Recently, Hong Kong and Taiwan movies have been on the big score one after another.
First of all, Taiwanese movies launched two masterpieces, "Removing the Three Evils Around the Week" and "Old Fox", a cool film and a fierce film.
Hong Kong movies are not far behind.
has sacrificed two big moves in a row, "Under the White Sun" and "Youth Diary", all of which are masterpieces of realism.
These 4 movies are all works with a score of more than 8 on Douban, and they are all films worth paying attention to in the near future.
If you want to choose one of the four movies to watch, Brother Pi first recommends "Diary of a Youth".
The film won the "Best Film Voted by the Audience" at the 60th Golden Horse Awards, received 12 nominations at the 42nd Academy Awards, and was selected as the most anticipated Chinese film list on Douban in 2024.
At present, Douban has a score of 8.4 points, which is the highest-rated Chinese movie in 2024 and a strong contender for the best of the year this year.
01、
Many people may be puzzled.
Aren't Hong Kong films lonely?
Why is it so fierce this year?
In fact, the current Hong Kong film is like a tape, divided into side A and side B.
Side A is a commercial film, characterized by being "big and vulgar".
In this field, the actors are not connected, and the old guys Gu Tianle, Liu Qingyun, and Lin Jiadong are forming a game back and forth, and the filming is drug warfare, gunfights and police bandits, and the audience has long been tired of watching it.
This kind of Hong Kong film should indeed withdraw from the stage of history.
The B side is a literary film and a crime film, which is characterized by "small but beautiful".
In the early years, "Days and Nights in Tin Shui Wai", "Sister Peach", "The Thief of Time" and "Treading the Snow to Find Plum Blossoms", and in recent years, "Rice Drama Attacking the Heart", "Justice Corridor", "Viper Lawyer", "Under the White Sun" and "Youth Diary" are all of this genre.
They are like a sharp blade, peeling off the skin of society, or showing the beauty of people's hearts, or poking at the darkness of human nature, becoming a unique Hong Kong-style stir-fry on the movie table.
In recent years, a large number of B-side Hong Kong films have been introduced, giving new life to the dying Hong Kong films.
"Diary of a Youth" is one of the best.
The director of "Youth Diary" is the new director Zhuo Yiqian of the Academy Awards, and he is not well-known.
But the producer of this film is Er Dongsheng.
Er Dongsheng is known as the director who is the best at filming emotional scenes in Hong Kong.
He pays attention to marginalized people, and in order to make a good film, he will do a lot of rural research.
He spent 8 or 9 months paying attention to the mentally ill and filmed "The True Story of the Boss";
He spent 8 years collecting information on drug dealers around the world and filmed "Disciple";
He paid attention to the Chinese who mixed in Japan and filmed "Shinjuku Incident";
He paid attention to horizontal drifting and filmed "I Am a Passerby";
He paid attention to "Three Thousand Orphans Entering Mongolia" and filmed "The End of the Sea is the Grassland".
Later, when he brought up his juniors, he passed on this spirit of truth-seeking.
The recent "Under the Daylight" and "Diary of a Youth", he is both executive producers.
"Under the White Sun" focuses on the abuse of disabled institutions, and "Youth Diary" focuses on children who commit suicide by falling from a building, all of which are acute social issues.
Putting aside the grand narrative, for ordinary audiences, "Diary of a Youth" is a movie that "cries very well".
After 95 minutes of the movie, 60 minutes later, the movie theater was already full of tears.
A friend of mine even cried so hard that he "couldn't see clearly".
It's not difficult to "make people cry", but it's hard to think about it after crying.
What is rare in this film is that it is obviously a thrilling theme, but the director is restrained enough, and the piano soundtrack is soothing.
You say it's a teenager's suicide diary, and I say it's an adult healing antidote.
The last cry is a release of emotion, warm, convincing and hearty.
So just defining it as "a good crying movie" is underestimating it.
02、
"Diary of a Youth" is very similar to Shunji Iwai's classic work "Love Letter".
In "Love Letter", two heroines with the same name and surname rely on a letter to connect a lingering love story.
In "Youth Diary", a pair of brothers separated by yin and yang rely on a diary to tear apart the deformed love of the original family.
