Under Gu Xiaogang's lens, Jiang Qinqin works diligently like a "ghost".
In the movie "The World of Grass and Trees" released in the Qingming file, Wu Mossica, a tea picker played by Jiang Qinqin, strayed into a pyramid scheme organization, from frustrated and confused to crazy, with a hideous face, while tearing her heart and lungs, while dancing.
A fire bath and rebirth that pierced the body and mind occurred and completed in the mother and son played by Jiang Qinqin and Wu Lei. This appearance allowed Jiang Qinqin to win the actress at the 17th Asian Film Awards that ended in March.
Jiang Qinqin
In recent years, social themes have always resonated with the greatest range on the big screen. Men and women, young and old, are often afraid of specific social issues, such as fraud, gambling, and pyramid schemes, so they bring their relatives and friends to the theater to "be taught".
But Gu Xiaogang, the director of "The World of Grass and Trees", did not mean to "educate" people at all, but chose to use the style of landscape painting to make a pyramid scheme-themed movie.
Stills from "The World of Grass and Trees".
Similar to Gu Xiaogang's "Spring River Plumbing", which won multiple awards in 2019, "The World of Grass and Trees" is also a film full of early spring, wet, and lush. The endless green tea fields, the gentle and picturesque landscapes of Suzhou and Hangzhou, and the restrained and lingering soundtrack of Mei Lin Mao......
If you don't know it in advance, the first 1/3 of the movie can't be reminiscent of the sharp reality theme of pyramid schemes.
This is rare in domestic crime-themed movies.
The title of the movie "Grass and Trees in the World" comes from Mr. Wang Zengqi's essay collection "Grass and Trees in the World", Gu Xiaogang explained: "People are like plants and trees, there are not only passive lives, but also active play space. Since the seed lands on the ground, the birth is decided, whether it is a person or a plant, there is no way to change this birth, but as long as we find the right direction of light and develop our own potential, in the right season, we can bloom our own flowers. ”
The filming scene of "The World of Grass and Trees".
And those who fall into the pyramid scheme scam don't seem to be sober and unable to get out of it? Between the ambiguity of thinking of heaven and hell, the blurred boundaries, the stylization of literature and art makes a crime film have its own Zen and philosophical thoughts, and the accident coincides with the particularity of the criminal form of pyramid schemes.
In Gu Xiaogang's experience and story, the silent MLM started earlier than the audience imagined.
Detonation
During the filming of "Spring River Plumbing", one of Gu Xiaogang's relatives fell into a pyramid scheme.
"I thought that this matter was far away from me, but later I found that the undercurrent in my life was actually more turbulent", until I personally immersed myself in MLM, Gu Xiao just woke up, "Not entering MLM does not mean that a person has a high IQ, maybe he is just lucky".
In 2021, he and his colleagues lurked for a week at an MLM organization in a city in western China. As soon as the ghost gate came back, Gu Xiaogang's strongest feeling was: This is not an attack on the heart, but an attack on "physical strength", first crushing a person physiologically.
Staying together from morning to night every day, being indoctrinated with the same set of words, the perception of time, space and reality is disrupted. Gu Xiaogang felt physically and mentally exhausted, and had a "splitting headache". At this time, people's mental will and physical defense are very fragile, and it is also the time when they are most likely to be "brainwashed". Even if you can control yourself and don't want to stop looking and talking, "your ears can't be closed", you are forced to type, and you are forced to sink.
Gu Xiaogang
On the first day of Gu Xiaogang's incursion, just like in the movie, a carload of people was trapped on the bus all day, and the three "tour guides" took turns to give speeches, and they were not allowed to go anywhere except for going to the toilet. Even if you fall asleep, you will be woken up. In the next few days, they were taken to a kind of "Disney Playground" space, where every landmark, every link, there were people to explain and give lectures, and each place had a specific "NPC".
Gu Xiaogang kneaded most of what he had seen and heard from his own experience into the plot of "The World of Grass and Trees". In the first brainwashing event in the movie, there was a very visually impactful scene of throwing money. The crowd reveled and screamed, and money and lust filled the stage.
And in the midst of the uproar and applause, a member played by Liang Long suddenly stood up in the crowd, stood on a chair, and loudly scolded this as a "pyramid scheme".
