People in the post-pandemic era are busy with side hustles, and when it comes to internal involvement, no one in the era is more anxious than people today.
When urban humans jump left and right between "beautiful beer" and "cool wages", there is also a place away from the hustle and bustle of the world, known as "never rolled".
This place exists in the movie of Shohei Imamura.
If you think this place must be a paradise, Imamura Masahira will interrupt your dreams with the phrase "I will always write maggots until I die."
That's right, this movie is from 1983 —
《楢山節考》
The so-called "maggots" of Changping in the village, and the so-called "unrolled" in this place of The Mountain, are entirely because the Mountain in the movie is a real "primitive village".
Infanticide, selling women, burying alive, killing fathers, abandoning mothers.
A series of sensitive topics that have now been banned 300 times were put into the movie "The Mountain Festival Examination" by Masahira Imamura nearly forty years ago.
The story tells that there is a mountain in Japan covered with lintel trees, and there is a group of villagers living in the village below the mountain.
Unlike the preference for sons and daughters in the first impression of feudalism, in the mountain, it is a bad thing for a pregnant woman to give birth to a baby boy, and it is a great thing to give birth to a baby girl.
The birth of a baby boy will only exacerbate the pressure of survival in the family, not to mention that there are not so many crops to plant in the field, and giving birth to a boy is just an extra mouth to eat.
Baby girls can not only reproduce offspring, but also sell them to other people's wives for food.
Therefore, in The Mountain, girls are regarded as great treasures.
In the law of survival of The Mountain, there is no such thing as a capital division between high and low, only a primitive code of survival with the two themes of "sex" and "fruit belly" as the core.
In the village of Nishan, the bodies of baby boys abandoned in the fields are often found.
And in the mountains, only the eldest son of each family can marry and have children, and the remaining sons can only be slaves to helpers at home.
There is also a cruel custom in the mountain, that is, as long as the old man in the family reaches the age of seventy, the eldest son of the family must carry the mountain on the back of the mountain to pay homage to the mountain god.
This custom is said to be a good custom to send the elderly to worship the mountain gods.
In fact, it is a fig leaf for the elderly population to abandon in an environment of extreme poverty.
"The Examination of the Mountain Festival" mainly tells the story of a family living in the village of Linshan.
Reiko is a sixty-nine-year-old lady, which means that she has one year to go to "pay homage to the mountain god".
Not matching her age, Reiko is in very good health, and even has a tooth that is healthier than a young person's, because of this matter Reiko is often ridiculed by the eldest grandson, Yuanfuji.
Reiko's husband had been missing for a long time, and when Reiko was a young woman, her husband carried her seventy-year-old mother to The Mountain according to the customs of the village, but never returned.
Because of this incident, Reiko became a widow and became the object of ridicule of the people in the village.
Reiko had two sons, the forty-five-year-old eldest son Tatsuhei.
and thirty-five-year-old second son, Risuke.
Although Tatsuhira was the eldest son and had the right to marry and have children, he died last year.
The youngest son, Risuke, as the second son, could not marry, and when he reached middle age, he still thought about the file with the woman all day, and there was always a strange smell on his body, and the people in the village avoided him.
The film mainly takes reiko's last year before she goes to pay homage to the mountain god as the main timeline, and tells a tragic story of cruelty and warmth around the events that occur in the village.
In order to prove to the villagers that she has the determination to go up the mountain, her son Tatsuhira will not violate the customs and humiliate the family like her husband.
On the day that the new daughter-in-law who had spent her life with Tatsuhira in the next village came to the house, she slammed her strong teeth into a blur of flesh and blood.
In the film, the scene of Reiko opening her "blood basin mouth" and wandering through the crowds of the village is still a classic scene of horror.
She proved to people that she was "aging" and that the old man of the stump family was qualified to go to the mountain to pay homage to the mountain god.
So far, Reiko's image in the movie has always been a woman who works hard for her family.
Soon, however, the film allowed people to see the "other side" of Reiko.
The young and vigorous eldest grandson, Yuanfuji, made the girl Asong's belly bigger outside, and reiko agreed to let her grandson take Asong home for dinner.
There is nothing more important in the village than eating, and taking a girl home to eat means accepting her as a part of the family.
Who knows that Ah Song is a delicious and lazy girl, and has the habit of stealing, often stealing potatoes from the stump house to go back to help her family.
Even more astonishing is the fact that the Asson family is a habitual offender, and the floor of the house is full of grain stolen from each family.
In the village of Lingshan, where a bite to eat is more important than life, this is a proper capital crime.
