In 1993, Ang Lee made the second part of the "Family Trilogy", "The Wedding Feast".
In the film, he borrowed the mouth of a foreigner and said a golden sentence that has been passed down to this day:
"You're seeing the results of five thousand years of sexual repression."
If you think about it, it's true.
Internationally, we have always appeared as "silent and mathematical geniuses".
But in fact?
In some places, when getting married, there is a custom of "climbing ash" (also known as: picking up ash).
This has long appeared in the scolding after Jiao Da was drunk in "Dream of the Red Chamber":
"I want to go to the ancestral hall to cry grandpa, where I hope to give birth to these beasts now!" Stealing dogs and playing chickens every day, climbing ashes, raising little uncles, what do I not know? ”
All of this makes one lament the diversity of species and the variability of the world.
Interestingly, in the same year that "The Wedding Feast" was made, there was a movie that also told the story of Chinese sexual repression.
Fireboat
I still remember that in "Eating Men and Women", the old Zhu who raised three girls actually suppressed his emotions and finally married Jinrong, who was about the same age as his daughters.
Also speaking of sexual repression, the Douban scores of Ang Lee's "Family Trilogy" are: "Pusher" 8.4 points, "Wedding Feast" 8.9 points, and "Diet Men and Women" 9.1 points.
The rating of "Fireship" is miserable, only a pitiful 5.8 points.
In fact, the film is not bad in both the director and the actors, and even has a business card:
The director is Huang Jianzhong, and the film stars Li Baotian, He Qing, Ye Xian'er, and Jiang Xiaohan.
Ye Xian'er, a famous star in Hong Kong, she is Ye Xian'er, who was bullied in place of Qiu Shuzhen in director Wang Jing's Hong Kong Strange Case, and Ye Xian'er, who played with Liang Simin in Can't Help But Love 2: Sudden Impulse directed by Zha Chuanyi.
Li Baotian and Ye Xian'er, this picture alone makes people feel strange. This kind of thing may only be able to be done by Huang Jianzhong.
Huang Jianzhong is one of the best directors of the fourth generation in China.
In the 1980s, he made works such as "Little Flower", "Ruyi" and "Good Family Woman", which made pioneering contributions to the innovation and development of Chinese film art in the new era.
In the 1990s, films such as "The Year of the Dragon Police Officer", "New Year", "My 1919", and "Rice" appeared in turn, showing Huang Jianzhong's strong artistic position and vitality.
After that, his "Fission of the Great Qin Empire", "Laughing Proud of the Rivers and Lakes" and "Song of the Great Wind" have become the classics in the hearts of a generation.
In his decades of film and television career, Huang Jian has been constantly thinking, and his focus in "Fireship" and "Good Family Women" is the sex of Chinese.
However, in the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese did not seem to be able to accept such direct innovation and bold breakthroughs on the surface, which is one of the reasons why "Fireboat" was extremely lowly evaluated.
Moreover, "Fireship" is still concerned with the sex of the elderly. In this way, the idea of "Fireship" is still quite advanced.
The film opens with a shock:
A group of little boys, covered in mud, were bowing down to a woman.
This woman was also covered in mud and kept saying that she was a bodhisattva.
To be honest, this opening is quite bold and avant-garde even today.
This scene alone already implies that this mad woman is a bodhisattva in the flesh of a universal being.
In "Miss Dionysus", the runaway woman played by Yin Ruzhen is also a bodhisattva in the flesh.
But the evaluation of both films is one heaven and one underground.
The reason is that "Fireship" made a good start, but it did not add more depth to this key "crazy woman".
She just appears as a symbol, without thickness. The focus of the film is on the old Ding Jiao, played by Li Baotian.
Old Ding lost his wife in his early years, and he had two daughters, the eldest had already started a family and moved out, and the younger was still a six- or seven-year-old female doll.
Usually, the father and daughter live on the boat.
