Seeking the film review of "Spring is bursting"

The font used in the title of the film "Spring is bursting" is rarely used in the title text of books and periodicals now. The font is reminiscent of the Chinese characters in the headlines of the old China "gossip" tabloids, revealing a little frivolous and indecent. In fact, the film really has nothing to do with "the sudden release of spring" We don't know the mystery of the author, but there must be some viewers who think they have been cheated, and some people feel sick.

Love and friendship

Two men in bed, a jaw-dropping opening. At first, the audience's sexual morality was shocked by Another World. However, on the whole, this film is not intended to provide a strange homosexual landscape for heterosexuals sitting in a dark audience. They will understand later that the love story of two men was full of joys and sorrows. How is this different from your own love experience between men and women? There is no doubt about the "legitimacy" of homosexuality in the film. The "negative" characters in the story are absent, and the troubles of two men's love come from their own hearts (they are not harmonious), not the outside world (homosexuals may always be treated differently in this world). A homosexual story arranged by heterosexuals, but the real narrator is hidden and replaced by a prominent homosexual and quasi-homosexual narrator. The narrative identity is replaced by body double Tree, which makes the embarrassing situation of binary opposition (homosexuality versus heterosexuality) cleverly erased, so the story can move forward without the anxiety (contradiction) caused by the pressure from heterosexuality. In the final analysis, love is between two people, gay love, which is said in the movie, isn't it? Those touching love films always focus on developing the territory between two people. The charm of Li Yaohui and He Baorong's unusual love lies in the unusual feeling-sweet, noisy and on-off. If He Baorong were a woman, it would be a standard love story. When a love ends, should we analyze the reasons as people usually do? We can see that even the reasons for breaking up are standard: Li Yaohui left He Baorong because the former couldn't stand the latter's stubbornness, laziness or easy virtue. Finally, He Baorong regretted it, but Li Yaohui ignored it. This is the end of a standard love tragedy.

When we say it's "standard", we mean that the film shows those * * * things in people's love experiences (at least many love films say so). However, this movie is really a little different for men. When love is carried out between two people with the same body and temperament (orthodox love is naturally generated between the yin and yang of body and spirit), it can't help but shine in generate. We can see that Li Yaohui appropriately possesses a kind of male generosity, while He Baorong inappropriately lacks a kind of female gentleness. When jealousy spreads from one great man to another, it has some special ornamental value.

The third person, Xiao Zhang, is a person standing at the critical point. He likes girls with deep voices, not coquettish ones. After he knew that Li Yaohui was gay, he further took the initiative to associate with him. He left home because he couldn't solve a problem (this is a terrible question of whether I like men or women). He had an ambiguous physical contact with Li Yaohui while playing football in the street. The director arranged for a man with ambiguous sexual orientation to be sandwiched between two men. What other reasons can there be besides making one of them jealous? We think that Li Yaohui's unbridled friendship with him is like the director's own footnote to homosexuality-how far is the friendship between men from their love? What Wong Kar-wai means is that it may not be far away.

Waterfalls. Tango. . Piazzolla

Waterfall, as a word on the characters' lips and a picture on the lampshade, has appeared many times in movie stories, but its real scene has only appeared twice, once when the characters are absent, once when Li Yaohui is present and He Baorong is absent. Panoramic and moving waterfall shots last about one minute and two minutes respectively, which is an absolute exception in the whole film, which is basically composed of short scenes. We also noticed that the music of the two waterfall shots is the same, piazzolla's tango apasionado, and in the * * * dance part of Li Yaohui and He Baorong's sweetest love kitchen, the dance music is the music of the waterfall, and the * * * dance picture is interspersed in the second waterfall long shot, so the waterfall, tango and piazzolla are integrated into one and trinity, which becomes a big metaphor of the film. The feelings of a pair of gay men in China are gathered in a strange country, a waterfall with similar interests, and the music of tango and piazzolla.

