Huang Xinyao
◎ Liang Kun
As a representative of Taiwanese directors with thick accumulation and thin hair, more than 20 years of experience in the field of documentary films are the background of Huang Xinyao, and he has also developed his bottom-up observation method of life. In 2017, when his feature film Virgo "Big Buddha Plus" won five Golden Horse Awards including Best New Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography, we who are accustomed to the "carp leaping dragon gate" narrative in movies began to buy for Huang Xinyao's "one death to the end".
Whether it is the Plus (plus) of "Big Buddha Plus" or the Minus (minus) of his new film "Classmate Mynas", the protagonist of Huang Xinyao's film is floating in the line of survival, the desire is constantly adding, the years insist on subtraction, and constantly touch the porcelain by life, and it is inevitable that the paint will be touched. In the words of Huang Xinyao, "Classmate Mynas" is "a story about a little paint in life".
Brother, is there any difficulty?
There is a scene in "Big Buddha Plus" where the belly is collected into an abandoned and dilapidated house, and in the face of a man who sits there without saying a word, his own unsafe belly asks, "Brother, is there any difficulty?" Belly cai became the last person to speak to the man, and soon after belly cai also died.
"Brother, is there any difficulty?" This sentence seems to be very useful here in "Classmate Manas".
From 1998 to 2005, Huang Xinyao filmed the documentary "Scare Three Littles", which recorded his life with his high school friends, which became the inspiration for "Classmate Mynas". The protagonist of the film may be very much like the you and me around us: Tim Tsai is dreaming of being a film director, but he is filming an unpopular advertisement and propaganda film; Electric Wind is an insurance company employee, working diligently, doing well but not doing it right, promotion and salary increase are all isolated from him; closed knots have lived with Grandma for many years, relying on paper to build a house, stuttering problems make it difficult for him to talk about business, it is more difficult to make girlfriends; canned debts, emotional life is not smooth, suicide attempts are as nonsense as diet pills are not eaten well, The work of checking the household registration allowed him to meet the classmate of the goddess Ofnas when he was a student, but the goddess was in the flesh business...
Classmates and friends often gather in the bubble tea shop on the street corner, play cards, fight mouths, and life quietly changes in the silent footsteps of time. Tim Tsai became a puppet selected by politicians, from the eighteen-line small director embarked on the road to run for the legislator, but his name - Wu Mingtian has been playing through the direction of his fate; the electric wind Fengzi got married, the mood of helplessness overshadowed the excitement of the Xiti family, the wedding also became a good opportunity for Tim Tsai to canvass, and the repeated failures in the workplace also put him into the dilemma of self-doubt; the closed blind date and the "second spring" ah yue fell in love, life gradually improved, but unexpectedly a flying disaster, the closed knot was killed by mistake, this person who always thinks about others Not only did not get a good death, the funeral was reduced to the venue of Tianzai canvassing; the canned goods went around for 30 years, and finally got the opportunity of the goddess to "favor", but fled from the battle, and the goddess walked off the altar, which was also the end of the myth...
"Brother, is there any difficulty?" Who doesn't frequently drop paint, make up and make up, irreparable? Huang Xinyao's pessimism has influenced the tone of his creation, but he has made "one death to the end" an art of life and his images.
One of the great advantages of youth is that life is full of question marks, a long future, mysterious and vibrant, worth looking forward to. As time passes, people reach middle age, the question marks of youth, the mystery is revealed one by one, sometimes the question marks are replaced by ellipses, and it is even more unfortunate that some people's lives have come to an end. One reason for the sadness of middle age may be that the unsatisfactory end has been foreseen, but there is still a long way to go.
In "Scare Three Little", classmate Jie Zai once said, "Life has no meaning, you can only drink tea to scare rotten." In "Classmate Manas", Huang Xinyao borrowed the story of the electric wind and said, "We spend a lot of time looking for the answer to life, but maybe the answer itself is a chaos." ”
Huang Xinyao's reality and surreality
"Classmate Manass" tells the story of "I" four high school classmates in a first-person narrative, and this "I" implies a dual perspective, the first is the director of the film, and the second is the fifth classmate in addition to the four protagonists.
As a director, "I" record the stories of several classmates and unfold the fictional narrative in a simulated documentary way. As a classmate, "I" directly talks to the characters in the film in the form of a voiceover, such as a conversation with Electric Wind in front of his pocket parking space, listening to him talk about the high cost performance of this parking space that can only push the car out, and the dialogue between the electric wind wedding, listening to him talk about the big day feels the pressure of life.
The superposition of this double perspective is also the climax of the film, just at the funeral of the closed knot, the electric wind and can can not stand Tim Tsai taking the opportunity to canvass for votes and punching Tim Tsai, and "I" can't help but go up to punch and kick, which is not only angry as a classmate, but also expresses the anger of a director who is too deep into the play with a voiceover, forming a familiar Huang Xinyao-style humor.
Huang Xinyao uses a dual perspective to break down the barriers of the creator's identity, uses voiceover to dissolve the barriers between fiction and non-fiction, and uses various means to freely switch between reality and surreality. The boss, priest and old Li are played by an actor who explains his good intentions in a voiceover. The pinnacle of the closed knot craft is to build a paper house for himself, there is a courtyard in front, there is Mt. Fuji outside the window, the interior furniture is readily available, and I remember pasting a script for Tim Zai, pasting a goddess for canning, which is what happened in reality, but the classmates play cards and laugh in his "new home", and it is full of surreal meaning. And the old Li and the golden boy and the jade girl who appear many times in the film are not closed dreams or hallucinations, and this surreal expression also amplifies the sigh of fate and the impermanence of life.
Compared with "Big Buddha Plus", the story of "Classmate Mynas" is less concentrated, more like an essay, but the convergence of life changes, even ugly, is vividly reflected. From this, we can see Huang Xinyao's thinking on Taiwan's political ecology and the capture of the powerlessness of people's emotional life and workplace life in middle age.
However, the seamless connection between reality and surreality makes the story of "Classmate Manas" not bitter, but a "rhapsody of little people" full of black humor. It actually gives each protagonist the right to dream, Tim Tsai gets the opportunity to run like a pie in the sky, canned to have zero-distance contact with the goddess, the words are not closed to meet the girlfriend who is connected, and the electric wind seems to be only one step away from promotion under the encouragement of the boss, but real life will eventually beat everything back to its original form, leaving only the "rhapsody" faintly echoing.
"Scare Three Little" was born in Huang Xinyao's 30-year-old stage, "Classmate Mai Nasi" was born in Huang Xinyao's 40-year-old stage, and the distress at the age of 30 seems to be only the first taste of sorrow at the age of 40. At the end of the film, after the big ups and downs, there are many high-rise buildings, but this time it is still a mirage, and under the peak picture of the dreamlike successful people, Huang Xinyao's narrator tells how many middle-aged people's bitter water: when he was young, he thought that as long as he worked hard in life, there were many wonderful possibilities, "But after 40 years old, it is slowly understandable that we are actually just a chicken."
However, despite the deep roots of life, Huang Xinyao's films are never responsible for exporting values or exploring grand propositions about the meaning of life. Even if you realize that the answer to life is a chaos, you can feel some resonance and find some comfort from it, which is the temperature conveyed by Huang Xinyao through the image.