Director Wu Yigong's "The Moon Returns with People" after "Old Things in the South of the City" attracted the audience's infinite expectations at the beginning of filming, hoping that Wu Yigong could continue the glory of "Old Things in the South of the City" and bring a breath of fresh air to the film industry. The movie is adapted from Zhao Xinyu's novel "Renting a Wife". The story tells the story of Zhang Hanyuan, who has been away from home for 36 years, in order to meet his parents' ardent expectations, with a "fake wife", returning from Taiwan to visit relatives around the Mid-Autumn Festival, meeting Lin Mengyun, a lover who was separated due to his father's disagreement with the relationship, and reuniting with him. The director continues to maintain his scattered style and artistic personality in this film, and at a time when the theater is becoming more and more heavy on low-level stimulating video, Wu Tiegong shows a kind of elegant visual charm to the long-tired audience, and uses more special cinematic expression methods such as empty shots and repetitive camera positions to create visual rhythm and rhyme to achieve the aesthetic intention of the screen prose poem, which he carefully designed as many as 27 A variety of moon shots to create an artistic conception atmosphere, but it is not difficult to find many inconsistencies in the overall creation, and this kind of poetry is inevitably deliberate, making the moon more "cloudy and sunny".
When the film was filmed, Wu Yigong considered, "Because I wanted to make a fuss about the moon, I designed as many as 27 different moon shots of all kinds throughout the film, which are not only different in size, but also hopefully different in color." This requires a little bit of stunt and photography working together. The appearance of various moons is not only for the purpose of the theme or metaphor, nor is it just to set off or render the mood of the characters, nor is it for the transformation of time or scene, I hope that they can become a kind of emotional chain throughout the film, and even a kind of montage passage." "I envision that some of the moon images should be treated with some exaggeration, even romantic, without being limited to whether there are such or such proportions in real life. For example, there are moons that I hope to be surprisingly big, and so on. In short, let's be as bold as possible in this area and make the moon a little anthropomorphic. Therefore, we can see the image of the moon throughout the movie, when Lin Mengyun leans against the window and looks alone, when Zhang Hanyuan smokes and thinks alone, when Zhang Hanyuan and Lin Mengyun have a happy conversation, the moon always hangs in the sky and accompanies him. However, there are many empty shots of the moon, but there is no change, they are just a full moon appearing in various situations, and there is no sense of scene blending, not to mention the effect of rhyme and melody.
The title of the movie comes from Li Bai's five-character ancient poem "Down to the South Mountain, Passing the Liquor in the Solution", and the first four sentences of the original poem are "Twilight descends from the Bishan, and the mountains and the moon return with the people." But regardless of the way it came, the sky was wide and green. The director hopes that when the moon returns with the person, he will look back on the long course of life and experience the "verdant and verdant" that is full of thoughts but indescribable, full of poetic and philosophical conceptions. The story of "The Moon Returns with People" also wants to focus on the theme of mutual respect, mutual understanding, and finally "reconciliation" between people through a family that crosses the Taiwan Strait from the separation of flesh and blood to the reunion of the family that crosses the Taiwan Strait. 36 years have passed in a flash, and what I thought was an insurmountable hurdle and an important thing in the past seems to be an obstacle now, but the years of separation have added some unspeakable regrets. Wu Yigong pushes the historical background beyond the screen, focusing only on the estrangement and communication process between individuals and family members caused by that time and moment. Downplaying the conflict brought about by political factors in the background of the story itself. Through the emotional entanglement in a family, the historical problems of cross-strait relations are expressed, and the old political and religious issues are skillfully transformed into family conflicts. However, this kind of love rupture caused by religious belief seems to be not typical and credible in Shanghai at that time, and the love scene between the two sides of the story in the past is too empty, and the lack of sufficient and powerful details is obviously not enough foreshadowing, so that the exchange between the two people who reunite again after the year seems to have a thousand emotions is difficult to arouse the audience's recognition and resonance.
The film text of "Rent a Wife" itself is plain and smooth, and it is difficult to have characteristics, and the director also knows that it is just a picture of the dullness of daily life, hoping that there will be some deep-seated hidden pain, distress and resistance, and after friction and collision, it will naturally touch the unrest of his soul. But out of the context of a specific national era, this is really a too common love clutch, lacking a wonderful masterpiece, no moving plot, and even a mediocre popular story in other structural frameworks. It's not earth-shattering, ghost-weeping. Therefore, the director wanted to increase the sense of realism by saying that the story happened around him, and straightforwardly pointed out the location where the story took place as Shanghai, and directly used the real place names in Shanghai, such as Majestic Theater, Nanjing Road Bund, Hualian Commercial Building, etc. Wu Yigong said that when he chose the exterior location, some people said that there was a construction site next to the Waibaidu Bridge, and the gate bridge was a construction site. Including the sign or wooden sign of a certain unit on the side of the road, it does not have to be replaced, because there is indeed such a unit in the location where we filmed, such as the Shanghai Sports Research Institute on Wuxing Road and so on. But the sense of realism increases, and many of the developments in the plot seem very unreasonable and not close to life, for example, why Zhang Hanyuan has been in contact with his family, but he doesn't know and doesn't mention Lin Mengyun's marital status; his parents also know that they owe Lin Mengyun, why don't they match the two parties; even after meeting like this, everything can be explained clearly, and it seems that there is no need to prepare to return to Taiwan in advance; even if the fake couple can't sleep in the same bed, they won't ask for two sets of rooms in the hotel without opening a suite; because the father wants to hold a banquet together, and explains everything, and so on. This kind of low-level mistake in this aspect of the play is especially easy to cause distrust among the audience.
Of course, the preparation time for the movie "The Moon Returns with People" is extremely urgent. From July 16, 1990, when the literary script was revised, to December 11, 1990, when it was sent to Beijing for approval, a total of 146 days. Among them, the film was prepared for 45 days and filmed for 9 days, including the submission for review, and the post-production lasted a total of 42 days. In comparison, the film "Old Things in the South of the City" took 154 days to brew and prepare alone, and it was not polished well, which may be one of the reasons why it is difficult to impress the audience due to the plot loopholes, or it may be that the mentality of comparing with "Old Things in the South of the City" has too high expectations for this film, and it does not make people shine.
But the film, with the help of literature and music, builds the tone of the film's romantic aria, which hopefully appears regularly in today's film sequences.