What is more interesting is the setting of the "water" and "boat" imagery in "Fireboat".
These two images can be seen as a carrier of "desire" and "sexual desire".
And it was in this environment full of desire that Lao Ding suppressed himself for many years.
Think about it, every time the fishermen on the boat come back from fishing, the daughter-in-law of the family is ready to wash and wait for her husband.
Only Old Ding and no one waited, there was only a six- or seven-year-old girl in the family, which was much more humiliating.
For such a long time, no one had ever considered him or cared about him, and he would still be the object of teasing on weekdays.
Old Ding also thought about finding a wife again, but at that time, the eldest daughter was not yet married, afraid that the newly found stepmother would give them a look, so he sang a little song to Old Ding every day: "Little cabbage, yellow in the ground, two or three years old, no mother..."
Even a fool could hear the song, and Lao Ding had to give up. Usually, he can't get out of his suffocation, and he can only vent by gambling and drinking.
The film uses many shots to show Lao Ding's sexual repression, such as his silence when everyone is drinking, his embarrassment when other men and wives flirt, and when he catches a duck, he can have feelings for a wounded duck...
It can only be said that it is too miserable.
Later, the little girl always brought a crazy woman to the boat to play.
Although the crazy woman is crazy, she looks very watery, white and tender, and can attract people's likes. Old Ding's little daughter liked this crazy woman very much and always played with her on weekdays.
Playing and playing, Old Ding moved his mind. Yes, he seduced a mad woman.
However, like countless country anecdotes, the story of old Ding and the mad woman soon spread. People's discussion rippled in countless small boats, and finally reached the ears of the eldest daughter who returned to her mother's house.
The eldest daughter always felt that something would happen between her father and the crazy woman, and often told her sister not to take the crazy woman to the boat again, but there was still an accident.
There was no way, she had to take the mad woman's hand, send her home, and tell her family to take good care of her, but she could not be allowed to go to the boat again.
Here, the eldest daughter plays the role of a big parent, and her appearance immediately cut off the good deeds of Lao Ding.
Old Ding is annoyed, old Ding is stuffy, Old Ding can only swallow his breath and sing a little song in the middle of the night: "Three more in the dark of the moon, I am bare-knuckle thinking of my wife and tears do not dry ..."
Just when the family was nervous, the mad woman was found killed in the reeds.
Soon, Lao Ding was invited to tea by the police as a suspect, and he was also caught in the doom of public opinion.
Old Ding naturally did not kill the crazy woman, it was another old single stick in the neighboring village who did it.
Slandered, talked about, and the pain of losing a mad woman, for whatever reason, Old Ding was beaten hard enough.
Watching the old father sink down day by day, the eldest daughter took the initiative to stay and take care of her father.
Until this point, our suspicions about the eldest daughter have suddenly become certain:
She loves her father, so she prevents her father from marrying his daughter-in-law, from mad women from coming to the ship, and everything she does is to keep her father by her side.
"Fireship" has been in the movie at the end of the last century to show the Oedipal plot, which is very advanced, because to this day these things still grow wild in the corner.
Fireship is too blunt in replicating reality, predicting it. We can feel disgusted by those dark and ugly, but we cannot deny the existence of desire and evil in human nature.
In the end, Lao Ding committed suicide.
He set fire to his ship in the middle of the water, as if he had finally been incinerated and destroyed by his own fiery desires.
The fire burns the people in desire and eventually melts into the boundless water.
The water of desire is still there, living and waiting for its next prey.
In general, Lao Ding, played by Li Baotian, punctured the "sexual" embarrassment of the chinese elderly under the suppressed lust, and "Fireship" is far more than douban 5.8 points in terms of theme and quality.
But we ended up giving it a disgraceful score with our own votes, just as we would always turn our backs on the dirty stuff in our lives and pretend they didn't exist.
But they do exist, not only in the past, but now, and in the future, and they have accompanied the long history of human development.
Man's struggle with desire happens all the time.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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