Black, white, red and yellow

The subtitles at the beginning and end of the film appear on the red background of the whole scene, which is very fresh. In fact, red is one of the main colors of the film, and four colors (black and white are also natural colors) constitute the primary colors of the whole film. Generally speaking, movies can be divided into two parts: the first half of black-and-white movies and the second half of color movies, although there are individual shots with opposite colors scattered in these two parts. In the part of black and white film, the surface painting uses black and white poles to the maximum extent, and the black and white film has become a veritable black and white film-the gray layer has been suppressed to an imperceptible degree. It is also worth noting that this black-and-white photo of Gao Fancha was obtained under the action of night lighting (the use of lighting can easily control the exposure). Similarly, the red and yellow colors are very prominent and particularly eye-catching for the part where the color film is mostly shot under the night lighting effect. Obviously, other colors are suppressed.

Black-and-white movies are usually mixed with color movies to mark the difference between the past perfect tense and the present tense. Because it is not important to distinguish the past tense from the present tense in this film, I'm afraid black-and-white film is used more for style. In fact, suppressing gray black and white pictures and highlighting red and yellow pictures are the distinctive style characteristics of film images, and this stylized image color has strong visual expression. We can see that some parts of black-and-white film violate the aesthetic tradition of rigorous exposure, clear hierarchy and exquisite picture style, showing overexposure or underexposure, and the composition is general and rough (white dots on the dark tunnel; The white light from the far and near bus head cuts through the night; Open the refrigerator, a nest of white light appears; A dazzling scene on the whole overexposed highway ...); Part of the color film, the color is not properly reflected evenly and carefully, and almost every picture highlights a lot of red and yellow (He Baorong's bright yellow jacket; A pool of pig blood on the slaughterhouse floor; A touch of egg yolk in Xiao Zhang's bowl; Crimson sheets; Two oil drums alternate red and yellow ribbons in an empty lens. In a word, the black-and-white picture has a distinct texture, rich and colorful pictures, and touching and extraordinary painting-like brushstrokes. Astruk's "camera-pen" theory says that when exploring and expressing the human world, the film camera should be as free and rich as the pen in the writer's hand. In this view, as a medium of film creation, shouldn't a camera be a brush in a painter's hand like a brush in a photographer's hand? Light and color are the basis of realistic painting and the main means of aesthetic expression, which are also applicable to photography. In the past, the photography of movies (including some great movies) limited the space of MingLiang Yu, and the traditional aesthetic principle of balanced color restoration and the detailed physical representation of camera lens perspective rarely interfered strongly with the light and color of movie pictures. This film is different, the light and color of the picture are deliberately woven, and the four colors of black, white, red and yellow shoulder the task of the creator at the image level, giving it charm. So where is the charm? We know that generally speaking, black and white are related to coldness, profundity and reserve, while red and yellow are related to fiery, dissolute, explosive and impetuous, and these are the spiritual qualities that the film wants to convey. What is amazing about the use of light and color in the film is that the relationship between black and white and coldness, red and yellow and fiery is not strictly contrapuntal, but the specific charm of black, white, red and yellow in specific scenes is much more complicated because of the interweaving of roles, plots, editing and other factors.

Beating and cutting

The pictures taken with hand-held shoulders and no base are all in the process of shaking, shaking and moving from weak to obvious. In addition, the shooting angle is flat, people and things are simple and simple, and the composition is simple (inclined horizontal line and irregular composition), so the shooting technique of the film shows randomness; Similarly, the editing looks casual. From the second shot to a group of shots, the usual editing points and the general connection methods (such as the positive and negative actions of the dialogue characters, decomposition and reorganization, etc.). ), the matching relationship between shots (such as the scattered scene, the logic of time and space, etc.). ), and so on, the rules that traditional film editing should follow are often broken. Instead, every time the camera jumps from the middle panorama of two characters to the middle panorama of another angle, it often switches suddenly before the action in one picture is full, and individual boring empty shots last for an unusually long time.

