If the 20th century is divided into two halves, and some of the Chinese cultural people who have had the greatest influence in the second half of the fifty years are to be cited, then even if the list is narrowed to a minimum, Xie Jin must be indispensable.
Xie Jin made half a century of films and ushered in the era of films named after himself. In the history of Chinese mainland film, he is the irrefutable leader of the third generation of film directors, and is also recognized as one of the most artistically vigorous directors since 1949. As Yu Qiuyu said:
"Think back, in this ups and downs of the half century, in the cultural life of Chinese, if there is no Xie Jin, a large number of Chinese if there is no "Red Detachment of Women", "Stage Sisters", "Legend of Tianyun Mountain", "Wrangler", "Furong Town" and other movies to watch, what kind of loss will it be? Because he has long been an integral part of the collective aesthetic process of contemporary Chinese. ”
In Xie Jin's artistic career of more than 40 years, his "Furong Town" is undoubtedly the most epic creative miracle, and it has also achieved the peak that Chinese films are difficult to surpass.
"Furong Town" is adapted from the novel of the same name by writer Gu Hua. As the winner of the inaugural Mao Dun Literature Award, "Furong Town" represents a height of the "reflective literature" trend of thought at the beginning of the 1980s.
With the brushstrokes of the essence of the times, the author tells the story of a group of low-level figures represented by Hu Yuyin, the "Tofu Xishi" and the intellectual Qin Shutian, in the small town of Xiangxi, who had tragic encounters in the special era, and showed his thinking on human nature with the help of the suffering of historical figures.
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The film begins in 1963, in the town of Furong, which borders the three provinces of Hunan, Guangdong and Guizhou, the industrious and capable Hu Yuyin and her husband set up a rice and tofu stall here. In Hu Yuyin's busy morning and attentive hospitality, the food stalls are often full of diners, very lively, and the business is even more prosperous than state-run snacks.
Of course, I have to admit that compared with her introverted husband, Hu Yuyin's enthusiasm and generosity and beautiful appearance have also become a living sign for attracting customers to her family. Because Hu Yuyin is beautiful, people in the town praise her "Sister Furong". But Hu Yuyin and her husband could not imagine that it was this distinct beauty that would cause a series of disasters to the couple.
Before the storm of history struck, this rice tofu stall in Furong Town was like a small stronghold, forming an invisible silk net in the flow of time, connecting Hu Yuyin and the people who intersected with her, deep or shallow, and pushing them one by one to the front of the stage where the wind and rain were coming.
Among them, Li Mangeng, as the secretary of the county party committee, is a green plum bamboo horse who grew up with Hu Yuyin, and they fell in love with each other in their youthful age, but they parted ways due to different revolutionary elements. In order to make up for the debt in his heart, Li Mangeng recognized Hu Yuyin as a dry girl.
After his love affair with Li Mangeng was frustrated, Hu Yuyin married li Guigui, an honest pig slayer. Although Gui Gui's profession is to be handled, he is a soft and shy little man in life, and Hu Yuyin must decide everything. The couple's life was simple, but also happy and contented.
In life, the person who gave Hu Yuyin the most care was actually Gu Yanshan, director of the grain station. As an old cadre who went south, Gu Yanshan was very righteous and proud. Although his cultural level is not high, he is ancient and hot. In order to support Hu Yuyin's livelihood, he always gave her the head of the broken rice grain that was not wanted in the grain station.
In this way, in the era of material scarcity, Hu Yuyin, with his business acumen and the help of Li Mangeng and Gu Yanshan, became the first batch of people to get rich in Furong Town, and also built the most magnificent small building in the town.
In stark contrast to the industrious Hu Yuyin is Wang Qiuyu, the poorest and most scruffy second-rate son in Furong Town, who is clearly not clothed and hungry, but he is still delicious and lazy, and when he is hungry, he will go to the rice and tofu stall to eat a white meal. The people in the town all avoided this slacker, but Yuyin didn't care.
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Under Xie Jin's lens, Hu Yuyin has all the traditional virtues of working women in rural China: hard work, kindness, tolerance, and compassion. But in the ensuing vigorous "movement", this woman's life staged a tragic fate of "seeing him rise up a tall building, seeing him entertain guests, and seeing his building collapse".
The next character to appear is the female manager of the state-run hotel, and it is Also the backbone of the movement, Li Guoxiang. Compared with the beautiful and lively Hu Yuyin, who is very popular, the old-fashioned Li Guoxiang has ruined his reputation due to the chaos of his private life and has become an old maid who no one wants to marry. Therefore, she has an instinctive jealousy of Hu Yuyin, a beautiful woman who is quite popular with men, and she has become the main driver of subverting the fate of Hu Yuyin and others in her hands.
In order to combat Hu Yuyin's vigor, Li Guoxiang first slandered her for having an affair with Gu Yanshan, then forced Li Mangeng to draw a line with her, and then intimidated the timid and fearful Gui Gui, causing her to embark on the desperate road of suicide.
In this tense and high-pressure political atmosphere, the contradictions and truths of human nature have become a kind of bloody cruelty. In the face of Li Guoxiang's malicious speculation, Gu Yanshan, who is full of righteousness, can only expose the scars of "physical incapacitation" and defend Hu Yuyin and his innocence in a way that destroys his dignity.
Unlike the lonely Gu Yanshan, Li Mangeng did not have such a proud bone. In the coercion of his wife and the innocent eyes of the children, family responsibilities forced him to cut off Hu Yuyin and handed over the 1500 yuan she once entrusted to him, which indirectly led to the destruction of Hu Yuyin's family.
