Text: Overnight flowers
The film "I Have Lived My Life Like This" is a civilian epic from a female perspective, the film takes Guimei, a female figure in line with traditional Chinese ethical virtues, as the starting point, and takes the transition from the traditional patriarchal social structure to the urbanized modern society as the background, explores the spiritual confusion faced by women, and triggers the audience to think about self-worth and the meaning of life.
As a representative work of Taiwan's "new film", the film adopts a panoramic narrative spanning decades, reflecting the real humanistic style from an objective and calm perspective, containing sensibility in rationality and seeing colors in plainness.
<h1>Civilian epics from a female perspective</h1>
01. Taiwan's "New Film" banner director Zhang Yi with the static beauty of the image
Zhang Yi, the director of "I Have Lived My Life Like This", is a representative of Taiwan's "New Film Movement" in the 1980s, unlike Hou Xiaoxian's use of keen poetic intuition to express nostalgia and cultural roots, and unlike Yang Dechang's use of an absolutely calm rationality to interpret the spiritual confusion of modern urbanites, Zhang Yi's films are relatively more classical narrative methods, focusing on storytelling and portraying the character and psychology of typical Chinese women from a modern perspective.
Therefore, Zhang Yi's films are also the manifestation of the "cultural lifeline and national consciousness" in the process of Taipei's urbanization. (See Wang Fanghua, "Taipei Image and Chinese Identity of Taiwan's New Cinema")
Director Zhang Yi mostly uses static, fixed viewpoint panoramic shots to show the relationship between the character image and the character in the film, which makes the film have a rational and restrained image style.
In addition, Zhang Yi pays attention to showing some seemingly ordinary scenes and details in life, refining and excavating the inner meaning of them, which has both a documentary image beauty that presents the appearance of real life, and a perceptual exploration of the complexity and multi-directionality of life.
This is very obvious at the beginning of the film, Gui mei (Yang Huishan) sent people to the fence, borrowed in the cousin's house, on the one hand, the cousin and the guests are eating watermelon, talking about their fun and harmony, on the other hand, Gui Mei in the kitchen to change coal, boiling water, water bottles, nearly two minutes of long shots, Gui Mei has been engaged in these trivial housework, look solemn, here the classic contrast montage, naturally show a female image trapped in chai rice oil salt sauce vinegar tea, under the traditional ethical and cultural standards.
Paying attention to the extension of image modeling and the scene scheduling of the internal space of the picture is a major artistic feature of the whole film.
02. "Xiafei House" reflects the personal fate and changes of the times
The film is adapted from the novel "Xiafei Home" by Xiao Sa, a well-known new feminist writer in Taiwan, "Xiafei" is a symbol of the prosperity of old Shanghai, and the old Shanghai era songs such as Zhou Xuan's "Full Moon Flower" in the movie also appear often, which is not only a cultural symbol, but also an intuitive projection of the psychology of small people yearning for success. "Xiafei House" in the film is Guimei's biggest dream - her own restaurant.
The film is a civilian epic from a female perspective, connecting personal fate with the changes of the times. In the more than several decades of changing times, the protagonist's family has traveled between the original hometown, the guest village, and the foreign country, and the ultimate purpose is only to live with a little dignity and dignity. Because of this, the film will also be regarded as "Alive" in another context (directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Gong Li and Ge You).
The torrent of the times washed away Guimei and her lovers, so she became a continuation of Hou Yongnian (Li Liqun) living in a foreign land; because of the embarrassment of life, she was forced to work as a maid in a foreign country and suffered a lot; when the time came and went, she finally opened her own restaurant, but her husband had two hearts; her children had just become independent, but they could not enjoy the blessings and had to grow emaciated and old in their hospital beds.
The film adopts a panoramic narrative, reflecting the changes of the times through Guimi's personal experiences. Whether it is the ups and downs of nature or the vicissitudes of the world, she can always support a family by herself.
When Guimei is no longer tired of running for her life, and the hard work of life makes the family stable, Guimei is facing a new confusion. As she grew older, she began to recall her original love, the initial beauty of this youth will eventually disappear into reality, and she must face a new social order established by modern industrial civilization, so when her children have started the idea of "Xiafei Home" for selfish interests and hope to sell it, all she has in her heart is nostalgia.
"Xiafei Home" is her life's work, but also the biggest dream of her life, is the symbol of the dreams of countless civilians; at the same time, the establishment of "Xiafei Home" to the renovation has undergone social and economic transformation, witnessing the sorrow and joy of countless people. Placing personal life experience and life consciousness in the context of the big era and showing profound humanistic care are the common characteristics of the fifth generation of directors in the 1980s, the Hong Kong New Wave, and Taiwan's "new films".
03. The typicality of Guimei's image and the benchmarking significance of Yang Huishan's performance
In the movie "Yu Qing Sister-in-law", Yang Huishan successfully portrayed Bai Xianyong's Yu Qing Sister-in-law, whose personality is as hot as fire and strong emotions, so she won the best actress at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival. In "I Live My Life Like This", Gui Mei portrayed by Yang Huishan has set a new benchmark in Taiwanese films.
