There are too many surprises that Taiwanese movies have brought to the audience recently.
Some time ago, "Removing the Three Evils Around the Week" just brought a vivid and refreshing experience to the audience, and this new work, which was recently launched on streaming, shined in the Golden Horse, with seven nominations and four heavyweight awards including "Best Director".
Compared with the thrilling excitement of "Around", this new film focuses more on human nature, under the background of "Flowers", there is no legend of "turning stones into gold", but attempts to pierce the heart of "an old fox", and asks the audience "what kind of life do you want to live".
At last year's Golden Horse Film Festival, it also won four awards, including Best Director and Best Supporting Actor, becoming a must-see Chinese film of the year.
Douban has a score of 7.3, all the way to today's 8.1, let's talk about this new work that is "not suitable for children" today-
Old fox
2023
Director: Xiao Yaquan
Screenwriter: Xiao Yaquan
Starring: Bai Runyin / Liu Guanting / Chen Muyi / Liu Yier / Kadowaki Mai
Genre: Drama
Release: 2023-11-24 (Taiwan)
Runtime: 112 minutes
Looking at the poster, under the figures of two men, a teenager stands impressively in the middle.
A massive, oppressive, but in a red shadow;
The other faces the light, though he doesn't look as powerful.
And this movie is about how this teenager grew into himself among these two men who are very important in his life.
In 1989, Taiwan Province was a stock market for all the people, and the soaring stock market made countless people crazy, and the stock market soared from 2,000 points to 12,000 points, but no one could have imagined that danger was coming......
In 1990, the stock market of Taiwan Province collapsed from 12,682 points, falling more than 10,000 points in eight months, leaving only a fraction.
And the eleven-year-old Liao Jie, like this era of rapid change, is undergoing a change in life.
He lost his mother at an early age and relied on his father Liao Tailai, who was the waiter foreman of the hotel, kind and humble. The biggest rush of the two is to buy a house of their own, open a barber shop under the sun, and realize their mother's dream before her death.
The two lived in poverty, and from time to time Dad would pack some leftovers from the restaurant that looked fairly clean. For Liao Jie, the astronomical amount of money to buy a house has no real feeling, but his father told him to wait a little longer, for three years. So Liao Jie subtracted 365×3 from 1095 every day, which was his only hope.
The grandfather who opened the beef noodles at the door downstairs also regarded buying a house as the last goal of life, and the old couple depended on each other for their lives, and they worked hard for half their lives as provincials, just to buy a suite and settle down.
A building carries the dreams of many poor families, all of whom have a common landlord, known as the "old fox".
He never came in person every time he collected rent, but sent his own secretary to collect it on his behalf. Secretary Lin's Mei Xinshan will bring a box of egg yolk crisp to Liao Jie every time he comes to collect rent, but it is actually Liao Tailai who loves egg yolk crisp.
This time the rent was collected, and Grandpa Beef Noodle said that he would not renew the lease because he was ready to buy a house. But he did not rely on the hard-earned money of half his life, but a sudden windfall in the stock market.
On the night when they learned that the stock had risen wildly, the old couple kicked excitedly.
However, the stock surge was a catastrophe for the Liao father and son.
Liao Tailai, who finally borrowed money from his younger brother for a down payment, promised his son that he could buy a house immediately, but found that the stock market had driven up prices, and house prices had soared.
He explained all this to his son, but eleven-year-old Liao Jie couldn't figure it out, it was obviously a subtraction learned in the classroom, but he couldn't solve the dilemma of reality.
Because of poverty, Liao Jie even made school uniforms by his father in order to save money, when faced with his father's failure to make appointments again and again, and in the face of campus bullying brought about by poverty, the kind and tall father in Liao Jie's heart collapsed, and in his eyes, his father was just a cowardly and incompetent person.
And what made Liao Jie completely kill his father spiritually was the emergence of a new spiritual father-the old fox.
Once after school, the rainstorm poured, and Liao Jie was squeezed out of the rain by his classmates who bullied him. A mysterious sedan drove by and sent Liao Jie home. The old man in the car was completely different from his father, he was ruthless, treacherous and cunning, but Liao Jie was not afraid of him, and the two gradually got acquainted with each other.
He gave Liao the direction of life,
"Inequality is the map, and it clearly helps us to point out the direction of winning."
"We want to use inequality to create inequality, and some people say that inequality is not good, and the head is bad. “
"If you climb up with the strong people, if you mix with the weak people, you will fall down, you know?"
The old fox knew that Liao Jie was deeply troubled by the bullying of his classmates, and he told Liao Jie how to fight this inequality, and to grasp the weakness of the other party, "I don't know how to lose to know".
He said that there was a female worker in her factory who was secretly selling herself, and she thought no one knew about it, but there was actually a CCTV there. And the son of this female worker is a classmate who bullied Liao Jie.
Liao Jie became more and more indifferent under the leadership of the old fox, which made his father Liao Tailai feel anxious, but in Liao Jie he was already getting farther and farther away from his father mentally.
The carnival of the stock market did not last long, and the 8-month sharp decline bankrupted the beef noodle grandfather downstairs, and the grandfather, who couldn't stand the blow, committed suicide by hanging himself.
In the eyes of Liao Jie, who has become indifferent, the house that has died is a great opportunity for them to afford, but Dad only has sadness in his heart in the face of the old neighbors who have been with him for a long time.
So when the son cried and said, "There's a funeral downstairs, it's my business", the father slapped his son for the first time. This is the farthest Liao Jie has ever been from kindness, but he was fanned back by his father.
Two completely contradictory value systems wrestled together in the immature heart of Liao Jie.
On the one hand, they are kind and optimistic, but in the poor original family, the father will wrap the used blade and throw it away to prevent the people who pick up the garbage from scratching, and he will not dare to laugh out loud in the elevator when his son is born, and he is worried that there are sad people in the hospital who have relatives who have just passed away.
On the other hand, he is treacherous and cunning, using his financial and material resources to try to control the lives of the poor, but he lives an enviable life with everything.
Liao Jie didn't know where to go until he met the mother of the classmate who bullied him, the female worker who sold herself in the factory and was found unaware.
It turned out that Liao Jie didn't tell his classmates the truth, but just asked him to go home and remind his mother that there was CCTV in the warehouse. The encounter in the park was that the female worker made a special trip to thank Liao Jie and did not tell the truth to her son.
This tiny kindness, after going around in circles, knocked down the Liao Jie who was hovering on the edge of kindness.
How Liao Jie continued to grow, the director did not continue to write, but many years later, Liao Jie became an architectural designer, shrewd, self-interested, like an old fox who is at ease.
But he'll be like his dad and wrap it up with a good blade.
Between shrewdness and kindness, he lived a path of "kind old fox".
*The author of this article: Shallow