challenge himself and write the emotions of three people in a brand new city.
It is different from the narrative mode in classic Chinese youth films in which the subject and the subject are triggered by events.
"Burning Winter" adopts a writing paradigm in which emotions trigger changes in the body, and the changes in the body reflect emotions, but the subjectivity in the film is absent.
The director chose to develop the story of the film in the foreign land of Yanji.
This is a foreign land for the director outside the film, and it is also for the three protagonists in the film.
When they walk in, they are free from all the pain that haunts them, and at the same time they lose their subjectivity.
In the film, the most obvious signs are Haofeng's lost mobile phone and stopped watch.
He lost his tired and dreaded endless counseling calls, and at the same time lost time.
And this is his determination to enter another world, and it is the beginning of his rediscovery of subjectivity.
In Brian Masumi's description, emotions are primitive, unconscious, non-subjective, or pre-subjective.
Therefore, even if the subjectivity is lost, among the three strangers, there is still the feeling of the body and the body, and there is still emotional energy shuttling and flowing.
It is precisely under the injection of such emotional energy that their subjectivity is truly restored.
The process is certainly not as smooth as the road.
Rather, it presents a path of change from "closed" to "stretched" through their bodies.
02 Emotion means "physical contact"
In the first half of "Burning Winter", the actions of the characters are often presented as a closed, repulsive posture.
It is even often manifested as the distance between the body and the body, and the emotional premise of contact is not reached.
Haofeng's first shot is of him leaning back on the back of his chair and chewing ice.
Here, the film clearly shows the sound of teeth and ice "fighting", so as to show that there seems to be silence around them.
However, the truth is that this is a lively wedding banquet scene, and Haofeng has closed himself off.
In the noisy bar, he turned down Nana and Han Xiao's invitation to dance.
He sat alone on the couch, taking the melted water as tears, crying loudly, and he was still closed.
Although this scene was seen by Han Xiao, Han Xiao did not step forward.
He quietly looked at the collapsed Haofeng through the crowd, they kept a distance from each other, let alone talked about contact, Haofeng and Han Xiao were closed.
According to Spinoza, emotion always means contact, and contact represents the mixing of more than two bodies.
In contact, the subject's knowledge of the object can only be produced by the situation imposed by the object on the subject, which is still in fact the knowledge of the subject itself.
Therefore, in the body-to-body contact, the body's reactions ultimately point to the subject's emotional state and "experience-memory".
If the body is in a closed state, then the subject's emotions are obviously negative, and the emotions between the subjects are hindered and reduced.
The "closed body" in the film is most typical of Haofeng and Nana's first erotic scene, which is not a successful physical exchange.
The closure is first expressed through Haofeng's body movements:
Nana took the initiative to put her head on Haofeng's lap to invite, but Haofeng did not move, showing a wooden and passive state.
Including the back, Haofeng's movements when undressing on the bed were also very clumsy, and there were embarrassing stutters and stagnation.
Obviously, this is not the beginning of a harmonious intimate experience.
What's even worse is that Nana, who seems to be active, is actually closed:
When Haofeng touched the scar on Nana's ankle, Nana immediately bounced up from the bed like a frightened rabbit and immediately stopped this physical communication.
Despite Nana's re-initiative, they continued.
And the director focuses on the incompatibility of the body in this whole process, and the emotions revealed are also passive, frightened, secret and painful.
Of course, this does not create a positive, positive emotional exchange between them.
And their physical reactions are the reflection of their "experience-memory", the externalization of their inner trauma.
Haofeng survived the fierce college entrance examination in Henan, and after crawling in college, he came to the other side of the ——— Shanghai, which he thought was happy.
And in the end, I found that "I worked so hard and went to a new place, so what, nothing has changed".
Although his life as a white-collar financial worker in Shanghai brought him an expensive watch, he was caught in a whirlpool of psychological problems.
He is afraid of loneliness, but he always chooses to be alone, and he is also afraid that others will see through his messy inner world from under his glossy appearance, so he always refuses.
Nana, who was supposed to be a talented figure skater at the Winter Olympics, was cut off by an ankle injury.
She seems to be at ease with everything, but in fact she can't face the shattering of her dreams.
The once painful "experience-memory" leads to constant frustration in body-to-body contact.
Instead of being strengthened, the strength of the body is reduced, and the body is in a closed, passive posture.
03 The understanding of young people is too superficial
"Burning Winter" is very different from previous Chinese youth films.
The difference is in the mode of event advancement and the way in which problems are solved.
In terms of the mode of event advancement, Chinese youth films in the past Xi used to trigger new actions through a new event.
For example, in "The Girl We Chased Together in Those Years", the relationship between Shen Jiayi and Ke Jingteng began when the teacher moved Ke Jingteng's seat to the front of Shen Jiayi.
The end of the relationship between the two stems from a free martial arts match in which Ke Jingteng participates, and each stage has an event as a starting point, so that the characters carry out new actions and changes in the event.
In this regard, "Burning Winter" is more influenced by the stream-of-consciousness model of literary films during the French New Wave.
Instead of one new event after another in the film to drive the narrative, emotions are used as clues to drive the actions of the characters.
Just like Haofeng's participation in Nana's guided tour, his stay in Yanji for a few more days, and the trip of the three of them to Changbai Mountain were all decisions made without warning and under the flow of emotions.
Just as they got together for no reason, so did their final separation, and they didn't need a reason, from being one person to being back again.
In this mode, "Burning Winter" also logically shifts the focus of the film from the actions of the characters to the bodies of the characters, and reflects the emotional flow of the characters from the changes in the state of the characters' bodies.
"Burning Winter" is an unsatisfactory film. The director may come to a new place, and there is still a problem of adaptation after the creation.
His understanding of the psychology of contemporary Chinese young people is only superficial, so there is a gap between what this emotional paradigm presents in the film and what the director wants to achieve.
The director said that this is a very healing film, and hopes that this film can become a love letter to young people. But have young people outside the screen really been healed?
No one can stay in Yanji and Changbai Mountain forever, and no one can escape from their social identity forever.
So isn't creating a non-place like Yanji suspended outside of real life still just a cure for quenching thirst with smoking, alcohol, violence and sex?
In the end, it's just a dose of anesthetic.
Not only does the off-screen audience need to return to real life after 97 minutes, but Haofeng on the screen still has to return to the huge city of Shanghai after a few days of travel.
Is this really a cure?
Can young Chinese people who are heavily suppressed by work, school, family, and society be cured by such a film?
These are issues that need to be considered by directors and future creators.