Why should film creators ignore the rich and exquisite tradition of film photography and editing art and pursue a rough and seemingly unskilled style? In our opinion, the creator used a brand-new movie picture language and image narrative in an experimental and creative way here, which embodies a postmodern view of movie art: when the rare focal plane is shot on a seemingly unprofessional and unstable shoulder, the movie has some commonality (no one can shoot such a shot); The content and composition of the lens lack exquisite arrangement, there are not many layers of rich depth of field, there are not many long and meaningful long lenses, and the short and flat lens images lacking depth sense cannot contain any truth. In addition, the picture is covered with three primary colors: black, white, red and yellow, and the expression of image information becomes extremely accurate and intense. We believe that, in fact, this is the world in people's eyes, because the world is always observed by people and never loses its stable physical existence in the optical lens. The image of the film has a strong sense of plane, and highlights the traces of rendering and cutting by the author, reminiscent of a contemporary genre painting described by post-modernism: a pile of fragments behind colored lenses can not be gathered together, and the so-called human world is just a messy refraction of messy world fragments.

time and space

Any film story must be unfolded in two dimensions: time and space, and film art is based on the relationship between time and space. In general movies, time is only one-way drama action time, and space is only a plane drama action space. Time and space are only containers of the event process, and they are only markers of the length and thickness of drama stories. However, in those great and creative movies, the factors of time and space often jump from the background to the foreground. Under the conscious and skillful control of the director, the factors of time and space will shed the rigid and tame coat in the realistic and realistic art world in the movie screen world, showing the magical power of cadence and strong penetration.

Let's talk about time first. We can study the time of a movie from the following three levels:

1. The time span of the whole story;

2. Time relationship between shots (basically there are only two kinds of "juxtaposition", namely * *, gradual change, namely, duration);

3. The duration of a single shot, the duration of the shot content based on human reality, and the sense of duration caused by the shot in the eyes of the viewer.

We believe that the time form of "spring break" presents unique characteristics in the above three aspects:

A. Although the time span of the story content of the film is certain, the background from entering Argentina to returning to Taiwan Province Province (or the last scene of the film is actually Hongkong. Taiwan Province Province or Hongkong, it doesn't matter), but the time tentacles of the whole story are much longer and deeper. As we know, at the beginning of the story, Li Yaohui explained that the two had "started from the beginning" many times before, and you can think that the movie story told them to "start from the beginning" twice. The tragic meaning of the ending is self-evident, and its open meaning is beyond doubt-who can guarantee that they will not "start from scratch" again? Now, time has advanced. Can we say that the things wrapped by time (the nature of people and things) have moved forward? I'm afraid not. In this sense, the length of the film story is uncertain.

B. Although the temporal relationship between shots is nothing more than * * * and diachronic, traditional movies always choose diachronic relationship when dealing with the problem of adding shots, reducing the use of * * * everywhere. Time is smooth and space is nuclear-free, which is the golden rule of most film combinations. In this film, we find that the situation is different, and the combination of shots often gives people the feeling that the jump is not smooth, because there is always a time between the two shots that should be reproduced, which is omitted. What's more, from time to time, the film will abruptly insert one or several shots from another time and space, which is amazing. We believe that in this film, the traditional mode of dealing with the relationship between shots (one action after another, one thing after another, one shot after another) has faded, the secondary and sequential characteristics of the two shots have weakened, and the tendency of juxtaposition and contrast has increased.

C. Some shots of the film are shot in upgrade mode and shot in downgrade mode. What is particularly striking is that the creator can directly insert a single frame between two normal-speed shots, which is different from flashback and horror in other movies. Usually a set of upgraded pictures gives people a sense of romance, while a set of degraded pictures gives people a sense of humor. By changing the mechanical running time of lens shooting (when shooting or showing, it is usually done during shooting), changing the moving frequency of things in the lens, changing the audience's psychological time perception of watching movies, so as to produce romantic or funny viewing effects, so that the audience can understand and accept without any problems (think about how frightened people are when they first see slow motion and fast motion in movies). That is to say, when reproducing and expressing things, it is not incompatible with the psychological time response to watch them to go beyond their real movement time. Furthermore, there is no one-to-one correspondence between people's internal psychological time and external physical time, which defends the psychological aesthetics of art works compressing or lengthening time, and it is precisely this non-correspondence that projects much richer feelings in our hearts. The promotion, demotion and insertion of some pictures in this film are exactly what the creators do to tame physical time and enrich their psychological sense of time. In the face of such processed pictures, we are subject to some kind of poetry, which is more romantic and funny than traditional pictures.

