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Stephen Chow's films always make people laugh, but there are often tears. He once said that he made tragedies, but everyone looked at them as comedies, and if you think about it, this is really the case.
Filmed and released in 1994, "Nine Pin Sesame Officer" (also known as "Nine Pin Sesame Officer's White Bread Green Sky") is such a work, although more than 20 years have passed, but today it seems that it is not outdated, just as enjoyable, but also feel painful.
To be honest, it is rare for a movie to include officialdom, human nature, society, funny, nonsense, absurdity, goodness, innocence, evil, fornication, false orthodoxy, etc.
At the beginning of the movie, the father of the alternate Zhixian Bao Longxing (zhou Xingchi) gave his son a picture of honest characters, but no matter how he looked at it, it looked like a poor word, and the two sides of the unity of good wishes and cruel reality opened the tone of the film.
As a descendant of the famous Qing official Bao Zheng in history, Bao Longxing initially wanted to be a corrupt official. The reason why he later became a Qing official was because Chen Zhixian joined hands with the famous "Big Form" Fang Tangjing to make the case of the Qi family's extermination into an unjust case, and to make him Bao Longxing into it, if he did not seek justice for qi Qin, the only surviving daughter-in-law of the Qi family, he would not be able to escape the result of being taken to the court and beheaded.
Therefore, when Bao Longxing escaped from prison and went to Beijing to file a complaint and say goodbye to his father, his father told him bitterly: "Corrupt officials want to rape, and Qing officials want to rape, otherwise, how can we deal with those bad people?" ”
This sentence has actually pointed out: do not seek justice, justice is impossible, the official field only wins and loses, there is no justice.
However, Bao Longxing finally won, not only for the Qi Qin clan to seek justice, but also to open the court, execute the murderer Chang Wei, and sentence the corrupt water master Admiral, Shangshu of the Punishment Department, and Chen Zhixian to heavy sentences.
However, Bao Longxing was able to win in the end not because justice triumphed over evil, but because a larger backstage, the Tongzhi Emperor, appeared, and without the emperor's direct authorization and support, allowing him to handle this case with full authority as a "inspector of the Eight Houses of Yipin", Bao Longxing was afraid that he could only be a turtle prince in the "heavenly world" in the capital.
The reason why the Tongzhi Emperor was willing to support Bao Longxing was that Bao Longxing actually had the evidence that he had left the palace in a small way and looked for flowers and asked For Willow.
At the end of the film, Bao Longxing, who was immersed in the joy of victory, suddenly heard the news that the emperor died violently because of the disease of the flower willow, and immediately cried to the ground, which seemed to allude to the fact that "justice from the emperor" was also quite fragile and easy to disappear.
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Objectively speaking, in the structure of the "imperial power-bureaucracy" established since the Qin and Han dynasties, the emperor was the only one who had the motivation to consider issues politically and uphold "justice".
Why?
Because under the whole world, there can be no royal land, the coast of the land, and the royal subjects. Since the world is the emperor's, he certainly does not want the contradictions to intensify to the point where he cannot sit on the throne.
Any emperor who does not recognize this is a "dark king" or a "tyrant", and if he can recognize it, he is a "Ming jun".
However, for the bureaucrats at all levels below the emperor, since the world is the emperor's, it is natural for the emperor to worry about it, and he only needs to keep the official hat and keep the glory and wealth.
In the feudal era, the long-standing mentality inertia of "only opposing corrupt officials, not opposing the emperor" was related to this distinction between the emperor and the bureaucrat.
But in the game between the bureaucracy and the emperor, the emperor is doomed to lose—because if the emperor relies on the bureaucracy to provide him with information, he cannot solve the problem of information asymmetry; the emperor relies on the bureaucracy to implement his policies, and cannot solve the problem of asymmetry of power.
Therefore, before the Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide, he sighed: "The king of the fallen country is not the king of the subjugated country, and the subjects are all the subjects of the subjugated country", which is still quite reasonable.
Far from it.
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The "blank space" of the "Nine Pin Sesame Officials" is that justice cannot rely on an emperor with a flower and willow disease, but should find another way.
Is the film a tragedy, or a comedy?
Ignoring the social realities, it is still sad.
Should it still be a tragedy?!