Watching Zhang Yimou's "Return", there is a feeling of time and space dislocation.
As the leader of the "fifth generation", Zhang Yimou's "Return" is like a tribute to the "fourth generation". At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, the fourth generation of directors shot a series of "scarred" films, such as "Distressed Laughter" (Yang Yanjin), "The Vibrato of Life" (Teng Wenji), "Spring Rain Xiaoxiao" (Ding Yinnan), "Bashan Night Rain" (Wu Yigong), "Little Street" (Yang Yanjin), "River Without Navigation Marker" (Wu Tianming) and so on.
In the fourth generation of the shot, the humanitarian flag is a hazy and warm bright color, they try to tell the audience that although the protagonist is in a fierce era, they have love in their hearts, and the humanitarian spirit in them not only saves themselves, but also makes life full of hope.
The fourth generation of directors believed in the famous Italian director Bertolucci's famous saying that "man is a hostage of history", and they pardoned the individual with their own unique warmth, but indisputably indicted history and times.
In "The Return", Zhang Yimou very skillfully uses this technique of the fourth generation.
The protagonists, Lu Yanzhi and Feng Wanyu, have been persecuted inhumanly, but the people who persecuted them have not appeared, whether it is the street director who pretends to be majestic, the captain of the labor propaganda team, or the vigilant and stern instructor of the labor camp, they are just performing their duties. The "Master Fang" who caused huge psychological trauma to Feng Wanyu may be the only "bad guy" in the film, but he has never appeared. When Lu Yanzhi was holding the rice spoon that Master Fang had used to beat Feng Wanyu, he went out to the Dongfeng Steel Mill to seek revenge on him, but found that he had also been taken away by the "special case team". Obviously, "Master Fang" is also a victim of the times and is being censored as a "three kinds of person", and he has been pardoned for this.
In Zhang Yimou's narrative, the only person responsible for the protagonist's suffering is the "era".
As a seasoned and internationally award-winning film director, Zhang Yimou is indeed very good at creating atmosphere. In the early 1970s (1973), the horror of the depression he filmed was like an enemy-occupied area, and the cold autumn rain never stopped, which was completely different from the artistic conception of "people with strong sunshine and black eyes" in Jiang Wen's "Sunny Day". The scene where Lu Yanzhi hid under the overpass of the railway station waiting for Feng Wanyu to come to meet him was filled with the heavy and harsh friction of the train wheel rails, which made people feel depressed and nervous. Even if Dan Dan's ballet school performance is successful, the whole audience standing up and clapping the shot, he is also very solemn, the audience's movements are like robots, although the sound shock roof tiles, but lack of inner passion.
By the late 1970s, although it was still full of yellow leaves and the suffering did not seem to be over, the background had become a warm color that made people feel safe and comfortable.
However, despite Zhang Yimou's painstaking efforts, his accusations against the times still have flaws.
Lu Yanzhi and Feng Wanyu's daughter Dan Dan is a character in the film who threads the needle and plays a turning role, and it is her "betrayal" that causes Lu Yanzhi and Feng Wanyu's overpass meeting to be unsuccessful. However, as a female student in a dance school, Dan Dan's biggest trouble is simply that he cannot play the main role - Wu Qinghua in "The Red Detachment of Women".
It was not so much a hardship as a happiness, which could even be described as a "luxury" considering that her father had been sentenced to a heavy sentence for political reasons.
Before the outbreak of war, Scarlett Hao in "Gone with the Wind" was also "distressed" all day long, because she did not know how to choose in the face of many suitors. The author, Margaret Mitchell, is to show the happy life of the american southern farmers before the Civil War through the description of Scarlett's "distress". Zhang Yimou originally wanted to indict the harshness of the times through Dan Dan's encounter, but inadvertently made us realize that the times are actually not so "harsh" - at least you can still dance ballet and compete for the protagonist. However, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Dan Dancai "became" a female textile worker.
"Homecoming" has done a more meticulous job in restoring the appearance of the times, such as street scenes and costumes, which has gained a consistent reputation, but it is not without flaws. For example, everyone in the film wears a huge leader badge, but in fact, in the late Cultural Revolution (the time given in the film is 1973), there are not many people wearing this kind of badge. Even in the first three years of the cultural revolution, the wearing of statue badges by ordinary Chinese people was mainly a spontaneous act of the people, not a government regulation. In addition, after the dandan and their performance, the whole audience stood up and waved the quotations and sang "The Sea Sails by the Helmsman" is not real, because this kind of waving quotations can only appear before the "913 Incident" in 1971.
The "fourth generation" of directors developed from 1978 to 1979. 1979 was an unusually important turning point. In the social atmosphere spawned by the "Third Plenary Session", "Emancipating the Mind", "Practice is the Only Criterion for Testing Truth", and under the exciting prospect of reform and opening up, people suddenly felt a new rhythm. The embryonic discourse of enlightenment gives a new promise about the "blue civilization," a strange and sensual future. Therefore, the works of the fourth generation all have a "bright tail", and the return of the departed often heralds the beginning of a beautiful new life.
But "Homecoming" did not dare to be so optimistic. The course of history over the past thirty years has shown that many of the sensual aspirations of the time were wishful thinking, that the nightmare waking up in the morning was just a beautiful imagination, and that the end of abandoning the "yellow civilization" and moving towards the "azure" of market economy and privatization was not very beautiful.
That is, in the case of Dan Dan, at the end of the film, she is still a female worker in a wool mill, and if she does not hurry to enter the university with the help of her father, then in the nineties, she is likely to become a member of the laid-off army, and even become a street woman like Du Yuemei, a female worker in Cao Zhenglu's novel "There". Therefore, it is not that Zhang Yimou does not want to add a "bright tail" to "Return", but even if he adds it, the audience will think that it is unreal and refuse to accept it, and in today's reality, the audience may feel that this is like an irony, producing a certain comedic effect, destroying the atmosphere of sadness and warmth deliberately created by Zhang Yimou throughout the film.
Therefore, the return of Lu Yanzhi is also a kind of "unreturned" - Lu Yanzhi as a natural person has returned, but the good life he symbolizes and represents has not returned.
When will the good life come? Zhang Yimou did not know, and the original yan Geling did not know either.
Lu Yanzhi was powerless to change all this, and he fell into a worse predicament than when he was on the laogai farm: he could still look forward to the day of his release while on the farm, but today, he could only hold up a sign with his name written on it and wait for a "self" who knew that he could never wait for it--this unsolvable dilemma was the dilemma of the Chinese elite group and, in a sense, the dilemma of the times.