In 1993, Wang Shuo threw Jiang Wen a copy of his newly published novel "Animal Fierceness"
That night, Jiang Wen stayed up all night, and after reading the novel, he said excitedly: The people and things written in the book are like a lead that explodes what is buried in his heart...
Later, he found Wang Shuo and hoped to change it into a script, but Wang Shuo did not get it, and Jiang Wen changed it himself.
A few months later, the 60,000-word novel was smeared by Jiang Wen and changed to a 90,000-word script, and the director produced his first film, "Sunny Day".
Years later, when Jiang Wen tossed out the shocking "The Devil Is Coming", the poetic "The Sun Also Rises" and the "Let the Bullets Fly" that stood and earned money...
When it comes to becoming one of the best directors in China.
But he stubbornly believed that he had left the best things in the "forbidden" debut.
"Sunny Days"
Beijing in the 1970s, summer.
The city is very chaotic, the adults are either "making revolutions" or "being criticized", the street shops are closed, the schools are closed...
It was an era of red light, in the words of Ma Xiaojun: "It seems that it was always summer, and the sun always had time to accompany me." ”
Ma Xiaojun is the protagonist of the film, with dark skin, thin and boney body, looking like a big horse monkey.
He was a bear child in the army compound, riding a two-eight-bar bicycle with a group of teenagers who could not control himself all day long, through the streets and alleys of the hutong:
Bragging, smoking, drinking, fighting, slapping mothers-in-law, entering the game...
It was summer, the sun was shining, there were not so many cars and luxury hotels in Beijing, and there were very few people on the streets.
So, the city belongs to them.
One day, Ma Xiaojun pondered the key at home and pried the lock through the house, and he was fascinated by the indescribable pleasure that came when the lock tongue popped open.
So he started a short career of sledding, he didn't steal anything, and he wasn't caught. Because at that time, people did not have any valuables at home, and they never slipped away from work.
He was a timid and cautious man who only opened the lock, not the secret lock.
So it's never been discovered...
Until noon one day, Ma Xiaojun ghost made the god pry open a secret lock.
The room had large windows and was filled with sunlight, and there was a colorful picture of a smiling girl hanging on the wall of the back room.
Ma Xiaojun looked at this photo, his eyes were unblinking, and he was lost...
Since then, he has climbed the eaves of the roof naked all day, pacing beside the staggered five-ridged and six-beast:
"I roamed around this building all day long, like a cat on a hot tin roof, restlessly waiting for the person in the painting to appear."
By chance, Ma Xiaojun met the girl in the photo on the road, she was plump, mature and sexy.
He wears a pair of sunglasses and a key tied around his ankle.
She told Ma Xiaojun: "My name is Milan."
That summer, Ma Xiaojun was 16 years old, and Milan only said he was older than him.
This intersection has made the two of them friends of different ages but talking about everything, talking in the bedroom, dancing in the living room, playing the accordion...
The dangling key on his ankle also opened the door of Ma Xiaojun's heart.
The hot climate makes people more naked, but also more able to hide the desire in their hearts, the sun is full, too bright, making the eyes black...
The film, based on Wang Shuo's novella "Animal Fierceness," tells the story of a group of children living in the army compound, spending their youth between the dazzling sunshine and the red flags everywhere.
It is a story full of stream of consciousness, with love and sexual impulses, with a revolutionary spirit of childishness and failure, and with a story of growth...
Jiang Wen used four very warm words "the sun is shining" to draw into the novel, making this story that should have been cold and fierce become soft and rotten.
Some netizens commented: This is the style that youth films should have.
Although "Sunny Days" focuses on the 1970s, it is more like a long history of youth growth.
The true appearance and urban imprint of beijing youth under the turmoil are vague and complete, but the skeleton is complete, and the atmosphere of juvenile hormones is full of everywhere.
In the movie, Ma Xiaojun and his gang, in order to avenge their brothers, smashed people with bricks in the alley to blur the flesh and blood, and they still touted each other in fear: "Your hands are really black."
Pry open the drawers in the house, peek at the father's diary, steal military medals, play with sabers and daggers, blow condoms...
Would sneak into the cinema, crouch in the corner, hold his chin up, and watch the foreign banned film on the screen: The Battle of Rome.
He would ride his bike at the door of the troop compound and shout at him loudly: Guren wood, the fool held his head high, riding a wooden stick back: Oba.
These events are in a special era, belonging to the memory of the times shared by Wang Shuo and Jiang Wen.
At the same time, they also meet the violence and hazy love shared by teenagers of different generations.