After he left the venue angrily, the little leader gently "popularized science" to everyone: "MLM is all about controlling people, do we control you? Do we force you?" A few words dispelled the doubts of the participants, including Wu Mosshua. And this man who stood up and left the table is actually the real boss behind the whole MLM scam.
Stills from "The World of Grass and Trees".
Gu Xiaogang has researched, this is the concept of "detonation" in psychology. "Tell you directly, detonate this problem and let people unload their psychological burden. He himself said first, you may have heard of pyramid schemes, but if you think about it, have you been arrested now? Not good?"
In the course of this week's experience, Gu Xiaogang gradually discovered that MLM is not a fraud in the traditional sense, it does not directly attack people's cognitive and judgment ability, but starts from "attacking the heart" and consolidates it with "attacking the heart".
Law professor Luo Xiang also talked about the reasons why people fall into the trap of pyramid schemes: "Most people who join MLM organizations have strong emotional needs, and may have unhappy careers and marriages. ”
This is the peculiarity of the crime of pyramid schemes: people who are deceived cannot be rudely attributed to "greed" or "stupidity", perhaps just out of trust in family and friendship. The fall of the last high-rise building of Jin Lan, the good sister who brought Wu Moshua into the game, also added a tragic footnote to this flesh-and-blood sticky scheming.
Wan Qing, the small leader of the MLM organization who appeared on the bus, also learned from the boss behind the scenes at the last moment that he was doing MLM. In this chain, there are always very few people who are sober and self-aware, and this number may be as small as you can imagine.
Stills from "The World of Grass and Trees".
Before leaving the MLM organization, Gu Xiaogang couldn't help but persuade an eldest sister in the team to lie that she was a reporter. He advised the eldest sister to leave quickly. The eldest sister was stunned for a moment, and then said to Gu Xiaogang: "This matter is very true, our relatives have bought all the cars in the village." Gu Xiaogang said that those may be packaging, and he can take out a loan, just to show you.
The eldest sister still didn't believe it. Since the end of the incubation, Gu Xiaogang doesn't know what happened to her.
Gu Xiaogang did not make moral judgments and guidance on "people who strayed into pyramid schemes", and he used the interlacing of stage and poetry to present those prisons and catastrophes, hoping to preserve and restore the situation and essence of "people" as much as possible.
Filming pyramid schemes is essentially shooting people, filming people's catastrophe and detachment in this world, self-knowledge and self-help.
From Hell to Earth
The story is inspired by the ancient Chinese fable "Mulian Saves the Mother": a mother who has done bad things and falls into hell after death and becomes a hungry ghost. In order to save his mother, the son borrowed the power of the monks from the ten directions and finally got free.
The film's three-part narrative structure corresponds to earth, hell and heaven. The part of Wu Mosshua's mother and son's life in their hometown is the "world", the lush grass and forest, the fireworks and fireworks, the joys and sorrows, hopes and disappointments that ordinary people may experience.
At this stage of reality, the mother and son have a common knot: their father He Shan, who has been away from home for many years and has not heard from him.
In the first scene of the movie, on the bus on the highway in the early morning, she and her good sister Jin Lan told that she had dreamed of her husband's death. The woman's voice is intertextual with the dim car and the foggy mountain road, and everything seems to be real and illusory, and it is difficult to distinguish between reality and reality.
This is indeed the case: the invasion of Wu Moss Flower by the other world represented by Jin Lan began earlier than what appeared on the surface. In order to comfort Moss, Jin Lan mentioned her younger brother who was doing business outside the home in the form of a family routine, and about ten minutes later, she put foot stickers on each of the sisters in the dormitory, subtly letting everyone get closer to that world.
Stills from "The World of Grass and Trees".
This is the information that Gu Xiaogang deliberately buried under the iceberg, and it also implies the dangerous boundary between "earth" and "hell".
Gu Xiaogang will always have a "hidden" part. On the surface, it seems that the clouds are light and the wind is light, the green mountains and clear waters, and the vegetation is lush, but in fact, the undercurrent has already begun.
The second part with a strong realistic style, that is, the plot with MLM as the main body, corresponds to the "hell" of the ghostly spirit. Alienated people to shoot, the colorful stage, the trance and excitement of the people, can't see the faces clearly, only hear the heart-rending carnival, and see the big words "I'd rather go crazy" on people's chests.