Reiko knows that the villagers will not easily spare the Asso family, and she overhears that the villagers are preparing to bury the Asson family alive, but does not choose to leave Asson at home.
She gave Asson a few potatoes and asked him to go home to cook a meal for his family, ostensibly to help Asson, but in fact to let Asson go back and die with his family.
The film depicts the scene of Asun's family being buried alive by villagers as a very shocking scene.
Wrapped in outrage, in a huge pit, a group of people who have lost all moral dignity and even the right to live for food are buried.
This huge pit also symbolizes the feudalism, poverty, and cruelty of natural selection in the village of Lingshan Mountain.
Even though Reiko knew that Asson had the flesh and bones of the Stump family in her belly, she still chose to send her to Huangquan Road.
Only because Reiko knows that with Asson's lazy temperament, she cannot take on the heavy responsibility of the life of the stump family after she goes up the mountain.
So it's better to let her die.
In the film, Imamura Masahira uses a lot of animal shots to express the mood.
When Akiyoshi and Asson are copulating under a tree, the camera cuts to two poisonous snakes that are also copulating.
The owls who witnessed all this killing in the trees at night when they were buried alive were watching with glowing eyes.
In the lens language of Shohei Imamura, humans are no different from animals, they are all species that are dominated by appetite and mating.
The film on the topic of sex, but also several times to break through the bottom line of the plot setting.
For example, in order to atone for her husband's sins, the widow who slept with the single man in the village once a time.
In order to fulfill her younger son's wishes, the last thing Reiko did before going to the mountain was to ask Akinpo, who was about the same age as herself, to sleep with her younger son, Lisuke.
Masahira Imamura's depiction of sex is too rough, but in his films, all this is so "sad and reasonable".
At the end of the film, that is, the day that Reiko was finally carried by her son Tatsuhei on the mountain.
According to the rules in the village, neither the old man nor the son can say a word during the ascent ceremony.
The silent Tatsuhei carried his equally silent mother, Reiko, on his back, and together they rushed to the place where they could meet the "Kaguyama God".
Tatsuhei's foot was injured along the way, and Reiko also bandaged her son, but the two always kept their silent promises and did not say a word to each other.
Until the last two people reached the top of the mountain, what they saw was not a holy divine light, but a real Sensen white bone——
There have been countless old people with the same fate as Reiko buried here.
Still without words, Reiko calmly walked towards the white bone pile and gestured to her son to "say":
Go back
Tatsuhira endured tears and went down the mountain, but on the way, he encountered the cruel scene of the neighbor's old man who was pushed off the stone cliff by his son because he was struggling to get up the mountain.
As the sky sprinkled snow over the lonely mountain, Tatsuhira suddenly turned his head and ran back to the top of the mountain full of white bones.
He cried out to his mother, who was sitting quietly in the white bone, "Mom, it's snowing!" ”
A simple sentence makes the emotion of the whole movie reach a climax.
In the "Examination of the Mountain Festival", everyone cannot escape the feudal system and become the fate of Sensen White Bone.
But in the movie, Tatsuhira and Tatsuhira's father, who could not bear to send their mother up the mountain, put the blood ties of affection, and in such a desperate situation, a flower like snow bloomed.
"Go up the mountain on the day of the memorial, if it snows, it is the god of the mountain who is blessing you."
Everyone knows that there is no mountain god at all.
But the snowflakes in the sky still fell like destiny.
Tatsuhira sat quietly in the white bone pile from a distance, shouting "Mom, it's snowing", which may be "I love you" or "I'm sorry".
From the beginning to the end, "The Examination of the Mountain Festival" is a total of 133 minutes, which is mixed with a large number of animal shots.
And when it came to the place where it was really necessary to express human feelings, Imamura Masahira chose to use the most restrained shots, the simplest lines -
Even if people fall into a desperate situation like animals, there are also true feelings and memories that are different from animals like snow, which is the difference between humans and animals.
At the end of the film, Tatsuhira returns home and continues to live as usual, except that her mother Reiko is left on the mountain forever.
There is no deliberate sensationalism, no reversal of dog blood, and the story of Imagura Shohei always ends like this.
Won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1983, "The Examination of the Mountain Festival" is an anthropological fable and a wake-up call for modern people.
In today's civilized society, news such as "buried mother in the mountain" still occurs.
Birth, old age, illness, death, and disability are normal things, but if they are sealed into ignorance, feudalism, and poverty, they will explode into a "custom" of devilishly loss of conscience.
Masahira Imamura told people that in addition to the lively and gorgeous celebrations, never ignore and pay attention to the "back" of a society, even if they are only a "trivial" minority.
Only reflection, only cherishing.