Introduction: "I don't want you to be happy, I want you to live." ”
The film "Border Storm" is a work released by director Cheng Er in 2012, starring Sun Honglei, Wang Luodan, Yang Kun, Zhang Mo and others, telling the intricate story between drug lords, drug dealers, police and hostages in the Yunnan town on the Border between China and Myanmar, the film uses a non-linear narrative to divide the story into four parts - the first chapter, the dog; the second chapter, the past; the third chapter, the daughter; the fourth chapter, the past. Through these four different periods of events, we are slowly revealed the whole original appearance of the story. The film won many domestic awards such as the Best Screenwriter Award at the 20th Beijing University Student Film Festival, the Outstanding Youth Film Creation Award and the Outstanding Youth Drama Composition Award at the 15th Film Huabiao Award, and director Cheng Er became famous in one fell swoop.
After watching the 2016 "History of the Demise of Romanticism" and then watching "Border Storm", we can see the evolution of director Cheng Er's style, if "Border Storm" is a crime film focusing on "police bandits", then "History of the Demise of Romanticism" is an epic film that focuses on the times and looks at all sentient beings, if the non-linear narrative of "Border Storm" and the narrative method of breaking the continuity of time and space are the founder's mature foundational works, then "The History of the Demise of Romantic" is a landmark work made by the director in the film language. Comparing the two, it is not difficult to see the youth and immaturity of "Border Storm", but it is also based on this that we can feel the director's personal stylized performance.
First, the non-suture system - the beauty of form
The story revolves around the drug lord, drug dealer, police and daughter, the film divides the story into four chapters - the first chapter, "Dog" tells the story of the police and drug dealers, the order on the timeline should be 3; the second chapter "Past Events" tells the emotional relationship between the daughter and the drug lord, which should be the earliest scene on the timeline; the third chapter , "Daughter" tells the story line of the daughter and the drug lord, leading to the story line of the domestic drug dealer and the police, the order on the timeline is 2; the "past" in the fourth chapter is "Past" The incomplete plots from the first three chapters are strung together to integrate the story and the final ending. This "non-stitching" approach to storytelling is very different from the traditional "zero-degree editing" (erasing the traces of editing), similar to such films that deliberately break through time and space, divide and reorganize, and have appeared in the classic movies "Two Big Smoking Guns" and "Pulp Fiction".
Such "non-stitching" not only appears in the paragraph plot, but also appears in the picture language, the story develops to the plot point of the drug lord played by Sun Honglei preparing to rebel against the son of the drug boss, the picture is composed of the temple chanting, the drug lord lurking with a gun, the subordinate ambush, Sun Honglei "crowning" the boss These time and space points are cross-cut, the camera and the lens are not arranged in chronological order, but interlaced with each other, and the clean and neat picture language describes a rebellion to the audience - the screen switching speed gradually accelerates, accompanied by chanting, With the sound of gunfire and powerful rhythmic music, Sun Honglei completed an action to eliminate his opponents and stabilize his position, which is the same as the cross-montage of killing opponents and church baptism before Michael became the godfather in "Godfather 2".
Second, the indifference and arbitrariness of time and space interlacing
Unlike most films that use a change of tone to express flashback clips, there is no difference in tone in flashbacks in Frontiers. Such a way is also the director's ingenious place, the direct change of picture elements such as film tone or format can make the audience see through the changes in time and space at a glance, just as the black and white at the beginning of "My Father and Mother" to the color used to open the story of "father and mother" was used, and then to the end of the story ended in black and white, it can be directly seen that the whole movie is a time-space logic that now recalls the past.
However, in "Border Storm", the director did not give such a straightforward prompt, but to rely on the audience to integrate and stitch together a complete story, which requires improving the attention of the movie, constantly thinking and reconstructing the logic of the whole story, to a certain extent, improving the interest of the movie and the interaction between the audience and the film.
In addition to the indifference between temporal and spatial tones, the flashback clips in the film are also arbitrary, and the director uses casual and multiple "interludes" and "flashbacks" similar to the text narrative to supplement the lack and emphasis of the narrative level - using the past to explain the present. Between each chapter in the film and before each important plot point, the director uses the dark screen to make transitions, directly highlighting the content of this part.
Third, clean and neat film language
The lines of the whole film are very simple, and the picture is neat and crisp, without dragging mud and water. The dialogue between the father and his daughter after his release from prison, which consists of two parts at the beginning and middle of the film, seems to be careless, but in fact it is like a prophecy that sets the way for the end of the film - "I am now living a very happy life, is this not enough?" "I don't want you to be happy, I want you to live." "If one day we leave Myanmar, I want Dad to come with us, but before that day, I don't want to change anything." "I don't understand." Just a few rounds of dialogue point the way for the development of the story - the father and the drug lord, two people who love their daughter (wife) deeply, one to give life, one to give happiness, will make a choice. In the end, the drug lord's compromise and atonement gave up his own way of life to give the girl the last happiness - to live.
Directors mostly use pictures to tell stories, and there are many scenes with strong metaphorical colors in the film - without verbal narration or full view, only some partial close-ups (not close-ups) that vaguely convey what happened to the audience. In the plot where the drug lord prepares to wash his hands of the golden basin but is rebelled by his subordinates, it is also a set of cross-montage clips, in which one shot showing the success of the rebellion is a close-up shot of two pairs of feet, one pair wearing leather shoes, one pair wearing women's sandals, each side with a gun and a gun-raising hand, which is such a simple shot, so that the audience immediately understands the situation and the drug lord has stepped down.
epilogue
For the crime genre, the director did not focus on the contest between good and evil and positive conflicts, or even did not show the reconstruction of social order of "good triumphing over evil", but instead told a heroic story of a "negative character". Seeing the end of the film, the audience is far away from the emotional values of right and wrong and restoring justice, but instead feels sorry, as the girl said in the film, "If only time stopped at that moment." "But the film is a rare domestic superior work in terms of formal structure, and form and content are the two aspects that the film has always needed to balance, and director Cheng Er has given us more formal possibilities."