Text/Uncle Rain
It is really rare to be able to depict the delicate growth process of women from the perspective of the family.
Zheng Xiuwen starred in "The Taste of Peppercorns", full of women's willingness to return to the family, even if they are separated by a generation gap between them, but under the entanglement of each other's feelings, they still hope to experience the warmth of the family.
The film is adapted from the famous Hong Kong female writer Zhang Xiaoxian's "My Love Is So Spicy", which opens with the death of her father, telling the story of three daughters from different regions, who know each other on the funeral, and then get acquainted with the hot pot restaurant opened by their father before they died. For the three sisters, the hot pot restaurant is a legacy left by their father, but it is a package in their hearts for them.
However, it is precisely because the hot pot restaurant has found memories that once belonged to them. The hot pot restaurant is like its past self, and in the process of continuous growth, it has reached a reconciliation with itself. For them, there is not only a bond between blood relations, but also a common encounter faced by emotions.
The work is slightly monotonous from the development of the overall story, but its style is very delicate. There is a kind of sigh of five tastes and miscellaneous tastes for life. This also echoes the title of the film "The Taste of Peppercorns", peppercorns, which are blue before they ripen, always have a hemp taste that is difficult to enter. After ripening, the peppercorn is red, and its biggest feature is that it is spicy enough. However, when placed in the pot with other ingredients, it is an indescribable hot pot flavor.
As such, the film begins with a hot pot restaurant, through the sudden death of their father, leaving them with incurable wounds, and also a hot pot restaurant, allowing the three sisters to reconcile from their new and past selves.
As the saying goes, "If life is only like the first sight, why should we endure the heartache of people walking in tea and cold.". Life is full of different flavors because of parting, for their father, tossing and turning between three women, separating again and again, and finally can only live in a hot pot restaurant to reminisce about the past.
The story of "The Taste of Pepper" is about three children who grew up in a single-parent family. Their father, Xia Liang, connected them all together. Because of his "flower heart", the three daughters lacked fatherly love from an early age. From an early age, he has left scars on his soul.
The eldest daughter, Xia Rushu (Cheng Xiuwen), is his first daughter born in Hong Kong in the 1970s.
The second daughter, Xia Ruzhi (Lai Yayan), is the second daughter he gave birth to in Taipei in the 1980s when she fell in love with her predecessor Zhang Yaling (Liu Ruiqi).
The third daughter, Xia Ruo (Li Xiaofeng), is the third daughter born after returning to the mainland in the 90s.
A sad past, sinking and falling between each other's memories. Once her father, who started a family in Hong Kong and gave birth to Rushu, went to Hong Kong without saying goodbye, for her, even if she returned after many years due to her mother's critical illness, she did not mention the past after the separation, and she and her two sisters.
Because of this, it has become a lingering entanglement for her.
In contrast, Ruzhi was also abandoned by her father, after which her mother married another man. However, despite this, he did not sever his relationship with his biological father, and often came to Hong Kong from Taipei. Her father also became her lingering shadow.
If, from an early age, it was in a single-parent family, and I grew up with my grandmother. For her, what is missing is also the father's love.
Between them is like the green color of peppercorns, tender green, shy but faintly full of a hint of numbness. Their father, intoxicated, anesthetized by desire, completely forgetting the pain it had caused.
This taste, green astringency makes people full of possessive desire. As everyone knows, it is the most bitter, the most spicy, the most numb taste, it does not have the transparent spicy of red, there is no taste after the final combination with other ingredients, some are just monotonous, immature hemp taste.
The smell of hemp represents their original father, who is greedy and anesthetizes them.
In the world of feelings, it is always full of love and being loved, hurting and being hurt. It has its own temperature, as hot as fire.
For the mother of the three sisters, this was not the case. Fate-like encounters to the end of sincere love, thick as water. But it is often complicated by the intervention of another person.
And as they grow up in their original families, this influence lingers in their minds like a kind of consciousness. On the one hand, Ru Shu is eager to get her father's attention, and on the other hand, she has always been worried about the shadow of abandoning their mother and daughter in childhood.
For her, she always wanted to know more about her father's experience before he died. But for her father's silence, for him to be sick and hospitalized, but not to mention a word to herself, but also prompted her to want to know more.
For Ru zhi, she seems to be strong on the outside, and has been making billiards her hobby since she was a child, which has not been understood by her mother, but the encouragement of her biological father has made her persist. Even if she can't go to the field to watch him play in person, watching her play in front of the TV screen is still the biggest encouragement in her heart. It is precisely in this way that it has become the psychological backing for her to go on.
In contrast, if as the youngest daughter of one, not only lively, but also young and fashionable. Lack of fatherly love since childhood, for her, unlike her two older sisters, who is the true love of her father. In her heart, she had always thought that she had never entered her father's heart, let alone cared.
The three sisters seem to be concernless on the surface, but in fact they are full of their father's back. Or because of companionship, or because of encouragement, or because of the heart. Both illustrate that in each other's feelings, the emotional bondage like a pepper.
This is the spicy taste when the peppercorns are really ripe, on the one hand, they show themselves with unique personalities, and on the other hand, they do not want to be ignored. Therefore, they all have their own spicy taste.
This is the beginning of a kind of self-knowledge, and it is more important to find the true self, and it is also an awakening of independent consciousness.
Compared with simple peppercorns, the taste of hot pot is more complex than that of peppercorns, and each of the ingredients is indispensable.
It mixes a variety of ingredients, in addition to peppercorns, as well as sake, and then cooks it into a one-pot dish. This is like a scar under the precipitation of time, the original scar has become a lingering shadow, can only adapt to it.
This is also the emotional entanglement between the three sisters. The pain that has been caused can only be compensated for by the last bit. Maybe they used to fight for more love for each other, but with the passage of time, they are also reconciling with their past selves a little bit.
The reconciliation between them, like inadvertently flipping through the ledger left by their former father, can find their own memories on it.
Also like the three sisters, from the first acquaintance in the hot pot restaurant, to a hot pot restaurant, and finally to find their own memories. It's all about staying in their unique flavor.
This taste is like a life. It's only when you've really taken some detours that you'll suddenly realize. The first encounter is a kind of ignorance, but when it is really peeled off, you will experience the real temperature.
Perhaps, this is it, inadvertently, to find the secret recipe of the unique. Like the secret recipe of hot pot that has always been difficult to find, it is not so much a secret recipe as boiling your memories into a hot pot dish.