The typicality of Guimei's image is that, to some extent, she is a condensation of the fate and character of traditional Chinese women. From the mother who gives birth to children to the husband and godson, the wife who is well-run, this is all the label given to her by the traditional social form. In the face of her husband's gambling, affair, and decadence, even if he is unwilling to swallow his anger, he will eventually endure the reasons of family society.
In her bones, she has an arrogance, unwilling to accept handouts from others, and believes in using her own labor to gain dignity; she has a strong sense of self-esteem, and after being slandered by female employers, she can't bear the shame and resolutely leaves; she does not believe in fate, and she does her best to send her children to study and educate her children to do any line of fame.
Self-improvement, tenacity and tolerance in the bones, but the suppression of personality and the dwarfing of values, this contradiction and conflict makes the characters have a strong tragic beauty. Her life value is dwarfed by traditional outdated concepts, and she tries to divorce in order to defend her personal rights, but she is inspired by traditional ethics and morality, so her life is always trapped in invisible shackles.
Yang Huishan is an actress with excellent comprehension ability, which is based on a deep taste of the tone and character connotation of the film. First of all, her performance is traceless, there is no showmanship component of big opening and closing, and it is perfectly integrated and unified with the film's plain and restrained documentary style. Secondly, she grasped the traditional feminine characteristics of Guimei as a wife and mother gentle and humble from the inside out, and at the same time showed the tolerance, stoicism and self-improvement in the bones of an ordinary woman, so Guimei has also become a screen model for studying the personality characteristics of Oriental women.
In order to shape the role of Guimei, Yang Huishan gained more than 20 kilograms and 44 pounds in two months (Yang Huishan's self-description when she was a guest of "Kefan Listen"), which is comparable to the Oscar-winning Actor Robert De Niro in "Angry Bull". And Yang Huishan's efforts have also been greatly rewarded, becoming the first actress to win the Golden Horse Awards.
From the youth, middle age to old age of the characters, the span of more than several decades, from the explicit differences in physiological states to the subtle changes in the mood of different life stages, from the external form to the expression and demeanor, psychological details, are all presented by Yang Huishan in a clear layer.
At the same time, her portrayal does not stay on the surface of the emotion, but also conveys the deeper confusion of the character's heart through micro-expressions, and the character's life dilemma also reflects the humanistic characteristics of a specific stage, just like Mei Yanfang of "Rouge Buckle" and Maggie Cheung of "Ruan Lingyu", their performances transcend the secular level of character shaping, evoking people's multi-faceted thinking about complex life destiny to history and culture.
This kind of performance with both character depth and technical difficulty is rare in the history of Chinese cinema.
<h1>A percussion of women's self-worth and the meaning of life</h1>
If the heroine Guimei's life dilemma is still affected by the environment of the times in which she lives, then the portrayal of female group portraits in the film is not limited to specific times and classes. Guimei's employer is from a noble family but is still indifferent to her husband, and Guimei's stepdaughter Zhengfang, as a younger generation with more modern values, cannot escape the fate of being abandoned by her boyfriend and her family.
The reason why a person is a woman is not so much "born" as it is "formed". (From the feminist scholar De Beauvoir)
Beauvoir's quote reveals that within the traditional value system, the dilemma faced by women is the alienation of women by the value standards of male-centered discourse. The film also builds on the resonance of each other's status as male vassals when depicting the confrontation between two generations of female mothers and daughters moving towards mutual sympathy. The relationship between mother and daughter has always been tense due to the preconceived hostility to her stepmother, and after experiencing setbacks and pain, the situation of being alienated and betrayed by each other has led to spiritual mutual understanding and reconciliation. She understood the humiliation and bitterness of her stepmother Guimei, and decided to take over the "Xiafei House" that Guimei painstakingly ran.
Therefore, while affirming the excellent qualities of tolerance and perseverance in Guimei, the film also sighs in the first person from Guimei's perspective: "I" have lived my life like this! Is such a life the best way to realize the value of Guimei's life? Throughout her life, she still has no love of her own, has not released her personality, and she is always making self-sacrifice for the sake of her family.
Through Guimei's confused and confused expression at the end, we can see that this is also a kind of percussion of the director, a reflection on the burden of women on women by the old thinking habits of traditional moral standards.
After all, no one's way of realizing value can be separated from the cultural background and the general level of perception of a particular era. Therefore, when modern society uses the most scientific and delicate division of labor to release the potential of individuals to the greatest extent to achieve individual value, women gradually choose love and career direction independently from the stereotypical male-based value standards.
The modern values reshaped by this modern industrial society have awakened women's independent personality and self-awareness, which will trigger modern women's deep thinking on how to achieve self-worth. This is the profundity of the film.
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