"The filming is good, the actors are excellent, the script is beautiful, the lines are natural and accurate, and the emotional retraction is just right." This is the first intuitive idea after watching "American Girl".
"American Girl" was shortlisted for seven awards including best picture at the 2021 Golden Horse Awards, and of the five films nominated for best picture this year, it is undeniable that "American Girl" is my favorite work, which is a rare masterpiece that is sincere, moving, and knows how to be moderate. With "American Girl" as the first feature film, it is almost impeccable for the new director Ruan Fengyi.
American Girl has a lot of interesting things to discuss. However, before that, I would like to talk about Yang Dechang's "Green Plum Bamboo Horse" first.
Taiwan's new taiwanese films, led by cutting-edge directors such as post-war Taiwanese films, health realism, Qiong Yao's three halls, and political propaganda films, have gradually shifted to the small people's pursuit of themselves and the times since the 1980s.
At the beginning of "Green Plum Bamboo Horse", Hou Xiaoxian and Cai Qin walk silently back and forth in the empty house, and this sense of alienation is used as the foundation of the whole film. A few minutes later, Yang Dechang uses a free-flying plane in the air, compared with the endless traffic on the road, separating the male and female characters, and the film begins by suggesting that the characters are in the chaos of Taipei and the other side of the United States that cannot be reached - the "futile American Dream".
In "Green Plum Bamboo Horse", the neon of the city at night and foreign billboards became important symbols, and in Taipei in the 1980s, the streets were full of Japanese corporate signs, and the influence of Japan on Taiwan, whether cultural or economic, was clear at a glance. Although Japan is not mentioned in the whole film, Yang Dechang's spatial transformation in the empty mirror of the city captures the small characters sandwiched between the American dream and the remnants of Japanese culture. Taipei's contemporary youth, which is out of place among the two great powers, is a cityscape of the 1980s.
"Don't think about America, america is not a panacea, like marriage, just a temporary hope, an illusion that makes you think that everything can start over." 」
In the end, Yang Dechang tells the ultimate reality with his usual sharp brushstrokes, just like Hou Xiaoxian's death in the film, leaving only the American dream that cannot be returned.
In 1985, Yang Dechang, who had stayed in the United States and returned to Taiwan, revealed the illusory illusion of Taiwanese in "Green Plum Bamboo Horse"; in 2021, Ruan Fengyi's "American Girl" also talked about the "American Dream", a pattern proposition composed of collectives, and more than 30 years later, Taiwan's emerging talents found another way and played a completely different warm tone.
By comparing "Green Plum Bamboo Horse", examine the important themes behind "American Girl".
The first shot of "American Girl" - the duffel bag from la at the airport, the language difficulties between China and Britain and other details, Ruan Fengyi instantly announces the antagonistic relationship between "Eastern and Western cultures", which solidifies the core foundation of the whole film. Hidden in the core of the American dream, Ruan Fengyi is not as cold as Yang Dechang, but reveals a certain tenderness, which is like an invisible web, catching up with the different understandings of the two generations of Taiwanese in the 60s and 90s, and at the same time taking advantage of the possibility of reconciliation in family disorder, which is extremely layered.
Taiwanese who were born in the fifth and sixth grades, when they were young, went through the lifting of strict regulations, and then encountered direct elections and rotations, and the economy was successively facing the departure of small and medium-sized enterprises; when Taiwan was in turmoil, it was encountered in the youth of the previous generation, Taiwan's situation changed rapidly and constantly changed, and foreign countries became a kind of redemption dream in the East Asian island chain in the Cold War era.
Generation Y and Z after the 90s, in the protection and transfer of hot money, opened another kind of dream immigrants the second generation of immigrants cloaked in yellow skin, bone and flesh but actually exist authentic ABC and Sundae, which distanced themselves from the vision of the previous generation's dreams, "identity" has become the most urgent reflection question of the second generation of immigrants, "You are really American!"
This line is like a fixed hammer, echoing in the mind of the heroine Fang Yuting, becoming an unsympathetic, unsubstructive, and inappropriate youthful language.
The script of "American Girl" extends from the broken American dream of the above two generations. When two generations returned to Taiwan from the United States at the same time, their corresponding losses were not the same, and their respective sorrows were indescribable. The image is in the delicate and meticulous insight of the times, and the tension slowly flows like a "splash" and immerses itself in the heart.
The sword of mother and daughter and family is like the cancer of the flesh and the wall cancer that has not fallen into disrepair for a long time, and the "gradual death" of the mother and the apartment uses the "rhetoric of comparison" mentioned in the film, in the literary nature of the image language, while highlighting the dysfunction of kinship and family symbols, through the interaction of the characters and the use of space field, the death image of each other jumps on the paper, reappears on the screen, and envelops the narrative.
As the story progresses, Nguyen Fung Yee further contrasts the two sides of "love/hate" and "death/growth", from individual to group, interrogating multiple relationships such as self, family, and society. As mentioned above, this is a mirror story of two generations of broken dreams. From this point of view, it is not only the intimate experience of the ego, but also the memory of the times entangled in Taiwan from a macro perspective.
