About Vietnam, in addition to brides, there are also movies.
Vietnam in the movie can be divided into five types.
The first is the war-torn Vietnam in American Vietnam War films, such as "Apocalypse Now", "Deer Hunter" and "Field Platoon".
The second is Vietnam in romantic French films, because Vietnam was originally a French colony and was known as "French Indochina", such as "Lover" and "Indochina".
The third is the "Vietnamese refugees" in Hong Kong movies, where Vietnam is synonymous with barrenness and chaos, such as Wu Yusen's "Blood Street" and Hui Anhua's "Running to the Fury Sea".
The fourth is the red record of the war-torn years in Vietnam, such as "The Same River" and "The Road back to home". Nothing to watch, in short, it is boring.
The last one, and the one we know the most, is the "poetic Vietnam" under the lens of Chen Yingxiong.
Here, Vietnam is no longer a "country destined to be nameless", but a place full of vitality and mystery.
The movie we want to talk about today is the last part of Chen Ying's "Vietnam Trilogy" - "Taste of Summer"
Once, in Vietnam, Chen Yingxiong heard two old men telling memories of the past of the war. Their tone was flat and gentle, without the slightest fluctuation of thoughts, as if everything was irrelevant.
Chen Yingxiong was touched by this indifference that had experienced the polishing of life and time, so there was "The Taste of Summer".
No matter in which movie, Chen Yingxiong is always firmly grasped by an aesthetic fetish.
In "The Taste of Green Papaya", the huge class difference between the love of the musician and the maid is skipped by a quiet beauty.
In "The Tricycle Driver", next to the dark social reality of Vietnam, a kind of charm is breathtaking.
The same is true in "The Taste of Summer", where exuberant lust and hazy ambiguity fill the pure green.
At the beginning of the film, the camera slowly passes by a middle-class family in Hanoi, Vietnam, calmly and unhurriedly ripples the emotions of the three sisters on the screen.
The ups and downs of life churn and surge under the surface as calm as a lake of spring water.
Doubts, betrayals, obsessions, delusions, temptations... The multitude of experiences and mixed desires are outlined in the summer sun and rain into a quiet and thick oil painting.
The three sisters, Sue, Kay and Lian, run a café together.
Although three women play a play, the lives of these three beauties are also like a play, but this play is low and shallow, stirring people's hearts.
The marriage of the eldest sister Su is not happy, and the waves are turbulent under the calm.
Four years ago, she met tang, a businessman, and had a private meeting with her husband behind her back.
The two agreed never to speak when they met, and the lust to abandon language was so wild that the fire of love seemed to break through their eyes and melt each other.
Sue's husband, Ku, is a photographer who often goes out to shoot.
In fact, Ku has already cheated on him, and in a distant foreign land, he and another woman live a married life, and even have a son.
He would lift up his unrecognized son in the turquoise waters.
He would also tell the old man fishing on the lonely boat that people must live in a place where the soul is harmonious, otherwise they are sad.
Originally, Ku made up his mind to go home and have a showdown with Sue.
But when he really faced Sue, he suddenly softened his heart.
Sue sat there, wearing an indigo robe, her freshly washed hair wet, gentle and calm, like the white lotus in the corner.
She looked at her husband and said that she had always known about his affair and the existence of the little boy.
She didn't stop, didn't object, didn't coerce, and the only thing she asked for was that she still be his wife.
And he was going to become the man she knew four years ago.
In this way, without arguing, Sue ended her affair with a kiss, and she and her husband continued to live together.
In this relationship, it seems that Sue and her husband are evenly matched with each other. Sue did not suffer losses, and in Tang's place, she also got pleasure.
Is marriage fidelity? Is love faithful? What is unforgivable, and what can be pretended to be blind?
It's not good to say, it's not good to say.
The second sister, Kai, is quite beautiful, beautiful and delicate, and she has a reverence for her husband, who is a writer and always conceives stories that have been turned thousands of times.
He wrote, and she sat quietly next to him.
After the party, the two would walk home arm in arm on a summer night in Vietnam.
Kay would tell her husband about her pregnancy and watch him with the same smile on her face as she had promised him to propose.
It is reasonable to say that having such a woman accompanying her should also be satisfied.
It's just that men are always unsatisfied.
For a while, Kay's husband ran out of inspiration and had to go out looking for material.
During a two-day and one-night trip, he met a gorgeous and charming girl.
On the surface, the two men did nothing, but the heartstrings that were stirred, but the mutual temptation of the dark tide, but the peeping out of the corner of the eye.
What's in it?
At best, the woman left the time and room number on the napkin with lipstick, and Kay's husband did not show up on time and chose to return to his wife.
I still remember that there was an article on Zhihu that was very popular, and it was also moved to Weibo Douban, the title at that time was "Eight years in love, and the male student master's degree and the opposite sex were in trouble for a year".
