Draft: Li Jie
"Looking for Han" was released for a week, the box office was less than 3 million yuan, the results were dismal, and it was almost reduced to cannon fodder for the May Day period.
There is no traffic starring, no handsome men and women, no sugar, ordinary young men and women rushing to get married to fall in love, which is too unsmooth. The male protagonist, Ojikawa, is a geek director/actor who has been active on the drama stage for many years, and he is not a fashionista. As for director Tang Danian, it is even more unconventional, and there is no legend of him in the jianghu for a long time. How do you introduce Tang Danian? His highlight was as a screenwriter for Zhang Nunxin's "Beijing, You Early", which was in 1990. The best time for his mass base was when he directed the TV series "What to Move, Don't Move Feelings" starring Tao Hong, which was in 2005. Is it difficult for the moon 15 years ago and 30 years ago to shine into the hearts of contemporary audiences?
The time background of "Looking for Han" is set in the era when children born out of wedlock cannot fully enjoy today's equal rights, so the narrative of the film has a serious core: what should "single pregnant women" like the heroine Wang Zhao face the environment of hidden discrimination? The original name of the film is more intuitive, and it is more immersed in the absurd and helpless sense of black humor, called "Born By Yourself".
Wang Zhao divorced, because she unilaterally left her feelings, because she had to act in front of the elders, because of various chaotic reasons, she and her ex-husband maintained an unclear and unsympathetic relationship, and as a result, they had a child. She is 35 years old, pregnant at an advanced age, and wants to have a child, but her ex-husband knows and draws a line and runs away quickly, if she gives birth to a child, she will encounter a hukou and school in the future... This endless mine array, so, thirty-six counts, "looking for Han" for the top.
Leaving aside the big trouble of "pregnancy", Wang Zhao of "Looking for Han" and He Jiaqi, the heroine of "Move What, Don't Move Feelings", are quite similar, not young, frustrated in the workplace, overturned in the love field, and accidentally hit and bumped into a sister-brother love. The boy Liao Yu, whom He Jiaqi met in that year, was a good-looking young man who was spoiled by his mother and girls since he was a child. Wang Zhao, who took Du Wei because of playing a game, appeared on a motorcycle when they first met, with disheveled hair and a beard, like a kiwi fruit. After 15 years, the love object of the elderly sister who has no connection with the beauty, from the brother of the Heavenly Immortal to the brother of the sloppy Mo, "The Book of Han" is more directly facing the bleak life and more grounded?
Contrary. With the good memories of "Beijing You Are Early" and "Move What, Don't Move Feelings", I walked into the screening hall of "Looking for Han", and the opening was basically disappointing. The study and depiction of the mental state of ordinary people of all kinds that Tang Danian was good at was replaced by exaggerated faces in the prologue of "Searching for Han". Wang Zhao is a gas bag of flattering personality, colleagues in the workplace bully her, call her around, the only colleague who does not treat her as a messenger, plotting against her; her ex-husband is a fighter in the scum, and he is violent to her hot and cold; the mother remarries and gives birth to a son, using her daughter as a tool to "help her brother and mother"; the younger brother eats and takes the half-sister as a cash machine... Because of the actors' simple and rough performances, the opening of the film spread out a "evil comic", and in Tang Danian's past writers or directors' works, the smell of the city is muddy but full of life, gone.
Looking back at "Beijing, You Are Early", the precious experience it creates is that the director and screenwriter use their sympathetic hearts and very mature creative ability to uncover the ambiguous, ambiguous and rich spectrum of ordinary human nature. The conductor girl is wandering in the world of materialism and lust, she sees different thoughts, her heart is ape, but she is a thick and stupid girl after all. The bus driver suffers from unfairness because of his sensitivity, but he is cowardly and inactive, and can only be at the mercy of life again and again. There are people who have thin feelings and people who have been disappointed, there are people who have benefited and those who have been sacrificed, there are spring breezes and triumphs and horses have lost their hooves, no one's temperament and his/her life are black and white, everyone for a private position, their will and actions always have different degrees of rationality, that is, these many ordinary people who are not good and evil weave an infinitely rich life. The soul of civilian tragicomedy is not accusation or criticism, but tolerance, and it is tempered with tenderness in the mediocre world.
This vivid flow of life requires writers, directors and actors to reach a tacit understanding of the iron triangle, and the regret of "Finding Han" is roughly that its blunt and awkward beginning makes people feel that those human shows with elasticity and persuasion, those performances that are as relaxed as breathing, are now too rare. It wasn't until Li Baotian, who played grandpa, and Wang Zichuan, the male protagonist, appeared frequently on the screen that a lively atmosphere was injected into the movie.
What is it like to have a scene of sporadic audiences laughing in unison in a movie theater? It was Grandpa who put his back on his back, put his hands behind his back, and said in a broken tone: "It is so decided, we have to find a wronged leader." "Having the characters honestly exude reasonable selfishness is the moment when comedy comes. Just like in "Move What, Don't Move Feelings", the bad grandfather's education period is good: "You have to keep a hand, don't move your feelings, move a little bit if you want to move, so that you are not easy to be hurt." There is also the classic "I Love My Family", when the old cadre Fu Ming heard that his son Zhiguo's spirit was derailed and the love letter was leaked into a handle, how to teach his son: "Meet together all day, write what letter." How can something of words fall into the hands of outsiders? ”
Li Baotian's performance makes people see the cunning of Ichijing's experience and the thickness of time precipitation harmoniously intertwined in an old man, and Wang Zichuan's performance contributes a valuable blank space and aftertaste. The phrase "explode" describes an extremely bad rather than a good performance. Wang Zichuan, who is not disdainful of writing character biographies and lazy to rehearse on the set, outputs a highly accurate and moderately unfamiliar performance in front of the camera, acting is the same as writing and shooting, the essence is a rhetoric, but the medium used by the actor is his own body, and the "life" in the movie is actually a more demanding, tightly organized and "skillful construction" without leaving a trace. Du Wei scruffily drove to McDonald's to see Wang Zhao, saw her driving a BMW, and went home to mention the "divorce application" in the game, Wang Zhao called to ask what was going on, he drove hands-free, sat idly plucking the pig's trotters, answering the girl's questions one after another "what's going on". In this situation, the man is saying things that are not really meant to be said, doing things that are not really wanted to do, half a sentence, there is a sound outside the string, he seems to be watching the fire from the other side of his embarrassment and pain, and it seems that the actor is inducing the audience to fill in the mood of the character's tumbling. As Racine summed up in Laocoön: when creating an orgasm, stop before the climax comes, and let the viewer reach the most emotional moment in the imagination.
Always set the aftertaste high. After "Finding Han" opens low and goes high, it is finally indebted to the disappearance of the "aftertaste". Two people with a lot of problems come together because they are attracted to each other, love does not make them perfect, love is even less capable of turning ordinary life into a perfect world, so far it is very good. But the screenwriter of "Looking for Han" refused, and had to say that "the unlucky girl met the hero of the world who stepped on the auspicious clouds", and he became her winning lottery, in order to overthrow the life demon king.
The words are too full, the drama is too solid, so it becomes the sadness of comedy.
Source: Wen Wei Po