"The Earth Is Long and Long": China's past, thirty years of detail from the beginning
On February 14, Wang Xiaoshuai's "Long Days on earth" was released at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. This long film with rich historical details and humanistic feelings, thirty years of detail from the beginning, a net of the stories of ordinary people who have intersected with sorrow and joy in China in the past, their personal lives in the process of history are both waves and people who follow the waves, and they form a long or short resonance with China's progress. Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei won two Silver Bear Awards for Best Actor and Actress at the Berlin Film Festival at the same time with this film, and their superb and subtle acting skills added color to the film, and those laughter, hi points, and pain points that shone with glory and dreams, frustration and pain, hope and view, and the stars and dots constituted the situation of small people in the big era. Two families, more groups of emotional relationships, the formation of first synchronization and then the wrong step forward march, from line to surface with subtle contrast to reflect the emotional bondage is the greatest spiritual force of time.
From the early 1980s, young workers Liu Yaojun and Shen Yingming were originally close friends, and they danced with their friends in the song of "Friendship for a Long Time", whether in the dou room or the auditorium, they recalled and blessed the future. In their work and life, family planning is the most important national policy, and their love and hope are from one to the other. Shen Yingming's wife Li Haiyan and Liu Yaojun's wife Wang Liyun are also good friends, the former is responsible for family planning work, she resolutely and forcefully completed her duties, Wang Liyun was forced to have an abortion, but family planning is only an incision in "Long Days". However, the greater rupture in life was in the afternoon of one leisure time, the sons of the two families, Shen Hao and Liu Xing, were playing in the suburbs, and Liu Xing, the son of Yao Jun, died unexpectedly, which completely changed the fate of the two families. Orphaned, the Liu family and his wife went to the south, adopted a boy and let him go as an adult. Around the beginning of 2010, the old-looking people reunited, and the hidden truth will eventually be revealed by the frankness of the younger generation. The Liu family returned to the old house, and there was a massage shop in the abandoned tube building.
It turned out that the first afternoon was not a simple accident, but Shen Hao's obstinate words and irresponsible pulling made Liu Xing lose his life. For the sake of the living children, Liu Yaojun Wang Liyun and his wife moved from the stage of history to the edge in a constant concession, first Wang Liyun became the price of the progress of the times in the great layoffs in the 1990s, and then they migrated from the north to the seaside in the south to repair the car as more ordinary self-employed households. What the Liu family has got in these thirty years is an ordinary life, full of sorrow and sorrow, but fortunately they are resolute and fulfilled, and finally ushered in the return of Liu Xing, the adopted son played by Wang Yuan. The Shen family has become a successful person in the secular sense, Shen Yingming as a real estate developer has changed the appearance of the industrial city, and Shen Hao is a young talent, who has already entered the attending doctor. Shen Hao, played by Du Jiang, is actually a more guilty character than his mother, and it is a little regrettable that his spiritual growth has not been further described. Li Haiyan's reconciliation with the Shen family before her death interprets the cliché of "Friendship Lasts a Long Time", and of course, it is also the biggest spiritual common denominator of these characters.
"Long Days on Earth" has an orderly emotional restraint narrative, successfully avoids the possibility of melodrama, and the creators enjoy the unpleasantness brought by the years, from the carnival of dancing together to the still lonely sound of the waves, everyone has invisible baggage. The first hour and a half of "The Long Day" has too many interpolations, just as life has never flowed down the daily life, the film adopts the transition method of natural objects, and the storm clouds are the real daily life. Shen Jasmine, played by Qi Xi, is both Shen Yingming's sister and once Liu Yaojun's apprentice, and she is constantly testing the dangers on the edge of life. From the involuntary wind to the rain trying to replace it, intertwined with unrealistic changes and redemptions, he finally withdrew from the unfortunate life of the Liu family and left the United States. In the end, when Liu Yaojun saw in the video communication that Shen Jasmine's child was a mixed-race child, he got the answer at that moment and let go of some expectations and fantasies. The final realization of "Long Days" may not only be the reconciliation with life itself in the film, but also a certain balanced narrative reached by a generation of filmmakers looking back at the past, when youth becomes a smokey past, the present will continue.