Under the bridge on a rainy night, Wu Moshua kicked and beat her son, blaming him for ruining his "dream of getting rich", and shouted in a frenzy, "I just want to be deceived, I'm happy, I'm happy!" The makeup drenched by the heavy rain turned her face colorful, hideous, and like a ghost. At this moment, she is in "hell".
The filming scene of "The World of Grass and Trees".
After the filming of this scene, the "mother and son" were unable to get out of the state. Wu Lei continued to cry in the car for an hour.
Jiang Qinqin felt the extreme excitement he had not seen for a long time. She said in a later interview: "My eyes suddenly became inflamed, my voice was also problematic, and I was stuck with one thing, so that the lines felt like an obstacle for me, and I felt that I couldn't say it." ”
But those who fall into hell do not desire to be born again, nor do they deserve to be born again. After that, it was the bridge section of "Mulian Saves Mother". He Mulian pretended to be persuaded and infiltrated the pyramid scheme, witnessing her mother's ghostly pain while secretly collecting evidence to call the police.
I have to admit that when making a crime film in China, the ending is almost suspenseless. From the exposure of the organization to the investigation and punishment, Gu Xiaogang almost brushed it off. The remaining white sketch at the end of the story returns to the "mother and son" itself, as well as the mountains.
He Mulian carried her mother Wu Moshua back to the mountains of her hometown, trying to call back her mother's consciousness through the familiar mountain.
Stills from "The World of Grass and Trees".
They find the big tree, lie on their backs, and wake up again, the night is shrouded in the mountains and forests, and the hidden silence makes the world as seen by the protagonist present a sense of illusion and unreality.
This is a rare treatment method in domestic realist films - after the main line reaches the end of justice, it continues to depict the state of man and nature. The audience hears the crickets and the insects chirping in the streams again, and sees the other side of the protagonist after withdrawing from the "main narrative".
Gu Xiaogang will always bring the human situation back to a relatively primitive place that deviates from the world, just like painting a painting, which seems to be an idle brush, for the completion and separation of the overall composition.
For example, the big trees that appear repeatedly in the film. Gu Xiaogang likes "trees", and in the last family-themed feature film "Spring River Plumbing", there is also a big tree that plays the spiritual axis, embellished with the changes and persistence of a traditional Chinese family.
Stills from "Spring River Plumbing".
In the folk described in "The World of Grass and Trees", trees exist as a kind of belief closely linked to life, people are there, trees are there, people die, cut down trees, and make coffins out of wood.
When infiltrating a pyramid scheme organization to collect evidence, in a state of mental breakdown, He Mulian cut down the tree that represented her father. But after saving his mother, when he heard his father's news again in the temple by the West Lake, he did not stay, but left calmly.
This is still Gu Xiaogang's intentional construction of "people". After completing the rescue of his mother, Mulian is no longer the boy who is obsessed with finding his father at the beginning of the story, he has completed a spiritual "killing of his father".
"When (the father killed) the mountain was not a mountain, and in the end (when the father was found) the mountain was still a mountain. He Mulian's father is called He Shan, "Where is the mountain"?
Everything seems to be back to square one. The camera is still focused on the landscape, and the characters are still among the plants and trees, but in fact, they have entered a spiritual world towards the inside of the self and arrived at the metaphysical "paradise".
Insist on returning to "people"
But I have to admit that for a realistic film, these careful thoughts and personal expressions that Gu Xiaogang skillfully kneaded into may not be appreciated by all audiences, and may even be rejected by some aesthetic inertia.
In this regard, Gu Xiaogang used a plant analogy: "Every plant has its own characteristics, and it can be called a forest only if it has its own posture and color in the (movie) forest, otherwise it is just a greenhouse." ”
Using the logic of plants to make movies and tell stories is one of the possibilities that Gu Xiaogang has explored since he entered the industry for more than ten years.
In the summer of 2016, Gu Xiao returned from Beijing to his hometown of Fuyang, Hangzhou, which is the Fuyang in "Fuchun Mountain Residence", one of China's top ten famous paintings.
