Recently, the long-awaited "Sky of the Wind Dog Boy" has come to an end.
As a group portrait "youth drama", it is a little far from the lives of ordinary people, but its relationship with us is not so distant. It is not only the daily life of several Chinese post-00s "young people", but also has an inseparable relationship with relatives, friends, teachers, and society, and this is the motif that Chinese youth movies cannot escape.
As an East Asian cultural circle, Japan has always been known for its "cruel youth" films, whether it is Shunji Iwai or Takeshi Kitano, all of which show a certain national collective loss in the theme of youth films. However, with the certain migration of the overall aesthetic trend in Japan in recent years, it has triggered a change in the creative thinking of "youth films".
The Theme of Youth Growth in American Schools has always been known for reflecting the (various) impulses of deviant young people. In recent years, the "American Pie" style of school youth films has also gradually declined, and movies have become more diverse, more marginal and more feminine.
Today, we will collectively sort out the famous youth growth movies in recent years, and try to explore a certain commonality behind their creative perspectives.
01 A more marginalized perspective: the collective destination of youth films
Unlike the youth film trend with "Youth Label" that began to rise in 2012, "Those Years, the Girl We Chased Together", starting from the movie "Over the Spring" released in 2018 and the "Young You" released in 2019, the film creators began to consciously put love not in the first place in the narrative, and chose to focus the story on the attention of multiple marginal characters.
"Over spring" focuses on the identity dilemma of cross-border school children in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, while "Young You" focuses on out-of-school youth who are outside the mainstream perspective and the "ghost" that has long lurked on campus - campus bullying.
Both abandon the previously popular "early love", "lost love", "abortion" and "separation" of the inherent narrative threads, as well as the infinite expansion of tear-inducing advertising film shooting. "Over Spring" takes the cross-border "walking water" as a clue to connect several branches of friendship, love and family; "Young You" uses "companionship" as the main story line, thus triggering a series of chemical reactions and winning the recognition of the audience.
In fact, youth films are not only love, works that stick to love, the audience is often single, only by rubbing complex growth problems into the creation, reflecting the "problems" of the majority of young people in real life, can they impress the audience's voice.
Similarly, in Japan, there are now some directors and screenwriters who try to use youth themes to expose social problems and expose the real situation of Japanese society, such as Atsuhiro Yamashita.
His "Tamako Who Doesn't Seek Progress", "My Uncle", "Crossing the Fence", and "Hard Labor Train" all highlight the cruel youth and sad love in his films that are different from Iwai Shunji's style.
In yamashita's movie "Linda! Linda! Linda! In it, several middle school girls prepare to perform for the cultural festival, and internal conflicts are caused by the injury of a member. The Korean student played by Bae Doona in it, who is not fluent in Japanese, but also mistakenly joined the band and became the lead singer, until she heard that the performance was Linda Linda, and she was full of tears.
Receiving a note inviting her to the gym, the boy who liked her confessed to her in broken Korean, and she responded to him in broken Japanese.
It's a cross-cultural exchange of marginalized characters that highlights the idiosyncrasies of Japanese cinema in recent years: focusing on groups in society that have rarely spoken out, such as long-term Nepalese, filipinos smuggled in, and new generations that have grown up sandwiched between cultures.
In the United States in recent years, the fringe perspective has gradually become the focus: for example, "High School Student" will focus on girls on the edge of society, "Please call me by your name" and "Love you, Simon" and other works will focus on gay and transgender people.
Among them, "True Heart Half Solution" is undoubtedly one of the more typical films, the core of which is same-sex love, and director Wu Siwei, as an American minority, tells a very critical life chapter in personal experience.
The film focuses on the introverted Chinese honors student Ellie gradually falls in love with Aster while helping sports student Paul write love letters to the school flower Aster. Its narrative focus has always been on "growing" and "finding oneself".
In long-term American youth movies, families are often in irrelevant marginal scenes, and parents even play negative roles. However, in terms of current genre trends, families and their related characters in American school youth films are increasingly involved in the characterization of the protagonist.
"True Heart Half Solution" focuses on the closure of the first generation of immigrants, to the gradual transition of second-generation immigrants from closed towns to the mainstream, implying the efforts of ethnic minorities to integrate into mainstream society.
Therefore, whether it is China, Japan, or even the United States, the marginalization of creative perspectives is the common pursuit of screenwriters and even creators in various countries.
02 The Female Perspective: The Process of Individual Self-Awakening
In recent years, many domestic film and television drama creators have begun to pay attention to women, thus creating a series of female figures struggling in difficulties.
In Tibetan director Wan Ma Tse-dan's "Balloons", we changed our stereotype of women in Tibetan areas.
The film tells the story of the two young sons of the herdsman Dajie, who are mischievous and use condoms as balloons, making his wife, Droga, who does not want to have children, pregnant, while those around him regard this as a miracle. At one point, Drogga wanted to have an abortion, but was eventually dissuaded by her husband and son.
Wan Ma Tse-dan contrasts traditional Tibetan culture with women's self-awareness, reflecting how a modern Tibetan woman should view her identity.
In the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda's debut film "The Light of Illusion", the heroine Yumiko marries and has children, living a poor but happy little life. One day, her husband, Yufu, left unexpectedly.