Ironically, Wang Qiuyu, a lazy man who once went to Hu Yuyin's mountain gate to eat white food, was selected by Li Guoxiang because of his status as a "poor peasant" and became a spokesman for the idea of the movement.
As a bachelor who has been in a state of sexual deprivation for a long time, Wang Qiuyu not only achieved a leap in status by actively exercising, but also obtained sexual satisfaction from Li Guoxiang. He saw that Li Guoxiang was superficially serious, but in fact he did not reject the desire of those who came, and Li Guoxiang also intended to cultivate such a subordinate, while meeting his own political work and physical needs.
The exchange of absurd and ugly power desires of the initiators also stands in stark contrast to the persecuted people's struggles to survive. In the special era, the struggle and mutation of human nature in repression are vividly reflected here.
Gu Yanshan faced this absurd and powerless reality, and after lying drunk in the snow, he said, "It's over, it's not over!" "So far, it is like jiao da's drunken scolding in "Dream of the Red Chamber", and why is this not all an indictment of the system and the torture of human nature?
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What makes people pay tribute is that the director begins with the accusation, but does not let the pain of this accusation replace objective reflection, but through the change of the fate of the hero Qin Shutian, dissects the deeper human nature under the cloak of the times.
Qin Shutian in the film is a high-level intellectual who worked in a cultural center, during which he became the object of everyone's shouting and beating because he was affected by political movements. But it was also in this situation that he was unable to protect himself, but he became the only person who dared to generously help Hu Yuyin, the rich peasant's wife.
On the surface, Qin Shutian is a "Qin Yizi" who looks foolish and crazy to outsiders, and has long been suppressed by sports. But looking deeply, this intentional "confusion" is precisely a kind of Qin Shutian-style survival wisdom.
He was obviously punished for sweeping the streets, but he swept out the waltz steps and pulled Hu Yuyin to dance together; he was clearly asked to write a slogan criticizing himself, but he also had to consider what font to use. This kind of black humor that seeks joy in suffering is a portrayal of the spiritual ecology and dignity of an intellectual in this turmoil.
In the era full of turmoil and humiliation, Qin Shutian still does not give up the possibility of love, and Hu Yuyin uses the free union of the flesh to find the truth of life...
In the most difficult years, they fought each other and rebelled in a special way, trying to regain the right to be human. The two still fell in love, married, and gave birth to the crystallization of love. Even with the hat of "two dog men and women, a black couple", they insisted on lighting the red candle, and humanity was resurrected here.
However, this combination of heartfelt feelings, which fell in the eyes of Li Guoxiang and Wang Qiuyu, became a typical example of "stealing chickens and dogs and being lawless".
Hu Yuyin, as the thorn in Li Guoxiang's former eye, although she has been knocked down, she is still beautiful, and has been loved by the real man Qin Shutian spiritually and physically, which undoubtedly gave Li Guoxiang a heavy blow, so she used the most sinister move, so that Qin Shutian was sentenced to 10 years in prison and sent to prison. This kind of cone of "birth and separation" is comparable to "death farewell".
At the sentencing meeting in the heavy rain, Qin Shutian's last exhortation to Hu Yuyin was "Live!" Live like cattle!", and this has become their belief in survival and a vow of love, the most sonorous and powerful rebel force in the whole work.
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As another classic after the two masterpieces of "Wrangler" and "Garland Under the Mountain", director Xie Jin used "Furong Town" to expose and reflect on the dirt of the times, and at the height of directly showing complex human nature, he has refined another layer.
Human nature can never be seen, in the isolated small environment of Furong Town, every time the big era is turned upside down, it has deeply affected everyone in it, and the different endings of each person after the dust has settled are a profound wake-up call to the hearts of the world.
From the beginning of the film in 1963, the lively fire in front of the rice tofu stall, and then to the red-hot rice tofu stall after 1979, the 15 years in between have condensed into a heavy and sad history, which has permanently changed the fate of these people.
When Qin Shutian, who was already born in Huafa, met Li Guoxiang, who had risen again on the ferry to his hometown, the latter first felt embarrassed, and then piled up a false fake smile to greet Qin Shutian in the past. This fully exposes that Li Guoxiang has a clear understanding of all kinds of ugly acts in the past, and this sobriety is the key to her step-by-step advancement. From this point of view, Li Guoxiang is much smarter than the "former lover" Wang Qiuyu.
Wang Qiuyu's life was in fact a life of being fooled by sports. For a deformed child of his time who longed for something for nothing, the temptation of power and the carnival of materialism gradually magnified his greed and devoured his conscience. This also led directly to the tragedy of his becoming a tool used by those in power.
Therefore, at the end of the film, the two people who used to be in the same stream go to a very different ending: Li Guoxiang is dressed in a small car and walks to the new patron of the province, while the crazy Wang Qiuyu is ragged and knocks on the broken gong, shouting like a ghost in the street of Furong Town: "Movement!" The movement has been exercised..." Wang Qiuyu's madness is not a kind of ridicule and criticism of greedy human nature.
When the dust raised by the times has settled again, the people who have been repeatedly destroyed by wind and rain are still like hibiscus flowers that have carried severe frost, and the courage and courage to live are constantly derived from the tenacious and indomitable vitality.
"Furong Town" has no liver and gallbladder accusations, only no sharp needles, only a calm and restrained picture, gently presenting this special history that has long been silent in the depths of time.
The story in the movie is finished, and the darkness, suffering, love, and humanity contained in it are far from over, and it is for people to comment on.
END.
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