Talk about space.

People tend to hide ugly things in the backyard of woodshed. Since the Chinese nation doesn't agree with homosexuality, let's stage it in a foreign country and avoid rehearsing a horror drama in a land that we are familiar with, glorious and bathed in moral breeze. Argentina in the southern hemisphere is far enough-moral distance (which sometimes becomes the moral pressure in the director's subconscious) may be replaced by the distance of the story space background.

As for the space of the film, it is also intriguing that the scenes where the story takes place are dirty places such as low-level hotels, bars, mean streets, toilets and kitchens. We have reason to speculate that the idea of "impurity and ruin the valley" in the homosexual concept of heterosexual ordinary people has also intentionally or unintentionally penetrated into the arrangement of the director's space background series (thus, the gay love story that was positively described revealed a gap and the positive theme of the film was affected). )

In addition, we can see that the spatial background is transformed as soon as it enters the screen. In reality, the space with clear latitude and longitude and well-proportioned length, width and height disappeared, showing the illusion color of the author after kneading and splicing. Kracauer's argument about the photographic restoration of the film to the world and Bazin's argument that the film originates from the impulse to worship and simulate the eternal world are not applicable to this film, because on the contrary, Early Spring showed a fictional but not realistic desire tendency when it was released, and was dissatisfied with the real space and wanted to transform and reorganize it. From the poetic metaphysical point of view, we might as well regard this film as a fantasy about space, in which two Hong Kong youths run wildly on the land of Argentina. The time and space background of their entry into the customs was replaced by a few seconds of turning over their passports; The only picture of Hong Kong is the other way around (because Hong Kong is on the other side of the globe); The news of Deng Xiaoping's death was announced in Taiwan Province Province through TV broadcast; There is a street in Taiwan Province Province called Liaoning Street. The famous Argentine football is a shot of a stadium audience on TV, and the shot of Gabboca Youth Team and Riverbed Team playing football; Three different public toilets appeared three times; Lighthouse at the southernmost tip of the earth; Where you must go, the waterfall. ...

Narrative voice

There are two narrators (voiceover) in the film, Li Yaohui and Xiao Zhang. The sound and picture are not synchronized, and the narration added to the vocal cords is the narrative sound, which is commonly used in films determined to "create new meaning" in the form of stories. Proper use of narrative voice can form dramatic and aesthetic tension with the dialogue and picture of the film, add harmony effect and polyphony meaning similar to music to the plot development and aesthetic implication of the film, and make the sound and picture form of the film complex and beautiful. This is a general comment on the use of narrative in the film, and the use and achievement of narrative voice in Spring is unique.

First of all, if the narrative voice is erased, what will happen to the story form and meaning of the film? Will it be the same again? Or did something happen? Disappeared and weakened? Enhance? Twisted? Is it hard to understand? Although we can't do the experiment, we are still confident that the narrative voice of this film can really be removed-most of the information lost by the audience is indicative plot, and they get a more challenging, unpredictable and intriguing viewing experience.

Secondly, the voices of the two narrators in the film have no internal objects to talk to, and their words are purely monologues. Is this different from the narration of the built-in communication object? (In Chen Kexin's Sweet Honey, Li Xiaojun's narrative is actually the content of a letter to his fiancee. ) We think that the former situation is extroverted, because letting the people in the play speak to the audience without any cover is equivalent to directly exposing the distance between the audience and the movie story, which plays a role in reminding the audience that you are listening and watching. You can't immerse yourself in the story, but you should respond to the story in language like the narrative voice that appears from time to time. The latter situation is more introverted, which can be cleverly designed and has no intention of dissolving the viewer's film-daydreaming.