The content is a girl who tells the end of her love run. The reason is simple, but she saw her boyfriend chatting with his lesbian on WeChat. The two men didn't have any substantial cheating, but everything changed.
The girls also resolutely broke up.
Kai naturally found the piece of paper, she chose the silence of depression, jealousy and collapse, she lost her voice and cried in front of her sister and sister.
The director did not give the ending, did not say whether Kai had a showdown with her husband, and whether the two were reconciled as before.
There is no end, no finality, and marriage is always headed for the future.
The youngest sister, Lian, is played by Chen Hero's royal heroine, his wife Chen Nu Yanxi.
Lian and her brother Ah Hai lived together and slept in two adjacent beds, looking ambiguous.
The two would get up, work out, listen to songs, smoke, and fight in the house with its fruit-green walls.
Ah Lian and her brother do not look like brothers and sisters, but rather like lovers and couples, and this relationship has long crossed the boundary.
Lian would raise her head and say to her brother, "Do you remember the look in people's eyes when we went shopping last night?" They thought we were husband and wife! ”
Perhaps, for Lian, the brother is her most innocent love fantasy, and she has been looking for a "man like her brother".
And this kind of unexplained forbidden love can only stay in the blur.
So Chen Yingxiong didn't say anything, and when he began to magnify this unusual ordinary, he had already begun to explore the complexity of human nature and the unknowability of human emotions.
Later, Lian fell in love with another young man and had his first time with him.
A week later, Lotus's menstruation came.
She did not know the world, thinking that this meant that she was pregnant, which made her two sisters cry and laugh, and scared them enough.
First love, infidelity, affair, "The Taste of Summer" uses three sisters in a midsummer life encounter to write the emotional journey of a woman's life.
There is no emphasis, no protagonist, everything is trivial and scattered, lust is like the wild weeds that grow wildly after the spring rains, without a head, growing savagely.
Chen Yingxiong, who received systematic film education in France, was influenced by directors such as Bryson, John Ford, Mao Nao and Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, so that Western "art films" and Eastern "humanistic films" merged into Chen Yingxiong's film world.
The emotions, themes and aesthetics are more of an Oriental expression.
For example, the attitude towards death and life in this film has the kind of sophistication and indifference conveyed by Ozu in "Tokyo Story".
At the beginning of the film, in the humid and warm of Vietnam, the family gets together because of their mother's death.
They are beautiful, pure, like a mystery set this summer. They got together to talk about love, about men.
Family secrets stretched out like drops of water dripping from banana leaves and their hair. It turned out that the mother also had the same simple first love as the three sisters, and had an affair and cheating.
In orthodox values, their marriage is deformed, but it also cuts to the complexity of human nature.
At the end of the film, the father's death day comes, and the three sisters prepare to cook their own dishes and feast on 30 guests.
The brother said that the day of death was more important than the birthday, and the father did not even have a birthday when he was alive.
Lian chuckled and said, yes, when our parents have birthdays, we will only ask, whether today is my father's birthday or my mother's birthday, that's all.
This closed narrative of reincarnation adopted by the film is actually a symbol of reincarnation and fate, which is an oriental style of perfection and compassion.
Happiness and pain, sadness and joy, cruelty and romance, darkness and light, all coexisting in one life, self-destruction, and have commonalities with Confucian thought.
There is no great sorrow and joy, only endless, deep green.
Women's green clothes, green plantains, green flowers, green walls, green vases, green curtains...
Large swaths of green are sprinkled on every frame, and the thick green penetrates into the folds of the walls and spreads to the human heart.
All those chaotic emotions, complex lusts, suspicions and doubts between each other, are vibrating in the green water, rejuvenating.
Everything is still hopeful, everything is headed for the future.
"Taste of Summer" is not a movie that can be easily understood, with a non-linear narrative, a loose and chaotic plot, no twists and turns, only those trivial daily routines.
Chen Yingxiong said: "The truly ideal and perfect film in my mind is a film that produces meaning and emotion through the structured process of imagery. The audience is moved by the language of the film during the viewing process, not because of the content of the story. ”
This kind of beauty produced by the language of the film is exactly the characteristic of Chen Yingxiong's films.
In this film, Hanoi in Vietnam becomes a paradise-like place. This breathtaking beauty can hook all the minds of the visitors, so that the audience almost forgets the story and has no time to take care of anything else.
Some people say that "The Taste of Summer" has a wong kar-wai feeling, but it is not wrong.
It's just that Chen Hero's emotions are more complicated.
The longing and attachment to his homeland has always allowed his lenses to present a mysterious and moving Vietnam like a filter.
This Vietnam stems from the condensation of Chen Ying's childhood memories, and we don't need to explore whether this is fantasy or reality.
Just as a hundred people have a hundred interpretations of love, we want to allow the artist to present his hometown, the real beauty in his mind.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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