Hao
"Wuhai" is the second feature film of Zhou Ziyang, director of "Old Beast", which is somewhat different from the previous one in temperament, and has a similarity. The same is a solid "big male protagonist", Tu's interpretation is the uninhibited "old bastard", and Huang Xuan interprets the crisis of a small town "phoenix man". Both male protagonists are largely unpleasant and convincingly real.
Huang Xuan plays Yang Hua
The story of "Wuhai" contains the deep depression of a family accumulated over the years, as well as the new disease of people's hearts that cannot prevent mutation under the rapid development of society, but concentrated in a short period of three days, the strong external drama conflict and the internal tension of people's hearts work together to crush a person's originally seemingly calm and happy life.
The film begins with Huang Xuan's debt, which involves accidents in urban development, social issues such as P2P, usury, naked loans, and class differences, as well as suspicion and calculation between husband and wife, friends' hearts are not ancient, and torture people's self-esteem, value, and conscience. The daily pressing of debt collection, the moral kidnapping of debt, the contempt and contempt of family members, the estrangement and betrayal of wives, the bottleneck of career, the unladylike friendship, the camera captures the anxiety of the characters more sensitively in the process of recording these collapses.
Yang Zishan plays Miao Wei
Wuhai is a place name and an image that corresponds to the theme of the film's narrative. The last "Old Beast" was filmed in Ordos, and Wuhai is a small town adjacent to Ordos. Like Ordos, it has experienced rapid economic development and bubble collapse, and there are "strange and strange" that belong to the development of small cities in contemporary China. The original natural strange scenery and the seemingly incompatible postmodern cultural landscape are mixed in the same time and space, coupled with some designs of electronic music, absurd and natural self-contained, providing a set of audiovisual systems that are inexplicably harmonious with the film.
At the same time, the literal meaning of Wuhai is the black sea, which is very appropriate to the theme of being overwhelmed by desire explored in the film. In the film, whether it is the possessiveness of love, a certain sense of freshness stimulated by outsiders, the desire for success and money, and the desire for self-worth proof, it is all desire. In addition to the contradictions faced by the protagonist Huang Xuan and Yang Zishan, the vanity of the female college student of online loans, the sexual desire of debt-chasing horses to take advantage of the opportunity, the treacherous greed of friends, and the superiority of fathers-in-law and mother-in-law, are actually human desires, and everyone is deeply trapped in the sea of unconscious desires, some go with the flow, and some are swallowed up without knowing it.
Human feelings are dissolved more and more weakly, and while external interpersonal relationships continue to be hit, contradictions within the family are gradually emerging. The old vows stored in the mobile phone video are no match for the ambiguous ambiguous messages in the dashcam, like dominoes, a card falls, and the whole seemingly exquisite life collapses. And such people and lives are also the epitome of countless ants on the edge of survival in society. This is also the reason why this seemingly extreme story can get a lot of word-of-mouth resonance.
Of course, the three-day concentrated conflict will be too dense in the rhythm of the flow of life, and the sense of conflict and violation brought about by some of the film's performance rhythms and narrative methods make some of the characters' transformations and behavior choices slightly abrupt and sloppy.
Tu Men plays Miao Wei's father
The whole tone of "Wuhai" is cold from beginning to end, with some surreal absurd scenes, such as a group of old ladies posing in a strange yoga posture, the elderly band continuing to play indifferently in front of the burning tent, and the homeless male protagonist struggling to climb into the belly of the dinosaur without eyeballs at night... This is a director's aesthetic taste based on reality, and it is a small brilliance worth tasting.
The actor's performance is another interesting part of the film, because there is a highly dramatized part of the plot, and whether the characters are credible is crucial to whether the film is true. Huang Xuan's works over the years have undoubtedly got rid of the "national first love" and "cream little student" of previous years, but the complexity of the character of "Wuhai" still far exceeds his past film and television works. This is one of Huang Xuan's few characters with "negative" meaning, he is not pleasing, but he cannot be regarded as a villain. He was like Sisyphus pushing a stone, tired and endless. From the very beginning, he mortgaged his family's real estate to do business, and when faced with "temptation", he did not refuse with a righteous word, he could see a half-hearted hesitation, a glass heart that he had nowhere to put in the face of the superior Yue family, and even finally showed the extreme ugliness of human nature after it collapsed.
Screenshot of the "Wuhai" trailer
After actor Qin Hao harvested a circle-breaking "climbing" terrier last year, Huang Xuan's "climbing" in this movie is a storm that has accumulated more energy. The seemingly innocent laugh at the end of the film, which is loaded with fear and anger and relief, gives the movie and the characters an intriguing footnote.
In contrast, Yang Zishan's performance is not so brilliant, of course, it is not a pulling down, but it seems that the actress has a fixed set of procedures in the way of mobilizing her expression, muscles, and limbs, and the personal identity will be suspended above the role.
However, the presentation of a lively quarrel scene in the movie is still a surprise, after all, most of the time our aesthetic preferences for the performance of literary and artistic films fall within the "introverted" range, and the fierce emotions released outside are easy to go to the TV drama spilled dog blood. But at the same time, the fierce quarrels in films such as "Marriage Story", "A Parting", "Stealing Hearts" and other films also provide an excellent aspect of the audience's observation of secular life.
In "Wuhai", it is wonderful to explain this confrontation with a long lens, the performance cooperates with the scheduling of the camera, the character personality, the family relationship of the character, the current situation of the character and the subtext of the inhumane heart are all displayed, and the sense of non-divisional gaze makes the viewer have a strong sense of substitution. After that, as Huang Xuan snatched the door, the sense of following all the situations that happened afterwards continued from the immersion of that moment.
As Zhou Ziyang's second feature film, although it is much more mature than the previous one, it also has to see a lot of collage inspiration from the master, in addition to the above analogy of the quarrel of "Marriage Story", the scene of burning the tent is reminiscent of Li Cangdong's "Burning", and the strange dinosaur park seems to have a subtle intertextuality with Jia Zhangke's "World". But that doesn't stop the director from exhibiting some distinctly personal style and preference for characters and perspectives on the world.
Of course, the problems touched by "Wuhai" have not been dug deeper, and many questions that could have been further asked have been reduced to a "landscape" composed of unsatisfactory lives of characters like dinosaur parks, which must have a helpless part, but it is also a regret that the movie has a bad breath.
Editor-in-charge: Cheng Yu
Proofreader: Liu Wei