Introduction: "Time flies, social change." Now, for the sake of the progress of the times, it is required to leave. We always have to try to do something. If we succeed, it will become a beautiful landscape; if we fail, it will become a good memory. ”
"The Piano of Steel" is a film directed by Zhang Meng and starring Wang Qianyuan and Qin Hailu. The film tells the story of the northeast in the 90s facing transformation, the former steel mill worker Chen Guilin after being laid off, in order to maintain his livelihood, set up a wedding and funeral band, running all day in the marriage and funeral, shop opening business, life barely maintained. His wife, Xiao ju, divorced him and turned to the arms of a rich counterfeit drug dealer. On the custody of their daughter Xiaoyuan, the husband and wife argued. My daughter, who loves pianos, asked, "Whoever can buy me a piano, I'll follow." In order to get his daughter, Chen Guilin planned to build a piano with his partner after unsuccessfully raising money to buy a piano. The film uses Chen Guilin's family plight to map the turmoil of the entire social transformation. In the face of the huge changes of the times, Zhang Meng did not use a heavy attitude to narrate, but through an almost absurd comedy effect, there was a humanistic care for reality in witty humor, expressing the remembrance and remembrance of a bygone era.
In the film, panoramas and symmetrical compositions are mostly used, and the ideographic function of the environment is enlarged. There are two scenes of Chen Guilin and Xiao Ju negotiating in the film. At the beginning of the film, the two of them are located on both sides of the picture, arguing about the custody of the child, and the difference between the backgrounds occupied by the two is obvious, the street behind Chen Guilin is broken and overgrown, while the street on Xiao ju's side is neat and orderly. Through the difference in the environment, the difference in the living conditions of the two is explained: Chen Guilin is unemployed and laid off, while Xiao Ju wants to marry a drug dealer.
This passage, ostensibly a secular question of who will be happy with the child, is actually about the economic disparities that have been divided and disparate. The second time was that Chen Guilin finally decided to let Xiaoju take away his daughter after experiencing a series of setbacks in borrowing money to buy a piano, to counterfeiting a piano, to stealing a piano, and then to making a real piano. Compared with the picture of the first scene, the former uses a back shot, and the latter uses a top shot, resulting in a difference in the sense of strength of the characters. In the wave of the times, people become small, slowly enlarged shots squeeze the characters out of the painting, the era becomes the protagonist, and the whole picture is full of powerlessness.
Chen Guilin's father was aphasia of the workers' representatives. The changes in society, the decline of industry, the difficulties of survival and the dilemma of inescapable of escape have gradually made them live into a depressed silence, they can not express their rich emotions to people normally, they can only wander outside the normal society, and become a marginal group of society. The father did not have a single line in the whole film, but when Chen Guilin and his daughter "played the piano", they issued several heavy coughs, and then chen Guilin severely stopped them. In addition, in Chen Guilin, I went to ask Wang Gong of Liusu for advice on making piano, and once mentioned my father's opinion: "Blowing up the chimney, even my father like him signed a joint letter Is it useful?" It is impossible to listen to a few of you old workers." It expresses the nostalgia of the workers, and when the chimney, which symbolizes industry, falls, the father is truly destroyed.
The emotions that are pinned on the piano have long surpassed the piano itself. "From the process of changing the piano from steel to the piano, it is the process of these marginalized little people standing in the center of the stage again." The film spends a large part of the story of Chen Guilin gathering friends to build pianos. First of all, Wang Gong, who had stayed in Su, Wang Kangmei, who had been a cook, went to the old season of contracting steel mills to dig scrap iron, and once privately assigned a key to the fast hand that was fired. Everyone gathered at "Karaoke", and everyone sang "Remembering Comrades-in-Arms" to create a group portrait of a group of laid-off workers. Chen Guilin led his co-workers back to the foundry workshop, started the lathe, made the sandbox, and made the factory run again in the hands of the workers themselves.
Making a piano by hand looks funny, but for laid-off Chen Guilin and others, this is a return after they have been thrown into history as individuals, and it is a matter of re-illuminating themselves, because by doing piano, they are once again back in the collective. The dilapidated abandoned factory building is like a utopia, where they eat, live and work together, which is a reflection of the era of collective life they once had, although the process is full of difficulties and hardships, but as Wang Gong said: "There is no spirit of daring to think and dare to fight, that is not what we workers do!" ”
As a symbol of the industrial age, the chimney has important significance in the film. Chen Guilin's band playing under the chimney, the traditional industry symbolized by the chimney, was once an important pillar of the development of the northeast, and the spiritual hall is located directly below the chimney, suggesting the end of the industrial age. In order to preserve the chimney, everyone, including Chen Guilin's father, wrote a joint letter to organize the demolition of the chimney, expressing the retention of the industrial age. When the workers gathered for a meeting, Wang Gong said: "In my eyes, he is like an old friend who has been forgotten for a long time, and when he suddenly wants to leave one day, I don't know whether to try my best to keep it or watch it leave silently."
If we succeed, it will become a beautiful landscape, and if we fail, it will become a good memory. "There are always some people in this world who seem to be doing small things that people can't detect, and they always fail and never give up." And what you can't see is that there is a place in their hearts, where there are not so many successes and failures, there is love, dreams and hopes. The meaning of the chimney is not more than its own function, but as a symbol of industry. In the face of social reform, confused workers, facing a new and unknown life, are full of uneasiness and confusion. Finally, the wheels of history rolled forward, the two large chimneys of the steel mills were about to be completely destroyed, and many passing townspeople bid farewell to the chimneys, and under the watchful eyes of everyone, it collapsed violently.
At the end of the film, everyone gathered around the cast piano, and Xiaoyuan asked Chen Guilin: "Dad, what do you want to listen to?" Chen Guilin replied, "The simpler the better." "The crowd expressed their remembrance of the old days with simple songs, and in the melodious sound of the piano, the era of belonging to the collective was truly over, and another new era was about to begin.