1.
The film "Burning Wild Boy's Sky" is quite surreal.
It is like a romantic encounter of a young girl before the coming-of-age ceremony, full of fantasy.
18-year-old Xiao Huang (played by Xu Enyi), a single-parent family, her father sells salted fish, and she is also nicknamed "Daughter of the Sea" by her classmates - mocking her for being full of salted fish, but dreaming of a princess.
The teammates of the dance team ostracized her, and the teacher also ignored her, thinking that she was not tall enough and not white enough, which affected the overall image of the team.
Even if you dance together on the playground, you will be pushed and shoved by all kinds, and you will not be able to integrate into any "small circle".
But the young girl Xiaohuang is not the kind of little girl who is ostracized and bullied.
Although occasionally there will be some loss, most of the time, she is clear, tenacious, and has her own set of codes of conduct.
It is a young girl who is pushed and shoved, pushed out of the circle, and can still dance out of her own rhythm and insist on finishing the dance.
Such a precious side.
Discovered by the newly arrived old dog (Peng Yuchang).
He failed the college entrance examination and came to a boys' school in Hainan to re-study, and the opposite door of the boys' school was a girls' school famous for dancing. The muddy old dog walked to the wrong playground and saw the girl in the crowd who was rejected but looked particularly different, shining.
"For the first time in my life, I felt shocked."
A teenager like a salted fish, a girl like a weed, and a similar soul meet, isn't it a perilla fish called love?
- A perfect match!
He spotted her shining spot at a glance.
Understand her, identify with her, encourage her, follow her, accompany her;
Go crazy with her, make trouble with her, dance with her dreams.
Even if he is a rookie who does not know anything, completely zero basics.
In the film, the "Salted Fish King" (Huang Jue), who has always been worried about what gifts to give his daughter, asks the old dog who comes to work in the shop, what do girls of the same age like?
The old dog said, of course, it is a boy of the same age!
Boys and girls are together, and their hearts are the best thing in the world.
So the old dog, too, is like the best gift That Xiao Huang met in the summer of 18 years old.
He accompanied her to register for the "Dancing Miracle" competition, mobilized his male school classmates, and worked hard to earn a place on the stage for Xiao Huang.
But unlike most of the familiar inspirational movies we see, what's different is —
The girl did not fight back in the end.
The dream of life she has been pursuing is not at all as good as she expected.
The fairy tale that her father had worked so hard to create for her for 18 years was also torn apart by her own hands.
In the second half of the film, it is basically an anti-routine narrative, but it also gives people a kind of "burning" after exposing the truth of life.
Funeral, funeral!
At the climax, a group of "losers" who have been eliminated from the dance (life) arena pour in from all directions, sitting on a dilapidated small fishing boat, and also use the weed posture to ride the wind and waves.
They came to the wind power platform where people went to the empty building and danced wildly together.
Unleash it.
Uneven movements? Never mind.
It was a carnival of different postures that belonged to each individual.
Not to win, not to compete, not to run in a uniform style, just for their youth, for their own light, for their own happiness, and to jump back with pleasure.
2.
The story is actually a very simple story, but in terms of theme and expression form, it has done a very bold and reverse experiment.
This is an anti-success youth song and dance film.
It is the dance of a flock of weeds, an ode to salted fish.
Too many movies and televisions are telling us how precious success is and how burning the counterattack is, but in fact, the truth of life that belongs to most people is to accept their failures and ordinaryness.
At a time when success is rampant, children have become the tools of the "inner volume" war at a young age. Adults teach them the methodology for success — how to try to get good in all kinds of competitions, but few people tell them that failure is not a big deal.
Under the impetus of the competing values of "killing 1,000 people on 1 extra test", how many parents remember that the original intention of having a child was to hope that he would have a happy and bright life?
After being admitted to a famous school, some college entrance examination winners dare not explain to their parents because there are too many hanging subjects at the end of the term, preferring to choose to wander and pick up garbage outside for ten years without returning home;
There are 14-year-old children, because of the decline in the grade rankings, choose to jump and say goodbye to the world, and do not want to face the disappointed eyes of their parents.
At a young age, in a children's dance competition, he deliberately blackmailed an unknown opponent and competed for the top.
……
The more parents allow their children to fail, the more they are afraid of failure, and in order to "not fail", they are alienated into a "machine" that is always competing for the top.
The most "anti-bone" thing about "Burning Wild" is that every setting and every detail of the whole film is expressed, in fact, life has far more meaningful things than winning.
For example, the love of relatives.
The young girl Xiao Huang, so cheerful, even if she is subjected to all kinds of trials and ridicules in school, she has always worked hard and clearly towards the dream of dancing, because behind her there is a "salted fish king" father who uses clumsy means and sincerely loves his daughter.
He is the source of her vitality;
For example, accepting their own ordinariness and inadequacy, the courage and calmness to dance for themselves.
Xiao Huang's original purpose of desperately dancing was to find her mother, so even if the hardware conditions did not allow it, she had to rub it to the dance team - but in this world, there are always heights that you tiptoe and can't reach.