As for Fang Yuting's growth chronicle is the absolute narrative main line, in a close-up and fixed mirror, exploring the discrete history of her own life experience, especially when the story goes to the whipping conflict of the campus machine system, Ruan Fengyi bravely gave Fang Yuting a close-up, in the gaze of watching, Fang Yuting's slow teardrops, the surface is the pain of the flesh, but in fact, it is sandwiched with indelible growth memories and the accumulated scars after the cultural conflict.
What emerges in Fang Yuting's palm is the fundamental difference between the education of the East and the West, and it has faintly become the director's hand mark of Ruan Fengyi.
Of course, "American Girl" can indeed be viewed in contrast with Chen Zheyi's "Parents Are Not At Home", Chen Zheyi captured the Asian financial crisis in 1997 in his childhood memories, and explored the definition/positioning of the mother with the theme of female maid; Ruan Fengyi's "American Girl", in the SARS epidemic storm in Taiwan in 2003, took identity as the axis, drawing a circle to ask the small people's self-pursuit at the bottom of the big era, which is also closely related to the voice of the women's times.
Moreover, if you look back at 2003 from 2021, COVID-19 echoes the SARS storm, 20 years have passed, Taiwan's housing prices have continued to rise, the epidemic has continued to disperse people's hearts, and from the perspective of the epidemic year in the early millennium, there has been a certain overlap with recent years, which is the author's vision of Ruan Fengyi, which has become an inevitable coincidence of fictional stories and real life, without showing ingenuity and fabrication.
When the memory of SARS in Taiwanese graphic works only exists in a few documentaries such as "Peace Storm" and "Crossing Peace", the small family of "American Girl" appears, but instead makes up for the absence of the era in the more mainstream drama films. As for Ruan Fengyi's sensitivity to the times, it has blossomed in details such as MSN, Double Saint, Nameless Station, Dial-up Internet Network, doll games, etc. Ruan Fengyi also knows how to use "songs" to correspond to the times and flatter people's hearts.
Around 2003, Jay Chou's first three albums thundered flatly, shaking the Chinese music scene, Jolin Tsai flipped the image with "Look at Me 72 Changes", so "Double J"'s "Say I Love You", "Quiet", "Grandpa's Tea" three songs into the play, "Also secretly happy that you didn't find me hiding in the corner" sang Fang Yuting's light joy of finding her old friend; "Don't worry too much, I will always be good" said the cone after corporal punishment and the weakness of friends missing, the tonal love song golden song, handling the mood is different, It has become Ruan Fengyi's delicate ingenuity, and it has also summoned back the collective memory of Taiwan after the millennium.
However, in the later part of the narrative, the mother and daughter who love and kill each other are difficult to solve the problem, relying on the reflection of "composition" and "white horse".
With her essay, Nguyen Fung Yee had the opportunity to point out the main theme of "Ladybird" - "What if this is the best me?" But Ruan Fengyi is different from Greta Jiewei, this question is not self-contemplation, but reflects the figure of her mother, and from then on, Ruan Fengyi's atmosphere of caring for her mother in the image is faintly revealed.
As for the "white horse" is a symbol of reversing the relationship between mother and daughter, based on a certain surreality under the reality story, the white horse has become the possibility of Fang Yuting and Lin Jiaxin's reconciliation, and it has never been able to put on the harness, this lens gives Fang Yuting a substantial sense of empathy, the contradiction between natural wildness and human taming, and its metaphor truly echoes the narrative, embellishing the subtle rationality and sensibility in the conflict, "What animal do you want to be in the next life?"
Ruan Fengyi let the mother and daughter pluck out their ears, and in the image of the white horse that was out of rein, the cloud breeze gently dissolved the weight of the nameless mother and daughter.
"I really love you" is the last trump line, which melts away the collective sorrow of the two generations of dreams, and the ghosts of the Cold War period, and finally disappear in the hearts of the little people.
So after this, the old apartment with long-term wall cancer and always in low chroma has sunshine, the transformation of photography reflects the vivid image of family operation, the sister's SARS is only a misunderstanding, and the father's crying and loss of voice will flow the suppressed emotions. In the end, Fang Yuting no longer locked her sister outside the door, and the door of the family of four was no longer closed as before, and what was opened was the possible coexistence and reconciliation between them.
Under the editing rhythm of Ruan Fengyi's near prose, "American Girl" freely grasps the restraint and release of emotions, tenderly and gracefully closes two generations, as well as countless audiences in front of the screen.
Finally, although Ruan Fengyi and Yang Dechang have very different image styles for the pursuit of "dreams", the core of "escape" is the same:
Yang Dechang concludes with the image of "death" in heavy ink, loudly telling the audience that the United States is not a panacea, not a paradise of escape; Nguyen Fung Yee also reflects on this point, through Zhuang Kaixun pointing out that "if it is an escape, it is the same in any country", but Nguyen Fung Yi deftly transforms the gloom of "death", in this sense, she tries to find a way to regulate the land and understand the family from a personal point of view.