Thirdly, Li Yaohui's and Xiao Zhang's narratives are not confessions, and their words are not around or directed at them. Li Yaohui is talking about He Baorong and Xiao Zhang is talking about Li Yaohui. Because of Xiao Zhang and his voice, He Baorong, one of the two protagonists, is neck and neck with Li Yaohui, the other protagonist, because the latter has not been spared from being illuminated by words, and the other is King's Landing.

Finally, Wong Kar-wai seems to be using the mouth of a dramatist to express his "ambition" of subverting the film history that emphasizes "watching" over "listening"-Xiao Zhang said, "... sometimes I think ears are more important than eyes, and listening with ears is better than listening with eyes in many things. It seems that a person pretends to be happy, but his voice can't be faked. Just listen carefully ... I don't like taking pictures ... ". A filmmaker who works in a large-scale industry that serves the needs of watching movies shows doubts about the "fairness" of his industry. Just as countless avant-garde artists in modern times questioned the existence and legitimacy of this kind of art through their works, and exposed the congenital defects of the media on which art depends, Wong Kar-wai seems to be dismissive of the development history of absolute dominance of movies here, showing self-deprecating courage and ironic wit. Wong Kar-wai's emphasis on "listening" over "seeing" actually has a profound philosophical background, that is, the rapid development of modern and contemporary structuralism, semiotics and philosophy of language has changed the whole humanities from the concept of first supporting material images to the concept of first supporting symbols (especially languages). In a profound philosophical sense, "what you hear" is more important than "what you see". Back to this movie, Wong Kar-wai's transition from "listening" to "watching" is not over yet. The deepest voice Li Yaohui left in the tape recorder-sadness-was either silent or noisy. -"Listening" is more important than "seeing", but people can't hear the truest and most important voice.

Actor's interpretation

It is said that Tony Leung Chiu Wai was tricked into making this play in Argentina by Wong Kar-wai. As a result, his Li Yaohui won the Best Actor Award at this year's Hong Kong Film Awards, which is well deserved. Most of the male screen images in contemporary China movies can be classified into two categories: funny, clown-like characters and fake, big and empty characters with little basis in real life. Lack of reliable positive male images with the characteristics of our nation, times and life. Therefore, the role of Li Yaohui created by Tony Leung Chiu Wai is rare. There is a deep, persistent and persistent spiritual strength of China men in the role, and the appeal of the spiritual connotation of the role is realized through the actor's free performance and the actor's own personality charm.

Exile and conversion

Frye believes that human artistic creation activities are centered around several motifs in the final analysis. Believe Frye's statement, we can really find a motif-exile and conversion in a sentence repeated by countless literary works in A Spring Break.

Moving the story to the ends of the earth and mean streets is self-evident. Li Yaohui stole his father's money and ran away. After leaving Argentina and He Baorong and returning to Hongkong (Taiwan Province Province), he hoped his father would forgive him. Here, we read the metaphor behind the story: the hero violated his father's law (stole his father's money) and was exiled by his father. Later, I finally asked his forgiveness and converted to the father's law. In fact, the theme of exile and conversion can be easily understood along the obvious story content of the film: men are men, and the relationship between men cannot go beyond friendship (Li Yaohui and Xiao Zhang later stopped at friends). He Baorong's gender role is disordered, and he is completely lost in the jungle where his gender role is chaotic (he is trapped in going home-escaping-going home-escaping, etc.), so he is deprived of the right to convert. At this point, we are surprised to find that the ideological connotations of films at different levels are not only different, but also contradictory, mutually soluble and deconstructed. From the story level, we can clearly feel the author's concern, understanding and sympathy for homosexuals, as well as a humanitarian mind to discuss homosexuality as a unique social and cultural phenomenon. From the deep structure of the story, we can see a fable about two (three) gay men who were physically and mentally exiled and converted to repentance and self-control.

All the solemn feelings in the film could not help laughing after seeing the subtitles of the actors at the end of the film. Li Yaohui and He Baorong used to be the names of two assistant photographers in the crew, making fun of their colleagues. This case is the pinnacle-in fact, on the other hand, you can think that the characters in the story are being teased.