"Fuchun Mountain Residence"
On the occasion of the G20 summit, Fuyang is also building a subway to meet the 2022 Hangzhou Asian Games. The rise of the south seems to have never stopped, and the word "change" has become a key theme that came to Gu Xiaogang's mind at that time.
Everything is changing, so what doesn't change?
Trees, mountains, and land, these unchanging still lifes, form the backdrop of Gu Xiaogang's story. And they often happen to constitute a landscape painting that belongs to the Chinese soil.
Since then, the concept of "landscape painting" has been shaped into a set of narrative plans in Gu Xiaogang's mind, "I know that some things will not come back after a while, and I want to record them."
He first spent two years filming in the streets and alleys of Fuyang, and completed his debut feature film "Spring River Plumbing".
Stills from "Spring River Plumbing".
After intermittently finishing this family picture, in 2019, "Spring River Plumbing" won the Best Feature Film and Best Director Awards at the 13th FIRST Youth Film Festival, and the Most Media-Concerned Film and the Most Media-Concerned Newcomer Director Award at the 23rd Shanghai International Film Festival Film Channel Media Awards.
Since this debut novel, Gu Xiaogang has shown his exploration of the possibility of merging aesthetics and narrative. In the film, the oriental picture of ink painting continues the infinity and ambiguity of time and space. There is an aesthetic insistence that distinguishes Gu Xiaogang from traditional narratives, whether commercial or art, that is, a kind of "freehand" based on intuitive feelings.
"Different from the 'instantaneous explosiveness' of Western painting, Chinese painting is 'freehand'. In particular, the long scroll painting actually had a movie-like function at the beginning of its creation. Gu Xiaogang said, "To integrate painting and film language into an aesthetic ensemble, it requires a unique aesthetic system for the creator to construct a relationship with each other." In this relationship, the characters and characters share the same time and space. ”
For example, the common "empty mirror" in movies. Gu Xiaogang once asked himself, in fact, what is an empty mirror? Technically, "the part without people is an empty mirror", but he believes that the Chinese landscape painting scroll contains a dynamic philosophical proposition from the beginning, and it can be integrated with the plot in a more profound and dynamic way.
Stills from "The World of Grass and Trees".
"If you look at the landscape scroll painting, when the horizontal scroll is rolled up, it looks very much like a film movie. Unlike what we see in museums, the paintings are unfolded there from the beginning. Why do you want to make it into a reel? It's so easy to carry, so that you can hold it in your hand and watch it in real time, and the process of unfolding it is like unfolding a film. ”
This indirectly gave rise to the aesthetic style of "Spring River Plumbing" and later "Grass and Trees". The picture scroll is slowly opened, the river extends, the mountains are vertical and horizontal, and the people are in the painting, and the painting is in the world. "Landscape painting presents a sense of the universe, it gives people a sense of detachment from reality, brings the spirit upward, and allows people to see themselves and the present in the overall situation. ”
Just like at the end of "The World of Grass and Trees", Wu Moss finally woke up from the mountain stream and was bathed in light. Suddenly, a tiger in the water slowly walked towards her. Moss first felt the specific fear, then the tiger disappeared again.
Stills from "The World of Grass and Trees" / Source: @蒋勤勤
"Tiger" not only represents the beast in Wu Moshua's heart, but also the god who saves her - Gu Xiaogang did not answer my question about the tiger directly, but asked my opinion rhetorically. He asked many people what they understood about the tiger, eager to know the perspective from the outside world. But when I asked him about myself, he returned to that relieved smile: "You can understand it any way." ”
He "hid" again, turning himself into a plant, moistening the soil, and watching all things grow and change. This is due to Gu Xiaogang's personality and his rational choice in art.
Today, he has completed two parts of his "Landscape Map" series of trilogies. This plan first appeared in the opening credits of "Spring River Plumbing", with a subtitle that reads: "The Spring River, through Qiantang, flows into the East China Sea." Gu Xiaogang plans to name the three films "Chunjiang", "Qiantang" and "East China Sea" respectively after the place where the river flows, and tell the "portraits and customs of the times" of the three places respectively.
Stills from "The World of Grass and Trees".
He still wants to use the "next part" to explore the artistic integration between the record and the plot, and to plant his own unique tree.
This article was first published in the 8th issue of Nanfeng Window magazine
Author | Xiao Yao
Edit | Wu Qing
Typography | promise