Introduction: The dance in the tango classroom became a ritual that referred to the alienation and madness of decadence in apocalyptic ukiyo-e.
Director Diao Yinan's film "Daytime Fireworks", with a decadent policeman chasing murder case as the main plot clue, shows an alienated group portrait under the picture of the decline of the northeast post-industry, telling the love redemption story of Wu Zhizhen, Zhang Zili and Liang Zhijun. The director chooses an isolated bystander perspective, and strives to maintain a sober objective feeling, and the audience is placed in a "ghost" point of view, becoming the voyeur and witness of this apocalyptic ukiyo-e.
1. Audiovisual language: authenticity and design sense
"Daytime Fire" does not choose the dark suspense image style of traditional film noir when showing the "story of pursuing the murderer", but creates a post-industrial and desolate visual space similar to "Blade Runner", thus achieving a certain "apocalyptic" spectacle. In the expression of space, the audiovisual language of craftsmanship design wanders between realism and surrealism, trying to make the audience rationally sober.
First, the film mostly uses large scenes and static camera positions, while maintaining the plot conflict in its entirety, it ensures the bystander distance between the audience and the event, weakens the influence brought by the plot conflict, and breaks the usual audiovisual language formula. For example, in the shooting case that occurred at the beginning of the film when the police Zhang Zili arrested the barbershop criminal, the image maintained a fixed panoramic camera position throughout the whole process in addition to the strong close-up of the gun falling, which in one way dissolved the audience's original viewing expectations, but made the audience more surprised when seeing the conflict, and this conflict that did not add the director's emotional reinforcement also enhanced the realism of the film space to some extent.
Second, the film is very particular about the composition of the shot, and when using close-up, it also injects a surreal metaphor into the film. For example, the cross-cutting of Zhang Zili's intertwined hands and the stumps thrown on the soot during sex with his wife increased the audience's expectations. At the same time, this ingenious lens design greatly guarantees the "separation effect". For example, a series of films such as director Joe White's "Anna Karenina" and Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" are all designed to enhance the sense of image scheduling design to create a viewing effect of the screen box. It's just that in "Daytime Fireworks", this treatment is more low-key and more restrained.
Third, the film also strengthens the sound effect function, or only shows part of the local action in the frame during shooting, and sublimates the audience's imagination space with the enhancement of sound. The film makes a lot of use of such as the sound of drinking soup, stepping on snow, gasping sounds, etc., these sounds as a reinforcement of the environment and the displacement of the protagonist's subjective feelings to help the picture form an understanding, and when the distance between the picture scene and the source of the sound is not in place, the same dark theme hits a strange perception, deepening the apocalyptic effect of the picture. The superposition of the picture in the panoramic range and the sound in the close-up range makes the audience's rational perspective gradually distance from the image, and increases the auditory impact of the perceptual perspective and strengthens the spatial atmosphere.
2. Film Style: The "Attraction" of Apocalyptic Ukiyo-e
Clive Bell believes that "meaningful form is the essence of all art", and meaning refers to this emotion that is different from the beauty of natural objects, and in "Daytime Fireworks", Diao Yinan also gives the work a strong "author's identity". The obscure tones, the ambiguity of distance, the decadent loneliness and the alienated group portraits in the film constitute an apocalyptic ukiyo-e, and the dilapidated paradise, crowded trams, and the ruined ruins of post-industry in the film form its own spectacle, directly appealing to the attention of the audience, with such a unique time and place, to arouse the curiosity of the audience's perspective.
The film places the story field in the declining northeast industrial city, with an empty decline, alluding to the distortion and alienation of the characters in the film, this unhealthy pathological environment and character stories form an attractive "spectacle", as a landscape to provide a sense of despair different from the current domestic Wenzhi films. In addition, the film also strengthens the alienation of the scene where "Daytime Fireworks" is located with various details, such as dead flies during sex, the boss lady who is in a daze on the back of the rotating orange lamp, and the lost master's horse, these abnormal detail clues serve as tools to assist the scene and plump the scene, although there is no function to promote the plot, but as a background factor to interpret the core "mourning" sense of the film.
At the plot level of the film, buried under the simple murder story and mainly narrated, is a kind of inner isolation between people, and the protagonist retired policeman and the washer are both "silent" in most scenes. The audience can only read the state of aphasia by snooping on the tip of the iceberg of the characters, which widens the distance between the audience and also widens the distance between the characters, so in some occasions, such as kisses outside the skating rink, and hugs on the Ferris wheel, provide a cold ambiguity in the rendering of the sense of doom, thus creating a stronger sense of character isolation. And in the empty and cold snow, the heavy clothes between the characters reinforce the untouchable distance, unlike the humid south, which rises up with a kind of alienated indifference.
3. Narrative means: the wandering of identity
Under the framework of such a story as "pursuing the murderer", there is also a warm love story: the departed policeman Zhang Zili, in the face of the dilemma of career and family failure after divorce, has become an idle drunkard, and the work of the security section is really not as adventurous as the work of criminal investigation. Therefore, under the surface of the "pursuit of the murderer" story, Zhang Zili's journey of "recovering himself" as a loser is loaded, and in this "self-recovery" investigation, he also inevitably contacts Wu Zhizhen and reaches an ambiguous sense of distance.
In this narrative, Zhang Zili has always wandered between the identities of the policeman and the man, and the suspense of the story also relies on Zhang Zili's identity choice, which also reflects the tip of the iceberg of alienation from the side. The story of the laundry worker Wu Zhizhen takes place in one puzzle game after another, as a character who is explored and decoded, Wu Zhizhen has always been in a passive position, and her passive personality has also intensified the mystery of this character, when this mystery is dismantled into a flower of evil under ambiguity and violence, Zhang Zili's report shifts for an emotional betrayal, displacement for a new type of mutation of self-evident self-esteem and abandoning emotions.
This may also allude to the divorce scene at the beginning: zhang zili, as a man, when faced with the choice of reporting or not reporting, but also self-proof and emotional fate, he finally chose the former. Does this choice carry a fatalistic unity and equally hint at the male ego cage? Of course, the film gives a reasonable reason for the choice - the sinner must finally fall into the law, but in between, the character's wandering in identity also paradoxically alludes to the loneliness, desolation, and indifference of the post-industrial era, and the dance in the tango classroom becomes a ritual, referring to the alienation and madness after the decadence in the post-apocalyptic ukiyo-e.