Director: Wang Xiaoshuai | Plot |Chinese mainland| 1994-2
Starring: Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong, Lou Ye
Text/Yu Mengnan
Since I was a child, I have always wished to be an artist, the kind of painting and writing poetry that crisscrosses life, and the artist is always synonymous with cheerfulness and elegance. But as I grew older, I became more and more isolated, I began to not like to communicate with people, I began to indulge in watching movies, and in my third year of junior high school, I saw a video disc on a small stall, black and white cover, a man and a woman leaning on a tree looking at the sky, and the name of the movie was "Winter and Spring Days". Of course, I don't know why Wang Xiaoshuai is a xu person, nor do I know who the two main actors of the movie are, and I began this movie journey on a summer evening, eating watermelon. The film is all shot on 35mm black and white film, the light is mainly dim, even if it is used in the outdoor scene of the skylight, the sense of slaughter that is close to the winter and spring seasons is also very obvious, so it brings the audience full of depression. A big feature of this film is that the characters are dark and the surrounding scenery is bright, which precisely sets off the position of the fallen artist in society and the hopelessness of his life. The faint light of hope in the crowd gradually disappeared, and Wang Xiaoshuai himself said that this was a strange and flustered movie floating on a black-and-white photo. The style is a bit like french New Wave films.
What story does it tell? It's hard to say, it seems to be just a cross-section taken from the lives of a couple of lovers. The love affair between winter and spring has actually faded with the passage of time, and the sense of belonging to the future has cut a small opening on top of the increasingly depressed life, and the slightest effort will disintegrate into a river of blood. It's so real, the characters and the story are made up, and it's not an exaggeration to say that the two young artists lived their days from day to night. Their love and marriage eventually ended in disillusionment and failure, and for the troubled nineties, it was only a microcosm of the struggle and helplessness of some artists facing the embarrassment of life. The rapidly developing industrial society is at odds with the artistic creation that needs to be slowly accumulated, so after the artistic ideal is shattered, Chun chooses a new way out (going abroad), while Winter moves from anxiety to mental collapse. The names of the two also seem to insinuate that there is still hope for life in spring, while winter is lifeless silence. The tone of the film is decadent and sentimental, reproducing the monotonous and tedious life of two young artists, showing the helplessness of the characters who are unable to control their fate. The story is divided into three parts, divided by location, that is, Beijing - Northeast - Beijing, each time and place of the conversion, there are psychological changes in the characters closely related to it, reflected in the action is from winter to anxiety to numbness to collapse, spring from confinement to escape to new life. Seemingly unskilled, but with a strict play structure. The film is interspersed with a lot of narration, some of which are clever, such as "They never quarrel, but they always feel resentful of something, which is more uncomfortable than a big fight", and "Every change in life makes them excited." Their previous lives were too monotonous and boring." In the dislocation of sound and painting, the intention of inexhaustible verbal expression is presented one by one, and their desire is not much different from today's young people, nothing more than money and freedom. It can also be said that all the young people in the world are faced with problems such as these, and they will be swallowed up by the flood beast at any time, lacking a sense of security and the reality of existence, especially in the face of a world that is changing too fast.
All the beauty of the sense of form, all the undercurrents that surged under the daily life, and the contrast with reality will immediately weaken. Not being able to sell a painting and having little inspiration is probably the most terrifying thing for an artist, sitting or standing in winter, smoking one by one, the smoke gradually covering the line of sight, he competes with himself, becomes sensitive and fragile and neurotic. Haru remains sober, she has feelings, but what she can't tolerate is a life that goes on day after day without end and looking to the end, the outside world and strangers have a powerful attraction, and the mysterious aroma of exuding a mysterious fragrance makes people's minds swell. So Haru chose to go away, so Dong could calmly say in the bar, let's go, let's all go.
Love has been far away, winter has become indifferent, this time Spring found out that she was pregnant, and the two returned to the northeast together. The cold did not bring them closer again, but rather more distant. In the desolate wilderness, the music is so light, there are birds chirping, but parting ways is already written on the surface. Spring left alone by train, and Winter looked at the vast fields, and there seemed to be fog among the trees. He also seemed to have become more confused. At the end he straightens his hair in the mirror, and the narrator says that he smashed all the glass of the school and suffered from a slight psychosis, and I still can't forget the last expression, and the joke and mocking and the bleak laugh. Black field, ending the film with a continuous sound of music.
The two actors, Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, are professional painters, not professional actors, but the time and place are just right, making the performance extremely natural. In the interview, Liu Xiaodong said that the film tells the real situation of them at that time, but the results are different. In director Jia Zhangke's later documentary "East", his whole spiritual outlook has been renewed, which is naturally gratifying, an artist has achieved complete growth in spirit and material, even if it cannot be said that he has reconciled with the world, he has found a better way to get along.
This is the first film directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, but it is my personal favorite, because it is simple, and the most difficult thing about art and creation itself is simplicity. The creator himself is constantly growing, and his world should be getting wider and wider, from "Winter and Spring Days" to the upcoming "Interloper", which is probably a change in the way the director himself gets along with the world.