Men who have reached a certain stage of life are most afraid of eight words: when people reach middle age, they will achieve nothing. Some people also say that the so-called forty is not confused, but the helplessness of a middle-aged man who has achieved nothing. Although there are still many people who can turn the clouds and rain and change their lives against the sky, they are rare after all. Most of them, probably like the father played by Gao Jie in "Back to My Home", are swallowed up by life, passion, and even their own lives.
As the title suggests, "Back to My Home", a short film of the "2017 Penguin Film and Television Qingmeng Director Support Plan", tells the story of the survival and current situation of two generations of father and son in an ordinary family: the son Bei drifted back to the film and television screenwriter repeatedly, in order to take care of the sick father lost and returned to his hometown; the father also wanted to break into the world to work for the family, but because of the change, he suffered the betrayal of his lover, and finally had to stay in school as a physical education teacher, enduring a lonely and lonely life.
The family is the theater, the family is life, the family is also a kind of reincarnation, and in this father and son, we seem to be able to see each other's past and future. When he was young, why didn't his father have the passion to fight the sword and go to the end of the world? In his conversation with his son, the father revealed that he wanted to rely on a fake marriage with a Taiwanese woman to get the opportunity to break in that unknown land, mix it up and then pick up the mother and son together. It's just that the window of opportunity is closed by fate, and he eventually loses in the struggle, and the defeat is a mess.
This may be the first half of the same life of many middle-aged men, fighting for life, busy with life, and then having lofty ideals, and eventually becoming the life of chai rice oil salt sauce vinegar tea. In "Back to My Home", we don't see the spirit of my father when he was young, but only his blandness, introversion, vicissitudes and poor expression.
The son who has not returned home for a long time suddenly appeared in front of him, and the father did not express too much exaggerated emotions, just like seeing an old friend, complaining about "how to come back and not saying a word"; talking to the son about his illness, calmly as if the protagonist of the topic was someone else; walking at the end of life, with the son's questioning to recall the past, it was only a light three words and two sentences, making a footnote to his life.
Although it is a young director's work, "Back to My Home" still invites Gao Jie, a powerful actor who has won the Golden Bell Award, to play the father of this man who has achieved nothing in middle age in the short film. Many young mainland audiences know Gao Jie because he starred as the black boss in Ning Hao's "Crazy Racing", and they did not know that this Hou Xiaoxian's royal actor can almost be regarded as a "black boss professional household".
Since 1990, he played the gang boss Dalin in the action comedy movie "Burning Island" starring Jackie Chan, and he has played gangster roles in many film and television works such as "Young Man, Anla", "Heaven's Mouth", "The More Tickles the More The 囧人", "Before Dawn" and so on. Hou Xiaoxian also praised the gangster boss portrayed by Gao Jie as a "performance without traces", and the natural nature of his natural expression in his inner drama is precisely his biggest feature.
In "Back to My Home", Gao Jie's "performance without traces" is a middle-aged man who has reached the end of his life, performing a sense of realism with strength and temperature. In the kitchen, his father urges his son, who has not returned home for a long time, to take a bath; in the living room, he and his son sit on the sofa to eat noodles, watching the replay of the ball game, while talking casually about each other's lives; on the way home, hearing a familiar and sad song on the radio, he can't help but cry and choke. In these details full of the smell of life, Gao Jie portrayed a father character who is light but has an aftertaste in front of the audience.
The most prosaic but sincere in the world, the father played by Gao Jie is both a father who has achieved nothing and a father who loves. In this fatherly role, it hurts and wants to be embraced.