In the 1980s, with the acceleration of reform and opening up, many "Western things" gradually entered people's lives.
In order to capture Shanghai at that time, Hong Kong director Hui Anhua, who has always been good at shooting the stories of small people in the background of the big times, also made the movie "Shanghai Holiday" in 1991, showing the living conditions of people at that time from a peaceful and grounded perspective.
The story tells that Gu Bo (Wu Ma), who lives in a shanghai alley, has been living in seclusion since his son's family immigrated to the United States, and usually only his daughter (Liu Jialing) will come to visit by chance.
One day, a transoceanic phone call shatters Gu Bo's peaceful life: it turns out that the son and daughter-in-law want to send their grandson Gu Ming (Huang Kunxuan) to Shanghai to be cared for by him.
The arrival of the grandson made the alley lively again. At first, Gu Bo was obedient to Gu Ming, and took him to stay in the hotel and took him to eat KFC, but Gu Ming still could not adapt to life in Shanghai.
After an argument, Gu Ming ran away from home and accidentally fell into the river, but his instinctive reaction was not to find a way to climb ashore, but to call his parents and grandfather to save himself.
In the end, Gu Ming was fortunately rescued by the villagers, who found him clean clothes and left him to come down to eat. The harmonious atmosphere made him start to miss Gu Bo and the neighbors in the alley.
Therefore, Gu Ming decided to return to Gu Bo's side, and since then, he has gradually pulled the distance between the two grandchildren. He began to dance square dancing with his grandfather, teaching the school classmates to play baseball, teaching the neighbors to skateboard, going to the theater with his grandfather to watch performances, and even matching his grandfather with the neighbor Mo Daniang...
However, in the blink of an eye, the day of Gu Ming's return to the United States was coming, and before parting, he was very reluctant to Gu Bo and his neighbors and said "thank you Nong".
Through a bland and realistic narrative technique, this film depicts the relationship between grandchildren and cultural differences, and also derives the theme expression of "treating new things with an inclusive attitude, but also not losing the bottom line".
For example, at first, Gu Bo, including the neighbors, was very enthusiastic about his attitude, and later, when they found out that Gu Ming had "intensified" because of this, they began to alienate him. When Gu Ming realized his mistake, he also began to integrate into the life in the alley with an equal posture, and eventually mingled with the neighbors.
This also reflects that "cultural exchange should not be blindly asking for favors, but should be a mutual behavior."
Under the "keen" lens scheduling of photographer Li Pingbin, the Shanghai alleys and streets in the film are also full of strong realism, which makes people feel very intimate.
Playing Gu Ming is Taiwanese child star Huang Kunxuan, who was a royal actor directed by Du Qifeng and Yang Liguo, and has cooperated with many big coffee such as Zhou Runfa, Zhang Aijia, Liu Songren and so on.
He was only 13 years old when he was filming this film, but he was able to interpret the image of the "second generation of returnees" who were well-nourished, such as speaking English and not speaking Chinese, bathing with a lotus shower, like chewing gum, listening to the Walkman, making people believe that he is really "ABC".
Unfortunately, due to the relationship between time and length, the film did not unfold the line that Gu Bo used in Yunnan when he was young, losing a lot of interest. This also directly led to the dry daughter played by Liu Jialing as a "tool man", which did not play a role in the advancement of the plot.
Although this film is relatively unpopular in Xu Anhua's work sequence, it has a key position in carrying on from top to bottom. It inherited "Ketu Autumn Hate" (1990) and inspired the later "Auntie's Postmodern Life" (2006), and the commonality of these three films is to express cultural differences and collisions through family relationships.
Watching this movie today, in addition to nostalgic for the style of old Shanghai in the 90s, it is more important to understand how to face up to the family affection that blood is thicker than water.
Family affection does not mean that you can blindly take, when parents and other family members are getting older, we should also learn to honor them and do something for them, so as to better maintain the relationship. (Zhang Liyuan)