Xiao Wu's film evaluation

The legendary success of the film Xiao Wu in Berlin made its director, as a representative of China's new films, attract the attention of the international film industry. Greg praised Jia as "the lightning and dazzling light of hope for Asian films". More importantly, a boundary marker has been erected to mark the yesterday and today of China films. For many years, even in the film history of China, no film has so truly expressed the breath of China people.

Xiao Wu's beginning and end are all scans of people coming and going in the market. Jia later liked it this way: a large number of long shots, middle scenes, distant views and group images made Xiao Wu a special work, which concentrated on shaping a three-dimensional person. Compared with the ambition of other works, it can be said that it has no distractions; It often stops to capture the dull, embarrassed and numb expressions of characters, just like an anthropological study.

However, Xiaowu is still just a pawn in the narrative. The friends, women and family he contacted, although not fully stretched, have woven a personal network. In a sense, Fenyang is still Fei Xiaotong's "acquaintance society". Although Xiaowu was alienated from this network because of his identity as a thief (he was even turned away from his friend Xiao Yong's wedding), he still kept in frequent contact with this network. As Chabrol said, people in small cities know each other and people will look at you more carefully. You should consider your own existence as well as the people around you. From the perspective of facing human nature, in contrast, there are too many lonely people in big cities, which creates obstacles in interpersonal communication, thus covering up many topics. So the new wave director has been insisting on looking for stories outside Paris. So is Jia.

First of all, Xiaowu is not embarrassed as a thief. Xiao Yong established a friendship with him as a pickpocket. He can also use this identity to help others or show his control. But when he was wandering in the street, something new was entering the town: Xiao Yong smuggled cigarettes and opened a karaoke bar, becoming an entrepreneur and a model worker; Hu Meimei, who came out of Beijing to pursue her dream of a star, stayed here and became a prostitute. The second brother married a city dweller, and the family needed to raise money to save face ... Xiaowu was finally abandoned by these new interpersonal entanglements.

However, the emotional impact of the film is not some kind of sympathy or anger (compared with the sensational director China, Jia doesn't express "sympathy" explicitly, but just observes), but an excellent and accurate capture of small-town life: indifferent people waiting at the roadside, the broadcast of street propaganda policies, dimly lit billiard rooms, video halls that constantly broadcast gun battles, TV stations that provide song-ordering services, especially many young people who come out of small cities. The scenes in the movie are so familiar and real that almost none of them are far-fetched and abrupt. It is not the embodiment of an idea, but a cold existence, a shadow forgotten by many people in their hometown, and it is still staged in the most vast area of China. I can't get tired of watching this exquisite and smooth record, so Xiaowu (actor Wang Hongwei, who already has the reddest face) is naturally wrapped in it. "It's like a rope immersed in oil. You only want to use part of it, but the whole rope may be soaked "(Hou Xiaoxian).

In the ruin of the environment, Xiaowu's dull and boring expression conveyed the temperament of the small town most intuitively. There is a scene where he plays with a friend and runs after him, just like the daily life when he was a child: running from one end of the street to the other, coming back next time, digging out the house from the wall, and then turning in, the lens accumulates like a circle that can't run out. But Xiaowu was impatient to run. Under the thick black frame, he almost always squints, making you forget that he is not much bigger than the protagonist in Ren Xiaoyao.

Jia also didn't explain the thief's motive. This is the requirement of popular drama. What he wants to present is a state of existence, countless lifeless fragments in a small town. In "Platform", everyone asked Zhang Jun who came back from Guangzhou, "What's so good about the world of flowers and flowers?" He replied that "people there are very busy": indeed, doing nothing is the most deadly place in small town life. Behind the plain characters, pop songs implicitly reveal some secrets, which is one of the few ways for Xiaowu to express his feelings, although most of them are audio-visual confrontation, which is a kind of irony: when Xiaowu learned from the police that Xiaoyong was going to get married and proposed to him, Tu Honggang's Farewell My Concubine screamed in the background; In the karaoke room, Hu Meimei brought a small Wudang tycoon to her side and sang "Bold and Beautiful". The illusory heroic dream wanders on the dignity of a humble person; At weddings and funerals, on the streets, in dance halls, and on TV, "Heart Rain", which overflows and exaggerates feelings, rings again and again in alienated, indifferent and lonely occasions.

Xiaowu is such a representative social individual. In the face of the impact of social transformation on all aspects of the small town, Xiaowu did not understand, did not adapt, or was reluctant; Alone outside the group, he still treats and deals with people and things around him in the old-fashioned way, and corresponds to the changes in the world with his own normality. It is true that social progress has made people have more and more money in their pockets, and old lifestyles and values have begun to change. The value system based on money has completely occupied people's hearts. It is in this change that a generation began the process of separation and integration. Xiaowu obviously belongs to the free crowd. He quarreled with his former "comrades-in-arms"-because he developed, he needed to forget his disgraceful past and maintain his dignity; Parting with her lover-she chose the destination of money; Alienation from parents-money relationship permeates the family, not the affection. As a result, Xiaowu was depressed, hesitant, lonely, contradictory and confused, and then, in a way of self-exile, he was unable to resist this society.

Finally, talk about performance. Jia used all non-professional actors here, and created an image world that is extremely close to reality with their true colors. There is no doubt that he succeeded. The characters in the film are all flesh and blood, authentic dialects, unpretentious clothes, wooden expressions and slow movements. You can't blame any of their actions, because they are themselves, without patterns and routines, just like the film type created by Jia here.

Jia is a persistent director, and the content expressed in Xiao Wu has appeared many times in his later films. From Platform to Ren Xiaoyao, from The World to The Good Man of Three Gorges, Jia perfected his small-town movies and his historical fables step by step.

In Xiao Wu, Jia objectively expressed all the characters and events he showed, without deliberately expressing his subjective emotions. Only in this series of blows and wandering can we feel Jia's helplessness and regret for Xiaowu. Perhaps this is also Jia's attitude towards today's social form! Xiaowu, with its unique spiritual core, has overlapped a series of destinies and contradictions in the process of social modernization in China, and is also faced with the choice of changing and unchanging, the change of values, and the mental state of hesitation and confusion. Jia constructs the social history of China from the perspective of images in his unique way, which is the most prominent place where he is ahead of the sixth generation directors.

The environmental shaping in Xiao Wu truly reflects Jia's purpose of restoring life and reproducing life. The full introduction of real-life shooting, long lens and natural sound, plus the camera position is always equal to the human eye, and there is no application of special effects lens, so that the audience can truly witness what is happening in front of them as if they were there. In addition, there is no dramatic plot structure, real-life scenes emerge in the audience's mind, reality collides with imagination, and images overlap with life, giving the audience a unique artistic enjoyment and emotional catharsis.