Night Flight
(2014, South Korea)
Director: Lee Song Hee-yi
Writer: Lee Song Hee-yi
Starring: Guo Shiyang, Lee Jae-joon
Shortlisted for the Panorama Section of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival in 2013
plot:
Yongjun was born in a single-parent family and was brought up by his mother, so the two are also particularly close. He had excellent academic performance, a good family, and his good friend Keizer was always inseparable from him.
However, it is unfortunate that Yongjun is involved in a love-hate entanglement with the school's little Zhixiong. They used to be good childhood nemesis. Zhixiong's father was imprisoned for stealing, and he gradually became a bad boy for self-protection. Yongjun has always had a crush on him, but he is also heartbroken because he has become the target of his violence.
Knowing that it was impossible to get it, he had to meet other gay teenagers through social networks. He and a classmate from an out-of-school school always meet at a place called "Night Flight," which used to be a gay bar that was closed by complaints because it was too close to the school. One night, in retaliation for the school's repression of homosexuality, they spray-painted the walls of the campus with the words "I am gay." Unexpectedly, these behaviors were filmed by the school's surveillance video, and the class teacher asked him to write a letter of guarantee to avoid being expelled from school.
At the same time, under Yongjun's poor pursuit, Zhixiong began to approach him step by step. But it is accompanied by a sudden and dark emotional relationship, which makes people unpredictable. What is even more troublesome is that the teacher sneered in the class that there was homosexuality in the class, and his good friend Keizer did not hesitate to expose Yongjun's identity in order to protect himself. These brought him more violence, and Yongjun was gang-raped by male classmates and videotaped.
Annoyed by the situation, Zhixiong finds the classmate who caused the accident and wants to get the memory card back for Yongjun. At this time, he was on the verge of collapse, no longer heed any obstacles, and he was also bruised.
Yongjun goes to the hospital to visit Zhixiong, who is injured, and they hug and cry, and they meet to leave the sad city.
Film critics:
Audiences who have watched "No Regrets" and "White Nights" should still remember the sadistic emotional relationships in it, with this style, director Li Songxi shot the film "Night Flight", in which several small fresh meats have their own characteristics, which are coveted by rotten female friends, and at the same time, the film also pays attention to a particularly serious topic: campus violence.
Behind the seemingly simple school violence, there are complex power relations. In the relationship between Yongjun and Zhixiong, Zhixiong's struggle for identity is hidden. Zhixiong's father, who could not bear the support of his son because he was imprisoned, was also a victim of school violence and later evolved into an abuser. Painful entanglements in intimate relationships intersect with unequal class differences on campus. In the end, Zhixiong used extreme violence in order to regain the memory card that captured the video of Yongjun's rape, leaving an intriguing explosion at the end.
The director is particularly good at dealing with scenes of fierce confrontation, the collective fight of students under the bridge is a familiar memory, The several confrontations between Yongjun and his mother write about the complexity of the family, and the beating of Zhixiong with teachers and students in the corridor at the end is even more shocking. There is also a scene where Zhixiong goes to the roof of the building to find Yongjun, who wants to live lightly, after a parallel montage, seeing the empty roof, giving people a lot of suspense, but the film does not send the protagonist to the end of the road, but finds him curled up in another place. The technique of this paragraph is very helpful for the advancement of the plot.
In 2011 and 2013, South Korea successively launched "The Melting Pot" and "Suyuan" to pay attention to the real cases of sexual abuse and abuse of minors, causing a huge social sensation and even promoting changes in relevant laws. Compared with these two films, "Night Flight" has not attracted enough attention, for three reasons: the first two films are adapted from real cases, which has attracted more social sympathetic attention; compared with the topics discussed in the first two films, there is still a lot of controversy in South Korea, and the 2014 Seoul Gay Parade triggered hundreds of protests by fundamentalist Christians, presumably the promotion of "Night Flight" in South Korea will also encounter many obstacles; third, the topic of "Night Flight" is more scattered, in addition to campus violence The film also deals with issues such as single-parent families, intimate relationships, and differences between rich and poor, and although these topics are closely related to school violence, the film's focus is not too focused. However, this also makes the film look less like a propositional composition, full of authorial thinking.
"Night Flight" is the name of a gay bar in the film, in which Yongjun and his friends often meet in this abandoned bar, becoming the only little paradise of their boring and cold campus society, and the title also metaphorically refers to the protagonist's desire to escape from this society. The film's open-ended ending makes it difficult to speculate whether they "escaped", but in reality, teenagers who are bullied in school "leave" in various ways. Maybe such a movie will become a small candlelight that warms them and inspires the public.
Author: Fan Popo