For example, the elderly middle school student Dahua Ge (Yin Zheng), who can't get good grades no matter how hard he tries, such as Aze (Played by Si Wai Ge), who can only be bullied when he lacks masculinity, such as the old dog who wants his father but is exiled to grow freely... Each character setting in the film represents a kind of individual imperfection and incompleteness.
The allegorical function of these characters is even far greater than the narrative function.
Like Yin Zheng's Dahua Ge, it seems that cutting off all his scenes will not affect the progress of the plot, but his existence symbolizes those marginal people whose innate intelligence is not up to the level of the public - no matter how hard they try to go to school, but there are always times when their wisdom cannot be reached, but this does not prevent him from having his own unique talent and can also shine on his own stage.
It was these various "imperfections" that finally came together, and a group of weeds danced in the wind and looked at the sky.
We are salted fish, so let's make a group of happy salted fish and make ordinary life taste a little more.
We are weeds, coming from the dirt, so let's go, wild children!
Because of this allegorical narrative, poetic expression, and the climax is also set off by song and dance, the film actually actively abandons the "real narrative".
Such a style is provocative and offensive to the audience.
If the audience can accept this poetic expression, they will empathize;
If the audience can't accept it, it will naturally spit out: this group of high school children are not good at reading, dancing every day, is there a serious illness?
For example, can you understand why the Ferris wheel in the movie is missing a corner?
Why are co-eds and boys facing each other door to door, but there are so dangerous pipes on the roof that can be connected to each other?
Why did the Salted Fish King send his daughter and her classmates so many salted fish tied with pink ribbons?
All the art, props, and scene selection, which seem to be abrupt, are actually imagery, which is for the presentation of the theme.
This kind of surreal romanticized narrative inevitably requires the audience to make up and interpret the intentions of the film's creators, and if the audience refuses to enter, then all the designs will appear nonsensical.
This is also the reason why the current film reviews are relatively polarized.
3.
In fact, the director of this film, Zhang Yibai, can be said to be the person who knows the most about the current film market.
With the TV series "Carry Love to the End" out of the circle, launched the film version of "Hurry That Year", supervised the production of "Later Us" - shooting youth films was originally Zhang Yibai's best thing, in recent years, his control of various types of films, is even more skillful, know what kind of films are selling well, but also know what kind of films can trigger public empathy, but suddenly come to shoot such a very adventurous, experimental temperament of youth films, it is almost like the old man talking about the willfulness of teenagers.
Looking at the shooting tidbits, he said that he was mentally prepared.
"In the Chinese film industry, song and dance films are a taboo. Its requirements for actors, audience acceptance, resources, experience, funds, are all a test. ”
As he said, the last Chinese song and dance film with some memory points probably dates back to 2015's "Gorgeous Office Worker", the director is Du Qifeng, which gathers such a gorgeous lineup of Zhou Runfa, Zhang Aijia, Eason Chan, and Tang Wei, with an investment of nearly 100 million, and finally the box office did not reach 50 million.
Blood loss.
A little longer, Zhou Dong, who was the most popular at that time, also filmed a "Rooftop Love", which grossed over 100 million, which was already a rare achievement.
Chen Kexin's "If Love", a classic in love song and dance films, has a box office of almost 30 million, which is already very remarkable in the year of 2005, ranking in the top ten of the year.
Therefore, it is almost the consensus of the industry not to make song and dance films easily. Filming was difficult and there was not enough fertile audience soil.
But Zhang Yibai still wanted to take a risk and shoot a youth film in the style of song and dance.
He said he wanted to do a stupid thing happily with a group of young people.
"Stupid things" are actually quite difficult to do.
Screenwriter Li Zelin, received the task and said that he was confused;
Music director Zhang Yadong complained mournfully, what a trouble;
Akane, the dance director who can only conduct remotely because of the epidemic, said that it is really a huge test;
In fact, the biggest test is a group of young actors, like Peng Yuchang and Zhang Youhao, who have zero foundation in dance and must start practicing from the basic skills;
Several large-scale group dances were selected from the top professional dance troupes, and nearly a thousand dancers were selected to fly to Hainan.
There are nearly 100 actors in the group, who began training 3 months before filming began.
The dance scenes can't be danced too well and professionally because they don't conform to the theme of weed dancing — the director revealed in an interview that he had specifically scrapped the previously brilliant and showy version.
Because it is ordinary people dancing, even if it is exactly the same action, everyone will jump out of their own rhythm and characteristics.
"I don't know what the outcome will look like because there's no precedent. Even at great risk, I take a gamble. ”
Zhang Yibai said that he knows very well how risky it is to make a youth song and dance film, but he is willing to challenge it.
"I don't want to wait until 5 years, 10 years or 20 years later, when this genre is on fire in the Chinese film market, and then I say on crutches, if I am younger, I can make this kind of film." 」
"In this world's games, only one or two people can win, and most of them can't win, but you can't give up life, you can't give up life, you can't give up doing what you really want to do." 」
"In the movie, a group of people happily do a stupid thing, and the process of making a movie is also a group of friends who happily do a bunch of stupid things."
Well, hope he has fun!
Compared with the fearlessness and optimism of young people to win and lose, it is actually more gratifying that adults have enough courage to face the adventures of life.