A person standing on a skyscraper tens of stories high overlooking, the whole city will become a dense cement forest, the left is the building, the right is still the building, look at it for a long time, will think that the world only buildings. In 1994, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-ming brought the story between people and buildings to the screen in a movie called "Long Live Love."
Cai Liang's films do not have obviously intense story conflicts, and all the story rhythms are slow and dull, and the tones are oppressive and gray. There is very little dialogue between the characters, and the whole plot is driven by action. In Cai's films, we can hardly hear the bright soundtrack, because he rarely chooses a dedicated soundtrack. The characters in the film are always alone, like isolated islands.
But what is certain is that despite the lack of a strong visual impact, Cai Liangming still gives the audience a wealth of gifts in the film, for example, we can often see the exquisite composition and bold imagination in his films, through the holes, passages, rivers in the film... We can explore director Cai Liangming's presentation of the most subtle corners of people's hearts.
If you want to summarize the plot of "Long Live Love", it can be roughly described as follows:
Miss Lin is a sales lady who owns a lot of houses, unfortunately, she owns someone else's house. The only thing that could help her relax was to go into an empty room and rest and sleep in a strange, cold bed. During the day, advertisements are posted everywhere to call and sell the house.
Xiao Kang also has a lot of houses belonging to others, they are called "Na Bone Tower" (urn), Xiao Kang gives people a depressed feeling as soon as he appears, perhaps related to his profession, he is more marginal and lonely than Miss Lin. When he picked up the knife three times and was ready to cut his wrist, he was eventually interrupted. As a result, Xiao Kang fell into chaos and confusion.
Ah Rong is the most dashing of the three people, he is young and handsome, has a sense of "prodigal son", he is also the only one of the three people who owns a "house", his house is a car. The car represents a kind of uncertainty, so Ah Rong itself also represents a kind of uncertainty, just like many urban youth who come and go.
Such three people live in the same room, Kobayashi and Ah Rong have occasional relationships, and their relationship is only like that. Xiao Kang hid under their bed to eavesdrop on those sexy sounds, until one day, he approached the sleeping Ah Rong and understood his heart's direction.
In fact, all the introductions are somewhat stretched for the movie "Long Live Love", because we can't summarize the specific storyline from Cai Liangliang's film, and the whole movie seems to be loose, but it is actually airtight. Loose is the pure lust relationship between the body and the body, and what is airtight is the painting between the soul and the soul.
Once watched an interview, the reporter asked Cai Mingliang, why is it always in the movie in a very intense way to deal with different bodies?
For this question, Cai Liangming replied: "When I was young, I was very estranged from my body, and my memory was not to hug my family, and I would not hold hands. For as long as I can remember, my mother never hugged me. Because I was brought to the fourth grade by my grandfather when I was a child, my body was very sensitive and mysterious to me. Once when I was a kid I went back to live with my mom, and one day I slept in her room, and she didn't know, and came in to change clothes. I was scared when I saw my mother changing clothes, and suddenly I was scared, as if I had done something wrong. But as we grow up, I think there are some barriers that start directly from the body, and we don't develop the normal growth of the body. So, instead, you're obsessed with these things. I feel that all my work, starting with "Teenage Nak", I can't help but think about family, family, and then go back to the body and look at this matter from a different perspective. A lot of Greek tragic stuff touches on this because it's a fundamental personal problem. ”
In Cai Liangliang's "infatuation", the body has less of a taste of lust in his films and more of a symbol-like reference. Because of this, Cai Liangming is always between the praise and criticism of public opinion. Fortunately, he didn't care much about what other people thought, and kept showing his list of themes: relationships, spiritual alienation, family, love, the decadent landscapes and deformed emotions of the city. All these consistent themes constitute Cai Liang's artistic landscape.
In "Long Live Love", Cai Liangming gave a different meaning to the building, or to give a different meaning to the house. Everyone is isolated, intimate and distant relationships, spiritual loneliness and the contradiction of longing for love, etc. make this film form a strong tension. The movie called "Long Live Love" seems to be somewhat ironic, but it is precisely because of this strong irony that people are obviously aware of the decadence and pathology in Cai Liangliang's films.
Cai Liangming often compares himself to the little boy Antoine in "Four Hundred Blows", and he thinks that he is only used to surviving in urban space, rather than dealing with people, so in his films, the relationship between people and cities is far more intimate than the relationship between people and people. Therefore, we can often see in Cai Liangliang's films that men and women after the clouds and rain fall into great emptiness and loneliness, for example, Miss Lin cries in the wilderness.
After the end of the movie, everything is like yesterday, Miss Lin continues to sell the house, Xiao Kang continues to sell the "Na Bone Tower", Ah Rong continues his prodigal son life, all the encounters and intimate contacts are like throwing a stone in the deep river, after a few faint ripples, the tranquility is restored. Lonely is still lonely, lonely is still lonely, confused is still confused, this is probably the "curse" of industrial society.