Text\Blue Shell
Youth and nostalgia are the eternal themes of art, from the movie "To Youth" to "Partners", it seems that the collective nostalgia of the post-80s generation has become an important social culture and consumption phenomenon at present.
The adaptation of the novel by French girl writer Françoise Sagan, and the one-man show "Hello, Sorrow" played by Huang Xiangli, are essentially similar themes in my opinion.
The protagonist of the novel, the young girl Cecil, is romantic and uninhibited, and lives a ridiculous life with her father, who is also a prodigal son, and is unwilling to put her life into a formal track. To this end, she tried to obstruct the marriage of raymond, her widower's father, and his girlfriend Anna.
Because, in Cecil's eyes, Anna is a decent, docile woman, once she enters the family life, not only Raymond's father has to be controlled by her, but also Cecil's uninhibited lifestyle must also change, she has to follow Anna's cultivation plan, to be a good girl.
So Cecil and her boyfriend she had just met, and Elsa, a woman her father had known earlier, worked out a trick together. The ruse actually succeeded, and the wandering Raymond once snubbed Anna again, and renewed his old love with the younger and more debauched Elsa.
However, to Cecil's surprise, this nonsense eventually led to Anna's mental trance, a car accident, and a cliff of death...
In 100 minutes, Huang Xiangli single-handedly expressed the language, mentality, personality, etc. of the five characters in the story with great precision. In particular, the image of Cécille, the fallen girl in "Hello, Sorrow", perfectly interprets the image of the "rebellious" French youth of the post-war generation.
At the end of the story, when it is learned that Anna died in a car accident because of her own tricks, Cecil did not have any remorse, but only felt a little sadness, this cold and rebellious girl image, people chilled.
The youth in "Hello, Sorrow" is not beautiful, on the contrary, it is cruel. But, like all nostalgic literature that celebrates youth, nostalgia is not because it was once better, but simply because it was once more youthful.
However, from a very personal point of view, there is a huge gap between the "youth" in many domestic and foreign youth films, including "Hello, Sorrow", and my expectations for "youth".
In my opinion, youth should be a period of curiosity, bravery, exploration, and fearlessness, with some kind of advanced exploration of the nature of thought and life. When we recall our youth, there should be a sense of frivolity floating above the dullness of the real adult world, transparent and pure.
Neither is it like many domestic movies that mistakenly think that youth is playing tricks in college dormitories, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, pretending to chase girls, nor running to a strange place to look at the scenery and take photos to send circles of friends, youth should be a kind of savage and noble thing.
And the "youth" in "Hello, Sorrow" made me see only barbarism, but not nobility.
Anna in Hello, Sorrow is an elegant and decent woman. She is independent, indifferent, heavy-handed, intelligent and self-loving, she believes in an orderly world, and she strives to maintain a harmonious and peaceful life with the energy field emanating from her body. Cecil, the rebellious girl and his bohemian father, are a pair of cynical strangers.
In this story, Anna actually represents some kind of delicate power, and Cecil and her boyfriend, his bastard father, and the stupid Elsa are another barbaric but powerful force. In the end it was Anna who died, in a sense, a delicate force that was defeated by a savage force. This real society in which human beings live is actually very similar.
"One of us lived like a widower and the other like an orphan girl for a month, closed the door, and had dinner and lunch together. We sometimes talk a little bit about Anna: 'Do you remember that day..."We talk about these things carefully, with our eyes open, for fear of upsetting the other person, or of which one of them suddenly thinks of something that cannot be remedied. This mutual caution, mutual stability, is compensated. So we are soon able to talk about Anna in a normal tone, like a man with whom we have lived happily but who has been called by God. I don't say chance, I say God, but we don't believe in God. On this occasion it is still a blessing to believe. "
For Anna's death, Cecil and her father, a strange couple, have no sadness, no self-blame, and don't even feel that they have done anything wrong.
Talking about this, they just feel a little sad, and even regard it as a normal state of youth, and then they continue to be drunk and obsessed, continue to live that kind of debauchery and indulgence, and even pretend to be literary and artistic, "Hello, sorrow."
This may be a certain state of The French post-war youth, bored, nihilistic, anesthetized by some kind of imaginary "cool" life, hippie life, and insensitive to the outside real world.
When I finally saw Miss Huang Xiangli's innocent, understated demeanor and spat out the sentence "Hello, sad", I seemed to see the beautiful but cruel thing on Sagan's body, such a youth, it was really a bit free.