The first parting, the beginning of countless times

The first movie I went to see after the theater resumed business was "The First Parting" directed by young director Wang Lina. In the large and empty movie theater, Isa, a good-tempered Uighur primary school student in the first few minutes of the film, feeds the lambs with a bottle, goes to the grandmother at the head of the village to buy bread, feeds the sick mother to eat... The boy is handsome and sensible, and I feel acceptable if the whole movie goes on like this "Abbas"; but when the image and voice of Kylie Binur appear on the screen at the same time, I still exclaim from the bottom of my heart: Sure enough! The screen needs a goddess. Kelly Binur, a Uighur girl who is about two or three years younger than Isa, has short shoulder-length hair and wears a red princess dress with gold silk flowers, with a good face, exaggerated expressions, and fierce speech.

In fact, Kelly Binur is just an ordinary little girl living in a desert oasis, and she has two major crises and challenges in her life, one is that her parents often quarrel and seem to be divorced (this point was later solved by the director's weightless and real); the other is that she only scored 25 points on the exam. The latter became the cause of her parting with Isa. In contrast, Isa's life is much more difficult. His mother lost the ability to speak because she was bitten by a poisonous spider in the desert when she was a child, and now she is sick and has lost the ability to take care of herself; Isa loves her mother very much and feels very sad about her father's decision to send her mother to a nursing home; her brother went to college and left his hometown, his father's health is not good, and the family seems to be on the verge of falling apart.

However, children have different perspectives on these difficulties in life. When Kelly's father sang the love song "Lark" he wrote in the cotton field to win back Kelly's mother's heart, Kelly was very happy to feel the love between her parents, with a little shyness and curiosity, she asked her mother reproachfully: "I am so touched, why did I leave The Lark Daddy?" "At that moment, you can't help but say that children's understanding and cherishing of emotions is more thorough than that of adults. When he wrote to his brother to express his dissatisfaction with his father sending his mother to a nursing home, Isa said that he only hoped that the family could live together, live well, and eat well. Of course, life is not so simple, but it cannot be denied that in the hopes of children, there is hidden the most essential truth and needs of life and life.

This is the value of children's films; this is also the value of all films that are "pursued" by reality. The director once said in an interview with reporters: The ideal film is documentary, not a documentary of shooting methods, but how to truly reconstruct and tell life, so that the audience can become a participant in cognitive life. The pursuit of "authenticity" is the reason why many directors can be famous in film history, and in this regard, "The First Parting" was commented by the Japanese media as "a stunning work, the rise of China's new stars", which is not an exaggeration. Director Wang Lina undoubtedly poured her feelings about her hometown and childhood experience into her first work with her feelings of immersion in books and images for many years. The authenticity of "The First Parting" is reflected in this film without professional actors, the description of the rural life situation, the capture of the language and demeanor of the rural people, and the natural expression and interaction of the mood of the three young actors. Isa, who needs to take care of her mother, is undoubtedly one of the more mature and sensible of the three, and the film shows his love for her mother, which is simple and unrequited: taking care of her mother to eat, combing her mother's hair, and treating her mother as his responsibility without complaint. The parents' pampered sisters, Kelly Binur and Elinaz, are naïve and enthusiastic and unscrupulous, Elenaz thinks that there is nothing wrong with the exam, "the exam is luck"; the sister leaves him for school, "then Isa can only play with me"; the beautiful Kylie Binur can dance anytime and anywhere in the desert, in front of the broken earth house and in the cotton field, like a natural elf who gathers the aura of heaven and earth and spreads the aura around.

The freedom of childhood, of course, has to endure the discipline of growth, so we see that the late Kelly shed real tears under the reprimand of the teacher, just like those tears we shed in childhood; the compositions she stumbled and read in class, just like the spit we consumed under the teacher's order to "read the text", futile and fruitless, but they are unforgettable cultural memories in life; the mother who dressed up at the parent-teacher conference was embarrassed when she was blamed by the teacher for her daughter's poor grades; the teacher blamed the parents after the teacher blamed the parents. Then he reprimanded the students for "wrongfully having a head, and having a debt and a master"... These are like our own childhood memories.

This film that moves us with details eventually returns to details. At the end of the film, in the sadness of Isa, who is alone in search of lambs, a song sounds in the wilderness, chanting the moon, the window, the poplar tree, the mother, the sheep... For these elements that make up his life, Isa had a fear of losing. Yet life is exactly that, the elements that make up our lives, sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting, in which we construct our own lives.

The first parting is the beginning of countless times.

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