"Faith is a very important keyword in this movie"
A s p i r i n M u s e u m
Text | Ke frog
01.
Unlike the unexpected fire of "Kailash", the second work of director Zhang Yang, who has been dormant for many years, has received a dismal response.
So far, the film is only 0.1%, and the box office is less than 3.2 million.
Whether it is from word of mouth or box office, I feel that everyone seriously underestimates this movie.
Director Zhang Yang is very familiar to everyone, and we have done in-depth interview albums with Zhang Yang before "Four Tastes of Poison Uncle".
Unlike the underground independent director who insists on self-expression, and the commercial director who always talks with the capital market, from "Bath", "Yesterday", "Unmanned", "Flying Over the Old People's Home" to "Kailash" and "Soul on the Leather Rope", Zhang Yang has taken an unusual path, he seems to always oscillate between art and business, trying to find his most suitable position.
Stills from "Bathing"
Stills from "Yesterday"
Stills from "Driverless"
Judging from this year's two films, Zhang Yang's return carries a sense of transparency.
Faith has become a very important keyword in these two films.
The faith in Kailash is spotless, calm as water, as if one should be born that way, and reaching the end is simple and straightforward.
In this "Soul on the Leather Rope", Zhang Yang made complex and deep inquiries about faith, sex, good and evil, fate, self and the cycle of life and death.
How should people live?
How to face hatred and love? What is good and evil? Are we living in a destiny that has been established?
It is a surreal, time-space interweaving magic film, the visual effects of the film are beautiful, the photography has a strong Western style of Sergio Leone, and the mystery, wildness and ruggedness of Tibet are conveyed very well.
The story is based on two novels by Tashi Dawa, one of the pioneers of Chinese magic realism novels.
Magic realism is a very important branch of literature, its homeland comes from the strange South America, where the literary masters Borges and Márquez were born.
Magic realism is a magnificent and fantastical interweaving of imagination, past and present, culminating in a deeply penetrating torture of human nature.
And in a place like Tibet, it has alpine boulders, Gobi swamps and mysterious religious overtones, providing a natural soil of magical reality.
The story of the film starts from three main lines, parallel and interlaced to tell the story of a hunter who has come back from the dead to escort the Buddhist holy relics Dzi.
The first line is that the protagonist Tabe killed a deer while hunting, found a rare holy relic dzi from the deer's mouth, and then the sky changed and was killed by lightning, and after being killed by the living Buddha, he was rescued by the living Buddha, and under the initiation of the living Buddha, he embarked on the atonement journey of escorting the dzi to wash away his sins.
Tabe's journey is also like a life of the world, on the way he meets his lover Joan and the elf boy Pu who shows him the way, as well as the gangsters who covet the Dzi.
Joan is the embodiment of sex and reality in the film, Joan can fight for love, and always put Tababella into reality, so that Tabe can be withdrawn from the illusory soul, step on the earth, and get worldly joy.
The little boy Pu is like an elf, full of divinity, all the way to show Tabe the direction to the palm print.
Pu is also the only person who has had contact with the writer Gedan, and he seems to be the link between the writer Gedan and Tabet, a medium between the two time and space.
The two brothers in the second line, Zhan Dui and Guo Ri, are setting out from their home to find their father's son, Tabe, who is killing his father's enemy, and preparing to kill Tabe to avenge his father.
However, hatred infected his younger brother Guo Ri with a demon, committing many unprovoked killings in order to kill Tabe, and the hatred was not resolved, but accumulated more and more.
His brother Zhan Dui chased Tabe halfway through Tabe's journey, and the two of them met to wait for Tabe to escort the Dzi to the Palm Print Land.
The younger brother Guo Ri was already waiting for Tabe in the palm print, and finally, the two brothers and Tabe fought a life-and-death duel in the palm print. Following along the way, the elder brother Zhan Dui gradually saw through the essence of hatred, but the younger brother Guo Ri was difficult to get rid of.
In the end, Tabe's men spared no mercy during the fight and gave up killing Guo Ri, who then stabbed Tabe to death. Guo Ri had long been lost in hatred, and when Zhan Dui took him home, he committed suicide on Zhan Dui's back.
The protagonist of the last line is the writer Gedan.
This is a story that belongs to another time and space, and Gerdan is always tracking Tabe and observing Tabe's every move. Eventually, Gerdan and Tabet meet at the palm of Master Lotus at the end of their journey.
When they met, Tabe had been killed by Guo Ri, and Gedan took the holy relic Dzi from Tabe's hand and continued to march with Joan to the hinterland of the palm-tattooed land. Everything is reincarnated, and the journey begins again.
Why did Gerdan track down Tabe and take the Dzi from Tabe to continue his journey?
From the end of the film, when we look back at the opening credits, we can find the answer.
At the beginning of the movie, a little girl rolls down the cliff on the way to escort Dzi to the palm print land, and a little boy hears the sound and the girl asks the little boy to take her to the palm print field.
The boy went to escape, and in the end, before the little girl died, she handed the Dzi to a deer, and the deer was the one who was killed by Tabe.
And this little boy who escaped was none other than the writer Gedan. Many years ago, Gerdan wrote this story into a novel, tabe is the protagonist of this novel, Gerdan melted his guilt into tabe's body, this long journey of atonement, it is tabe's, not Gerdan's own.
The reason Gerdan tracks down Tabet is that he has not been able to find a suitable ending in the novel, so Gerdan blends himself into the story itself and magically begins the journey of tracking Tabbe.
In the end, Gedan succeeded Tabet and completed his own journey of atonement.
The story of the film is actually not complicated, the director tells the way is exquisite and unique, layered, interlocking, full of mystery, quite "brain-burning".
The characters in the story are varied, Guo Ri, Zhan Dui, Tabe, Andan, each of whom has his own obsession, or hatred, or greed, or obsession, just like the Buddhist saying of greed and anger.
At the end of the film, Guo Ri destroys his own demons in the form of suicide, and the innocent killings he has committed before.
The hatred of Zhan Dui at this moment has long disappeared because of the death of his brother and Tabe, and in the vast Gobi, carrying his dead brother on his back, he walked to the way home.
Tabe was on a journey of atonement to death, and finally died in a battle on the palm of the earth, paying off all the sins of the world.
Gedan succeeded Tabet to continue escorting Dzi, making up for his guilt of seeing the little girl die as a child and retreating, and embarking on a journey of self-redemption to "surrender the demons of the heart".
Everyone is liberated and forgiven in different ways.
The Dzi returned from the little girl, the deer, the Tabet, and finally to the hands of the writer Gedan, and the Dzi was always on the way, opening one reincarnation after another.
Probably all sentient beings spend their entire lives, are some form of escort Dzi, arriving at the beginning, life and death.
So what exactly is Dzi?
It may be the self of every way and in the moment.
There have always been too many films in our market that please the audience, and we are keen on lighthearted pleasure, superficial, leaving no room for the audience to speculate.
However, if the film is returned to an artistic form to express, whether a film can bring long thinking, whether the audience can perceive the connection between people and themselves, people and others, people and society, and can have a spiritual resonance with the director at a certain moment in the film, which is particularly precious.
We now really lack directors who can calm down and make movies seriously, and we lack films like "Soul on a Leather Rope" that can lead the audience to find the God in their hearts on the long road of life, sit cross-legged, and speculate with it.
We've talked a lot about the harm that big IP and small fresh meat have done to the film market, and now a lot of data and word-of-mouth have verified this.
I believe that time will not indulge a bad movie, nor will it bury a good movie.
Final score: 8 points, this is my favorite of Director Zhang Yang's works.