Their success lies not in the story, but in the structure.
The director of this film, Zhuo Yiqian, used three techniques to create this ingenious "structural magic box".
The first move is called Sound East Strike West.
The whole film is a two-line narrative.
The first line is the suicide line.
On campus, someone found a suicide note written in advance.
Teacher Zheng deduced from the handwriting that the suicide note should have come from the students in their class.
In order to intervene in student suicide, he began a covert investigation.
The second line is the growth line.
Zheng Youjie, a 10-year-old child, encountered troubles in the process of growing up:
Mom and Dad have no love, my younger brother is too smart, he repeats grades poorly, he doesn't sleep well at night, he doesn't pay attention in class, and he has already realized that the world is not worth it at a young age.
According to the filming method of general movies, the first suicide line is more gimmicky and is the main line;
The second growth line is more lukewarm and is a secondary line.
The two threads are intertwined, and this is a standard socialist suspense movie.
That's how the director shot it from the beginning.
He took great pains to let Mr. Zheng turn into a detective, peel off the cocoon, investigate and collect evidence, ruled out the suspicion of the squad leader and the cake successively, and slowly approached the initiator.
In the growth line part, the director followed the steps and created a stupid child who lacks love, which is no different from all movies that reflect the growing pains of children.
It wasn't until the middle of the film that the main and subplots suddenly switched.
In the main story, "who the suicide is" suddenly becomes unimportant, and the director wants to show the young generation who live in the moment of depression and anxiety.
So much so that the classmate who wrote the suicide note appeared at the end, and the director only gave him a vague back.
It doesn't matter who he is.
It only matters who they are.
The main line began to be freehand, from real to virtual, and became a secondary line.
And the previous subline, after telling a cliché stupid child's growth story, suddenly came to a reversal, suddenly made waves, changed from virtual to real, successfully hit the audience's heart, and changed from the subline to the main line.
The audience thought that they were enjoying a suspense film, but after the sound was blowing, what they saw was a social ethics film, and the sense of surprise came from this.
The director's second trick is called trick guidance.
At the same time of the double-line narrative, the director uses parallel editing to let the stories of Mr. Zheng and Zheng Youjie advance at the same time.
The audience is invisibly misguided, forming a wrong story line:
The stupid kid grows up to be a mediocre teacher, suffers a suicide on campus, and recalls his childhood.
The first 60 minutes of the film have been performed according to this "wrong version".
It wasn't until a black-and-white photo appeared that the audience realized that the stupid boy's life was forever frozen at the age of 10.
Mr. Zheng is not the boy, but his younger brother.
The dislocation of identity brought about the biggest reversal in the whole film, and the audience's tear ducts burst instantly.
The brilliance of this trick lies in the fact that after the audience gets the "correct version", they quickly deduce three details -
The smart younger brother finally became an ordinary person, which shows how hard the death of the elder brother hit him;
At that time, the elder brother's wish was to become a teacher, and the younger brother helped the elder brother fulfill this wish;
The younger brother finished reading his brother's diary years later.
A person's real death is forgotten by everyone, and the death of his brother is sad, but at least his brother always remembers him.
But the nostalgia of his younger brother is mixed with a bitterness that is difficult for others to taste.
When the elder brother was ridiculed by the class, the younger brother once showed disdainful eyes;
When the elder brother was chased and beaten by his father, the younger brother pretended to do his homework and turned a blind eye;
When the elder brother hugged his younger brother tightly in the middle of the night, the younger brother pushed him away.
How heartwarming the details of the present are, how chilling the details of the past are.
What is written in the diary is the voice of the elder brother, but why not the confession of the younger brother?
The third trick of the film is called from the outside to the inside.
Just telling a story of curiosity and reversal, the movie is not enough to touch people's hearts.
On the surface, it tells the story of a 10-year-old boy who fell from a building, but behind it is the generational trauma of families in East Asian countries and the anxiety of the whole society.
The director can always radiate from a small point to the profile of a society.
For example, only one student wanted to commit suicide, but during the investigation, Mr. Zheng found that almost every student was facing great psychological pressure.
He even hallucinated in class all sorts of misanthropic thoughts from his classmates.