The psychology of adolescent adolescence is hidden: voyeurism, rebellion, fornication, sexual enlightenment... Through Ma Xiaojun's externalized behavior, it is revealed.
Later in the movie, Ma Xiaojun hated Milan, and he turned his face to Milan at the birthday party and broke up with his brother.
He roared, "No, let her go, roll." I don't look at anyone's face now, and if anyone protects him, I will be anxious with whomever I want."
After the banquet.
Ma Xiaojun rode his bicycle to chase Milan in the heavy rain and fell into the pit, at that moment, his face was full of mud, hoarse and crying: Milan... Milan
He confessed to Milan, and the two embraced each other on a rainy night.
The next day, when the rain was clear and nothing seemed to have happened, Milan was still kind and polite to him.
He couldn't tell if it was real or fake, like a dream.
From beginning to end in Sunny Days, there is a dreamlike meaning, and it is difficult to distinguish whether it is a dream or reality in a trance.
And this is the original essence of the growth process, falling on everyone's body, growth is both an unshakable reality, but also a strange dream.
As Jiang Wen's magnetic narrator said: "I sadly found that it is impossible to restore the truth at all, and the memory is always changed by my emotions, and then teases me and betrays me."
Screenwriter Shi Hang once said:
"If 'Sunny Days' is a first-class youth film, then today's youth films can only belong to the third and fourth streams."
Because in the movie, Jiang Wen never used the adult perspective to intelligently criticize history, but used the perspective of this group of bohemian teenagers to look through history and recall history.
In the yellowed tone, in the eyes of this group of teenagers, there is no class struggle, no conspiracy, and no understanding of this "war".
They would only passionately imitate the bridge section of Lenin in 1918 on the golden mound and shout: Vasily.
Climb on the roof of the twilight night, meet the cool breeze, play the guitar, and sing "Night outside Moscow" in unison: the long night is almost over, the night is dark...
In their memories, that restless summer was accompanied only by the smell of burning grass.
It is worth mentioning that this "Sunny Day" cost 250,000 feet of film, and only the pictures of Milan hanging on the wall took 23,040 pictures, and only one of them was selected.
Jiang Wen became the most demanding director in China.
After two years of filming and various large-scale cuts, the film was released in 1995.
Swept the 33rd Taiwan Golden Horse Awards, won the best picture, best director...
Xia Yu, the actor of Ma Xiaojun, became the youngest film emperor in Venice, when he was 19 years old.
Among the top ten best films in the world in 1995 selected by Time magazine in the United States, "Sunny Day" ranked first.
Foreign media commented:
Chinese director Jiang Wen's "Sunny Days" is one of the world's most admired films of 1994 and is still eager to watch today.
It is a new Chinese film from content to form, and its emergence marks that Chinese cinema has entered a new era.
Having received so many honors, it is even less the credit and hard work of the actors in it.
More than half of the seemingly sunny heat in the film was actually filmed in autumn and winter.
Ma Xiaojun braved the pouring rain to confess to Milan that the scene was filmed in a climate of minus ten degrees Celsius in Beijing in January.
In order to let the actors enter that era and their respective roles as soon as possible, closed training was carried out, so that the actors put on military uniforms, lived in the barracks of the army, cut off all external contact, and read quotations, poems, and listened to red songs every day.
Tao Hong and Tranquility are even wet body dew points, contributing many bold nudity scenes.
The largest scale of the bridge in the film takes place in the scene of Ma Xiaojun rapes Milan in the room, which is also the largest scale in the quiet shooting film so far.
Although "Sunny Days" eventually became a banned film, 26 years later, it is still regarded by countless people as the best youth film in China.
There is such a scene at the end of the movie, Ma Xiaojun and a group of people have grown up, and the color of the picture has changed from yellowing to black and white.
When a friend was fighting in the south, he was stupid by a shell, and the others were dressed in leather and laughed.
At this time, through the car window, they saw the fool Gu Lunmu in the army compound when he was young.
He still rode the stick and walked forward.
They kept shouting: Gurun wood... Gurun wood.
Gu Lunmu still held his head high but replied: Silly*.
It is as if to spit and disdain at this black and white monotonous adult world and fantasies.
And Ma Xiaojun's juvenile growth and fantasies, as written in Wang Shuo's novel, have drowned in the pool of clarity:
The aura of sunlight casting on the bottom of the water is bright and dazzling. I sobbed and cried, and drank silently in despair as I swam.
This is a feeling of loneliness that cannot be dispelled, heralding the farewells and regrets that must be experienced in growing up, and the sunny days will eventually exist in the past.