A few years later, Yumiko married her young son to the village and lived a stable and happy life ever since. But in her mind, why did the ex-husband commit suicide?
With this obsession, she ran away from home and went to the beach to follow the funeral personnel, trying to find an answer.
What is the value of a person's life? The film wants to pursue such an answer. Attachment to the family, nation, and country makes people have a sense of mission, but once these attachments disappear, what kind of end life will become.
In the West, starting with the French "New Wave", whether it is Truffaut's Zu and Cham or Godard's The Extralegal, women are beginning to become crucial narrative structures in the story.
Later, "Dream of Paris" was even more "to give women more sexual mobility/change". When this structure enters the narrative of American films, especially the theme of campus youth love, there is a hint of ambiguity and ambiguity, such as "Wallflower Boy", to strengthen the dramatic tension in the story.
In "True Heart Half Solution", the director obviously highlights the "death of the mother". The absence of her mother makes the heroine choose to use her existing experience to shape her future life, and it also makes her mother's role model guidance more prominent.
In Miss Bird, for most of the film, the heroine refuses to accept herself. But she repeatedly wanted to seek her mother's approval.
In the creation of feminist works, the importance of the role of the mother to the daughter and the father to the son in most superhero films is self-evident, which is the power to strike at the heart.
Stories can become meaningful in a number of ways and give the viewer something to remember and cherish beyond the short consumer experience:
1) These stories convey some information about the world, a particular problem, or subculture, or give us a new perspective.
2) These stories inspire us in life through the battles, triumphs, and changes between the characters they depict.
3. In the process of establishing connections between characters and connecting with them, every beautiful thing we see is touching us.
In the above works, there is no doubt that two or even three factors are covered, so that the output of values is realized: women's self-consciousness.
03 Significance from a new perspective
Film research scholar Dai Jinhua believes that the basic feature of 'youth films' is that they express the pain of youth and many of the embarrassments and lacks, frustrations and pains in them. It can be said to be a subversion of the myth of 'infinite beautiful youth'. The main theme of 'Youth Film' is 'The Cruel Story of Youth'. ”
If you look at the drawbacks of the blowout of mainland youth dramas in the past few years, you will find that stories often rely on the emotional changes of the male and female protagonists to create dramatic tension and promote the story forward. The shouts and tears in the heavy rain, the hugs and kisses at the long-farewell reunion appear over and over again as important narrative means, making the symptoms of ptsd more and more obvious for many people.
In fact, those flat characters who are only obsessed with love cannot actually resonate with the audience's emotions.
As people often say: "The love of youth has become the yeast of youth narrative because it conforms to people's narcissistic complexes, but as the usual expression method in youth films, it should not become the only one in this genre." ”
Originally, the film of the youth growth type has complex characteristics because of the infinite possibilities of youth. However, because of the growing concern about social issues, moral awareness is also becoming stronger. Those film and television drama followers who often think of themselves as "three views of improper prosecutors", or "defenders" who express dissatisfaction with women's marriage and childbirth with radical strategies, just make the path for film and television dramas to reflect the path of life become narrow.
Compared with an independent novel, film and television dramas can portray the characters, lives and their relationships in depth, and can explore more "meaning" in the process.
For viewers, it will be more influential and satisfying to regularly track their characters over time. Their relationship with the characters is becoming more and more like a relationship in real life.
Because of this, a big part of the challenge for screenwriters is to create a world where the audience wants to be the characters in it and want to live the life in the play. In this way, in the play, they can easily approach the characters and hope to spend a long time with them.
But because the online world is moralized for many immoral phenomena, personal problems are publicized, and the result of nitpicking about moral issues is that the public issues that really need attention lose focus, and the details occupy the mainstream.
What's the point?
Meaning, to the creators, why did we write this work, and what will the audience end up getting? Regardless of the specific plot, characters, and scenes, what relevance or value does the deep meaning explored in the play have for their own lives or the lives of ordinary people, and can people regard it as a life experience, not just a short journey that can be forgotten at any time?
Themes are presented by examining the struggles in life through the details of the story, which ultimately reflects the idea of what is the best way of life in the world, and what is the most effective way of life, at least for now. I'm not giving simple and clear arguments about whether racism is good or bad, or whether a person should be selfish or should give.
A better theme measures competitive goods or competitive crimes and dramatically explains why it is sometimes difficult to make a choice, or to make a change.
The answer can often not be too simple. The outcome or final judgment of any theme is gradually obtained as the story progresses, rather than being thrown out in a simple and quick way.
For the theme of youth growth, when a script really makes people feel rich and meaningful, the human situation is presented in a fresh and concrete way. The protagonist's journey is about how they affect the world they live in (and how their world affects them), how they resonate with the audience, and how they have a lasting impact on them.
As top American screenwriter Eric Bock explains, if your idea meets these five requirements, then it should make sense enough:
A story or series, beyond the superficial plot, deals with questions about people that are universal and important, and there are no simple and clear answers to them.
Second, characters are driven by the most fundamental, unmet desires and needs around which they are likely to grow and change.
The last part of the story or series points out the changes that the characters have made, making the whole journey seem very valuable.
Some specific ways from a story or series can have a positive impact on the audience's life.
Instead of focusing on the theme and character growth, I subtly present it with a compelling storyline.