The movie If Love

If Love is a love blockbuster directed by the famous director Chen Kexin. This is a contemporary musical film with rich plots, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhou Xun, Jacky Cheung and other big-name stars. Characters are flesh and blood. The works are full of popular trends without losing intoxicating feelings. In the form of musical, the film reproduces an eternal theme of love and hate with colorful dance designs and ever-changing lingering tunes, and shows the cruel reality of the wandering dreams of contemporary China art youth, especially the "drifting north" group. New york's Time magazine called the film "Moulin Rouge" in China.

The story tells that Nie Wen, an art film director, shot a large-scale musical in Shanghai, starring his longtime girlfriend Sun Na and Lin Jiandong from Hongkong. Unexpectedly, Sun Na and Lin Jiandong were old lovers ten years ago. In those days, Sun Na was born poor, but he had great ambitions. In order to survive and succeed, she did whatever it took to become a big star that everyone admired. After becoming famous, she tried to forget the past and deny all traces of time. However, fate played a trick on people. Ten years later, two important men in her life appeared at the same time-a lover who fell in love ten years ago, a director student who lost the election and turned into a big star, Lin Jiandong, and a famous gold medal director and her boyfriend Nie Wen. More dramatically, three people are going to perform a play together, but the plot and fate are strikingly similar. Facing the former lover and today's lover, Su Na was lost in the choice.

As a musical film, the director has well integrated western cultural elements and China's traditional aesthetic perspective, and made many beneficial explorations in the aspects of story connotation, narrative form, song and dance application, picture sound and so on. The success of the whole film highlights the director's comprehensive ability to control the image language. Usually, musical films are superficial in genre films, but Chen Kexin has extended films to many levels. There is no fairy-tale happy ending in the film, and no character can get rid of grief. This design may be a challenge for European and American audiences. At the same time, the plot of the film is also intertwined. Although it is not complicated, it is scattered, and the director handles it compactly and powerfully, and the connection is smooth. The whole story is simple, but the narrative form is very complicated. In fact, it is "a play in a play." Compared with reality, it is two time and space, and there is time and space ten years ago. The drama in the play is the same as the reality, so these three time and space have an intersection. However, the organization of the director is very clear. The line of reality goes forward, so does the line of memory, and the line of singing and dancing is interspersed among them, which is responsible for explaining the line of memory and rendering reality-these are put together on the screen, infiltrating and infecting each other, seemingly real, but actually illusory. The whole film is full of memories, reality and staggered stages. With the encounters, memories, rejection and jealousy of the characters in the play, the film language shows the charm different from any other art. In a film full of MTV clips and staggered time and space, it needs strong control ability to highlight the core, which is the direct embodiment of Chen Kexin's director level.

The shots used in the film are excellent. This film has two of the strongest photographers in Asia, Bao He, who share the lens process and each has wonderful and unique images. Bao is in charge of Baroque Hotel and Shanghai Bund from an eager and romantic perspective, which makes the picture full of bright green, blue and brown. As for Du Kefeng, the memory of Sun Na and Lin Jiandong gives a gloomy and cold impression. The underwater shot, running shot and the shot in the barrier isolation state of the whole movie are very effective. The characters played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Zhou Xun saw him and ordered him not to send him or see him. When she found him peeking through the window, she gave him a good kick and ran away. The lens shows the feelings of lonely teenagers through the glass, which is very vivid and true. Sun Na walked forward, and the camera followed a few steps. Then, contrary to the usual practice, the camera suddenly zoomed away in the opposite direction, full of dreams. Such rational lens processing can make people feel the sadness of the left-behind people more than the subjective lens that keeps shooting all the way. This depiction of objective distance also vividly reflects the psychological distance of the characters, which is gripping and heartbreaking. There is also a time-space overlapping scene in If Love, which is very charming. That's (Lin) and Zhou Xun (Sun) hugging each other in the model room. At this time, the screen in front of them just plays the samples of hugs on the glacier, just like their memories. The camera slowly pulls open, as if they can clearly see their memories, and reality and surrealism are integrated.

In terms of song and dance creativity, the director's handling of song and dance performances is also simple and not complicated, and the repertoire is well integrated with the artistic conception of men and women in the play. Strengthened the emotional concentration of the film. In the song and dance part of "If Love", the music rhythm becomes the biggest basis for editing. In addition, the use of various narrative montages has applied the ideographic function of song and dance to the extreme. The basis of lens fusion is no longer the continuity of time and space, but the consistency of emotions. Although the plot of "If Love" is not touching, the song and dance jokes set off the mood of the whole movie. In this sense, "If Love" can be described as an inch of singing and dancing. The songs interspersed in the film are full of exotic feelings. Farah khan, a top Indian choreographer, led China actors and a number of Hollywood dancers to form dance steps. At the same time, Chen Kexin decorated the song and dance scenes with aerobics, cartilage skills, fire-breathing people, trapeze artists, clowns and dwarfs. But the song and dance scenes in the film are actually just used to cover up the complicated emotional relationship behind the camera. Chen Kexin skillfully assigned dynamic song and dance scenes to promote the interactive escalation of the love crisis between people in the play, and to interpret the love story of "Clouds in Beijing" by Sun Na and Lin Jiandong.

It should be said that Chen Kexin tried to find some bright colors from the difficult and bleak real life. He led the audience's eyes from real life to the simple and beautiful memories and the surrealism reshaped by art, and at the same time, he calmly watched what was happening. He gave consideration to memory, reality and surrealism, and even revised it constantly, conveying a kind of thinking intention and an effort to gain insight into his own existence. There is always a chance to love in one's life, although sometimes it is uncertain. We will have a handsome and melancholy man in our hearts, and we will also have a kind, mature and talented Nie Wen in our hearts. The beautiful story of the princess and the prince is staged in our hearts, but it can't hide Sun Na's impetuous and pitiful scheming. Perhaps, this movie is to tell us how to love, how to cherish and how to recall.