From the perspective of film history, the creation history of Chinese youth films actually has a long history, and the most well-known youth films in modern times can be traced back to Yang Dechang's "Juvenile Murder Incident on Muling Street" in 1991 and "Sunny Days" released by Director Jiang Wen in 1994. Both films received high praise in that year, after which Chinese directors entered a stage of unashamed youth films, with mainland films especially scarce and more biased towards Hong Kong and Taiwan, especially Taiwanese films. For example, "Blue Gate" released in 2002 in 2002 was "Nine Winds" in 2008 and "Those Years" that detonated the market in 2011.
Since "Those Years" has gained the double popularity of word of mouth and market, the creation of youth films seems to have entered an assimilated creative circle, and these films basically show the frustration of youth and the symbolic feelings of the era from a retrospective perspective, such as the emergence of a number of films such as "To Youth", "Hurry That Year", "You at the Same Table" and so on. The creative characteristics of such films focus on the simple arrangement of the characteristics of the times and the deformed presentation and stop at the superficial temptations on social issues, among which the "banknote-style films" of "Small Times" and "Sorrow Against the River" have been criticized morally, and youth films have begun to become a kind of fast food, using the way of browsing photo albums to arouse the audience's emotional identity so that the audience becomes more numb and tired.
In the past two years, the emergence of youth films such as "Elephant Sitting on the Ground", "Over Spring", "Young You" and so on has begun to pry the creative conventions of youth films, they have explored social issues in a realistic way, and a distinct change in narrative perspective has taken place, this article tries to analyze the domestic youth films under the underlying narrative perspective through the youth films that have exploded at the box office last year.
One. Interpretation of the underlying narrative of youth movies - lost life and out-of-control self-defense
"Bottom" is a concept that directly points to the "vulnerable" group: the so-called bottom is the group at the lowest level of society. This is a concept that does not need to be thought about, and being at the "lowest level" is the criterion for division, and if the content of this criterion were more detailed, it may include low political status, economic embarrassment, low cultural education, called the bottom, may meet all three conditions, or may only meet one of the conditions.
The significance of the bottom layer for China as a whole can be broadly mapped to those vulnerable or marginalized groups that are on the fringes of society and at the bottom of the pyramid hierarchy. The original meaning of "bottom" refers to the lowest level of society, mainly to some subsistence groups whose lives are not rich or even who are struggling for their livelihood, and are mostly concentrated in the marginal groups represented by peasants, urban and rural unemployed and semi-unemployed, and migrant workers in cities.
The underlying narrative reflects the harsh environment and difficult circumstances at the bottom under the social and cultural changes, and forms a narrative mechanism that takes the living conditions of the low-level characters as the category. In "Young You", this underlying identity has multiple manifestations. From a social point of view, the male protagonist played by Yi Qianxi is an orphan, mixed in the streets, living in a ruined burrow. When he was supposed to be educated and worked hard for the college entrance examination and the future like his peers, he had to take to the streets because of his life, and he wandered in the city and formed groups with various small gangsters. They fight, steal to maintain their lives, and can only solve the crises in their lives through violence, which also brings uncertainty to their lives.
And Chen Nian, played by Zhou Dongyu, the family situation is equally embarrassing, living alone, her mother is surrounded by people because of fraud, and her life without a fixed place and unstable economic resources make Chen Nian feel that only going to Beijing is the only way out. These existential crises are a direct reference to the two people's bottom identities, vulnerable groups that have lost social security.
Looking at the school environment, the school is also a Darwinian society, with a top-down food chain. Chen Nian tried to get a safe guarantee in the school violence, from the school to the law to the personal resistance and Xiao Bei's help, she sought various asylum results were not satisfactory, and the last wrongful killing made her feel relieved.
This form of resolving one's own crisis is a common pattern of neorealism, but it realistically reflects the difficulties of the underclass to break free. "Young You" is different from previous youth films, it takes the campus violence, which has always existed but is controversial as the shell, abandons the campus complex of most people who have been packaged by romanticism, and closely links the campus and society through the execution defects of the judicial organs and the complexity of social relations.
The film will be set in the third year of high school and another narrative contradiction highlighted sharply, the opening is a campus suicide case straight to the theme, Chen Nian from a witness to campus violence began to turn into a victim, from student suicide to Chen Nian was threatened and persecuted, the involvement of the school and the public security in the case also shifted, the school to "the overall situation is important" and "more than enough and insufficient strength" in the way to expose the campus's weakness and dogma in the face of the protection of minors, The strict procedures of public security law enforcement and the restrictions of social relations and imperfect legal provisions also make Chen Nian unable to get timely protection, which is a layer of social questioning thrown out by the film, when teenagers cannot be protected by the social system, they have to use the most primitive way to maintain their most simple life.
