Mirror flowers and water moons, like a dream, can see but can not grasp, this is the aesthetics of Japanese culture.
Japanese people feel that the most beautiful moment of cherry blossoms is the moment when they are blown around by the wind, and when they are most beautiful, they are broken, which is another sense of eternal existence.
This is not traditional romanticism, but the worship of sorrow, full of rich loneliness and imperfection. A bit like the blank space in Chinese landscape paintings, it always has a long afterglow and is still unfinished.
Speaking of this, I have to mention the Japanese director Shunji Iwai, many Chinese audiences have the impression of him from the movie "Love Letter", the ultimate quiet literature, after watching it, you will even feel that what you are watching is not a movie, but just a fading special effect.
This pure love film, which represents Japanese aesthetics, has become an insurmountable classic in the minds of the entire Asian teenager, and it has also made Shunji Iwai a god, who uses the most prosaic lens to create the warmest story, which is a unique youth.
The film begins with a third-anniversary death, after the unexpected death of the male protagonist Fujii, his fiancée can not get out of the thought of him, so he writes a letter and sends it to Fujii's home when he was young. Unexpectedly, this letter, which was supposed to be sent to heaven, was actually received by a man named Fujii Shu.
The girl with the same name and surname is a classmate of the teenager Fujii, so the story unfolds in this letter between you and me.
Probably all girls have fantasized that the uniformed teenager has the most handsome side face and the most gentle smile. Takashi Kashiwara, who plays the teenager Fujii Tree, is known as the last beautiful teenager of the 20th century, when he holds a book against the windowsill, the wind blows the curtains through his hair, and the slightly raised eyes are slightly dazed, and the deer are generally overwhelmed.
This is a picture that can still make hundreds of millions of young girls move whenever you think of it no matter how many years have passed. However, the director did not have much pity for him, and still cruelly arranged the death of Fujii Tree.
The young fujii tree and the young fujii tree, young but have not had time to express, all the ignorant love is in the heart, blooming their own rose. It is like a teenager who must die in the story of Shunji Iwai and become an eternal flower that will never wither.
Japanese people have unimaginable attachment to describing "death", but their view of life and death does not seem to have too much grief, which is why many people do not shed tears after reading "Love Letters", and even feel some healing.
The picture and music are beautiful, when the heroine walks far alone in the barren snow, the long shot pulls out a big vision. Snowflakes fell, and her back looked particularly long.
The phrase "How are you?" I'm fine" may sound meaningless, but it is full of the most simple truth in the world, that is: learn to reconcile with death.
In 2018, "Hello, Zhihua" was released in China, and the audience flocked to it, half of it was directed at Zhou Gongzi, half at Shunji Iwai, and everyone couldn't wait to see how a Japanese director could make a literary and art film starring all Chinese actors.
For Shunji Iwai, the person who likes it likes it likes it, and the person who doesn't like it can't understand what he's talking about. At the beginning of the release, "Hello, Zhihua" was described by many viewers as "a love triangle", which inevitably made people laugh a little.
"Hello, Zhihua" and "Love Letter" have many similarities, such as the sentence "How are you, I am good", such as the interlacing of the timeline as if two parallel time and space, like fate should be so, the darkness has its own destiny, but at a certain moment people suddenly realized, the original missed so many things.
Zhou Xun's face and voice are very suitable to appear in this movie, and she fits as well as if she grew out of this movie. Too bland, too untringtive, bland to realize that this movie is about a love affair that spanned so many years, and it is the pain and triviality caused by the emotional dislocation that should be difficult to reconcile.
However, I feel that this should be the case, because time should bring people peace.
"Hello, Zhihua" is not a typical pure love film, it has human coarseness, there is realistic ugliness, there are parents short, there are things that are not human, but Iwai Shunji can intelligently polish the essence from it, so that each character becomes logical.
If "Love Letters" is likened to a 20-year-old girl who does not understand the world, then "Hello, Zhihua" is What Jia Baoyu calls "married women". It has an irreconcilable harmony between China and Japan.
Good literary and artistic films are like the warm sun in winter, which looks faint, but sprinkled on the body is warm.
Shunji Iwai's works always have a sense of alienation, or loneliness, and each character is like an independent individual, and one person can complete a story.
Extremely slow narrative, not grand enough, not even undulating, impatient people will be able to see the past asleep, to see Iwai Shunji, requires a strong ability to empathize.
Shunji Iwai once said in response to a reporter's question that giving everyone a kind of touch is his starting point all the time. Yes, to give everyone the touch they want, to give everyone a different feeling, not to establish a connection with the world, is Iwai Shunji's unique sense of alienation.
Just like at the end of "April Story", the heroine stands under a cherry blossom tree, and the cherry blossoms fall from the top of her head, and she lowers her head and shakes the petals that fall on her.
Cherry blossoms, love and life, withering at the most beautiful moment, although helpless, but forever frozen. Dreams always have to wake up, the end of the story is always a person, and Shunji Iwai's alienated products are always hot in the end.
Maybe some people can't understand Shunji Iwai in their lifetime, but it doesn't matter, watching movies is just to watch a good story, don't have to speculate repeatedly, and force yourself to learn something, which is not Iwai Shunji's intention.
As long as we can feel the fleeting beauty, the dream-like sadness of Nanke, the pure and delicate emotion, for us, it is enough to read Shunji Iwai.