An extreme case of initiation instantly turned into a group portrait display.
For another example, after my brother committed suicide, my mother ran away from home with hatred, and my father's choice was to throw things and drink heavily.
Many years later, his younger brother was submissive in marriage, and his lover also ran away with hatred, this time his choice was to stick to it and keep it.
The director uses two different ways of dealing with an event to teach us how to deal with conflict in intimate relationships.
Also, the same face to the suicidal teenager.
The younger brother was indifferent to his elder brother back then, and a fresh life came to an abrupt end;
Years later, he learned the lessons of that year and patiently talked to grieving students on campus.
The most absolute point is that the elder brother and the younger brother are very different on the surface, but they can actually be regarded as one person.
Everyone grows up as a mixture of the two personalities of the elder brother and the younger brother.
One is the pride in the hearts of parents, who live a fluke and are silent.
One is the shame in the hearts of parents, free but lonely in their hearts.
Most people's ending up is to kill the disobedient elder brother in the soul and become the obedient younger brother.
The personality, although incomplete, at least survived.
These reflections from the surface to the inside make the film from an isolated line into an intertwined web, in which each viewer can see their own shadow.
Everyone cried, to some extent, for the tears of their former selves.
The chill is mixed with the warm current, and there is still a deep hidden underneath the warm current, and the whole film has become extremely rich.
03、
There are many things to do about the film.
For example, the analysis of society is very similar to Yang Dechang, like a gentle and sharp scalpel, cutting open the foci of East Asian society;
For example, the use of empty shots has a bit of Hou Xiaoxian's shadow.
There are also performances by actors.
The father played by Zheng Zhongji is chilling, and Mr. Zheng played by Lu Zhenye is gentle and restrained, and full of dramatic tension.
The most difficult is Zheng Youjie's actor Huang Zile.
Several crying scenes were performed very well, especially when I was punished by the teacher for standing, and the cry when I faced the ridicule of my classmates was directly heartbreaking.
Of course, the film is not perfect.
Many people criticized that except for the shocking reversal, the rest of the film is a little dragged.
For example, he used a lot of pen and ink to describe his brother's love history, and even added slow motion and romantic filters, which was a bit noisy.
The director explained in the screening exchange session that the younger brother had a huge obstacle in dealing with intimate relationships after his brother's suicide, and the presentation of the love scene was also to illustrate that the unexpected death of a loved one has a great impact on people.
For another example, the forced whitewashing in the later stage of the film brought a great reconciliation to everyone.
Before his father died, he remembered his dead son, and the younger brother forgave him in a conversation with his secretary.
Although the whereabouts of the runaway mother are unknown, the happy ending is indispensable.
Brother Pi felt that the director probably didn't want the story to be too desperate, so he arranged such a slightly warm ending, and his heart was actually infinitely sad.
影片英文名Time Still Turns the Pages 翻译过来就是“时间永是流逝”。
I remembered the sentence in Lu Xun's "In Memory of Liu He Zhenjun".
"Time passes forever, the market is still peaceful, and a limited number of lives are nothing in China, at most, but for the innocent idlers to talk about after dinner, or for the malicious idlers to be the seeds of 'rumors'. ”
This sentence happens to be the best annotation for the film.
04、
Ironically, such a masterpiece was released in the mainland but had no popularity.
At present, it has been released for 11 days, and the word-of-mouth has broken the previous record of this year's theater films set by "Dune 2", but the film schedule continues to decline, many viewers can't buy tickets if they want to watch it, and the total box office has only just exceeded more than 10 million.
Probably the topic of "teenage suicide" is too shocking.
While watching the movie, we noticed that the Cantonese word "ex-boyfriend" was translated as "close friend", and puppy love was a forbidden word on the big screen.
An 18-year-old was told that he couldn't fall in love, and that falling in love was a heinous crime, but a 22-year-old was forced to go on a blind date, and being single was a big rebellion.
Young people who have grown up in this environment of evasion, discipline and self-deception are afraid that their hearts have been killed countless times.
When will we be able to see such works in the mainland?
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: A chicken
©原创丨文章著作权：皮皮电影（ppdianying）
Please do not reprint in any form without authorization