The appearance of Xiao Bei chiseled a ray of light for Chen Nian, in fact, the two complement each other's lives, one lacks the protection of life and the other needs the care of life, the film creates two flesh-and-blood portraits, in them we can see the most precious sincerity and faith among teenagers, during this period there is no lack of poetry of youth, rain and motorcycles, hugs and whispers like camellias in a torn wound, the aroma faintly pervades it. Their weak physical confrontation with injustice in life has also successfully won the audience's emotional recognition, making the audience's psychology produce a resentment and accumulated trauma that can only be vented in the way of violence, and then the male policeman's behavior as if betraying the justice of law enforcement is also a narrative setting that the director deliberately evokes the audience's recognition.
This approach works, and people begin to think and speculate about the contradiction between the direction of violence and the reality of existence from the identity of the character. At the end, the redemption between teenagers is like a silent battle, in a variety of interpersonal and inner games, the two use faith and sacrifice to "win" and calm this "well-known killing". In this narrative of self-survival compensation by giving up part of our lives, when we denounce school violence and regret the lack of law formulation and enforcement, we should also recognize the cruelty of the underlying living environment and the extinction of human nature in material life. In the ending, the director draws an open end with a beautiful future, and also wants to call on people's inner bravery and truly penetrate into reality to create an impact.
Second, the image construction under the underlying narrative mechanism
Genre production, as a sign of the maturity of the film industry, has established a reliable link between film production and consumption, while the narrative of genre production has also been criticized as isolating the real thinking of reality. Being able to combine narrative strategies with a high degree of "problem" awareness and bring serious thinking into mass cultural production is an important ability of Chinese film creation at present. The film "Young You" makes a meaningful step forward in the filmization of "social issues" contained in youth films.
The film deliberately hides the background of the location where the story takes place, but the geomorphological features of Chongqing are still very easy to reveal. The director took advantage of the urban characteristics of Chongqing to make some lens shaping that was conducive to the narrative of the image. Chongqing is commonly known as a mountain city, with undulating stone ladders, winding alleys, skyscrapers and overpasses all built on a natural multi-layered landscape. The director portrays the insurmountable dilemma of life and the smallness of the characters through the upward shooting and overhead shooting, and in the photography, the lens combines the layered urban buildings to construct some forced pictures to form a sense of oppression, such as creating a feeling of despair for Chen Nian's escape, Xiao Bei's sense of drifting in society and the inadequacy of power.
The use of large depth of field in the film is still extremely restrained, which forms the most important feature of this film in the audiovisual language is also the important image construction of narrative filmization, that is, the use of close-ups and close-ups to show and focus on the portraits of people. In order to condense the viewpoint and deepen the audience's understanding of the injury and the situation of the characters, the film uses a large number of close-ups and small depth of field shots to prevent the audience from the eyes to take their eyes off the actor's face, and the separation of the background and the characters is also one of the means to make the theme universal.
In addition, the director also integrates some realistic shooting methods to penetrate into the reality of the film, such as highlighting the victim's panic through the perspective of the abuser through the mobile phone lens, and the newsreale-style record allows people to see the difference between the group portrait and the individual in youth, the contrast between beauty and cruelty, and the handheld photography that is interspersed with the shaking in the film can't help but remind people of the fluttering men and women and weightless youth under Lou Ye's lens.
Overall, "Young You" has made innovations in the image that truly serve the theme narrative, and does not simply rely on the value brought by the theme, although there are also limitations and deficiencies in spatial scheduling, it can still be said that it is flawed, and the film's creation in audiovisual aspects also provides a good demonstration for the subsequent domestic youth films in the film narrative.
epilogue:
In the era of the explosion of entertainment narrative images, the visual meaning of the images that are too dissipated has a negative impact on the audience's viewing emotions. Those films are full of obscure and dazzling film language, and the life shown in the film is completely the private property of the director's personal vision, telling the pressure of life and the heaviness of life will be largely abandoned by the audience. After all, sometimes, the audience goes to see the movie only to see the mental catharsis and relief. The overly real reality or dragging camera rhythm in the film will make the audience bear the repressed emotions of the underlying living conditions that are too realistic.
This is also the situation faced by the late director Hu Bo's creation of "Elephant Sitting on the Ground", although the accident caused a storm in the industry, but the public's attention is more just staying in the discussion of industry contradictions and the regret of losing a young author, although the work itself has not been edited and released, it still has not formed a more noble praise in terms of the version that flowed out, for "Elephant Sitting on the Ground" or Hu Bo, the director's creation has fallen into a personal quagmire. He was as deep and dark as a swamp but could not build a bridge to communicate with the masses.
In contrast, "Carnival", "Over spring" and "Young You" have done this, and perhaps "Elephant" is better in terms of authorship, but in terms of the current Chinese film market and social situation, the other three films must be more realistic. Therefore, we can also see that the current situation of chinese film market creation is also a little warning to the future directors to create, when you abandon commercialization, the market will mercilessly dump you.