Appreciation of Xia Hao's Photographic Works

Mason Lee, the second son of Ang Lee who starred in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and Huang Lu, the queen of literary films; Independent musician Xiaohe composes music; Du He, a master behind the scenes in Taiwan Province Province, is the recording and editing director respectively.

With such a high "debut configuration", the film seems to be very lucky to have been escorted by filmmakers from across the Taiwan Straits from the very beginning.

In the script stage, it has been shortlisted by many venture capitalists, such as Jinma and Beiying, and won the best feature film in the first 12 film festival. However, the release date of this work started from 20 18, and it was not until February 26th this year that we finally met on the screen.

However, even at the closing ceremony of 202 1 Spring Festival, which was crowded with stars and the box office blew out, this work was still not strong-almost all the "recent hot show" pages of the ticket grabbing app needed to be pulled to the bottom and squeezed into one day.

This kind of experience, there are also stories similar to movies, which may make people feel a little disappointed.

However, we are also happy to tell you about this "high-quality debut" work, because it shows the sincerity and sobriety of the creators after the uproar of commercial films.

Correspondence and dislocation

This movie is "jumping"!

Because the film does not elaborate on time and cause and effect, it is more like a series of different scenes. But behind the jump, you can clearly feel the corresponding neat traces, pointing to the bias and logic that the director is trying to hide.

For example, the role setting in Time and Space for Adults and Time and Space for Children, Xia Hao (ornaments), a surveying and mapping engineer, and Xia Hao (ornaments), a pupil, are similar in appearance and posture, and have undergone similar changes, but there is no clue that they are the same person, which is more like a coincidence led by the director.

Swallow (Huang Lu), the witness of the ground subsidence accident, and Fang Ting, the little girl, are the best friends of Xia Hao and Xiao Hao respectively, and their life details and looks and actions also show amazing consistency.

For example, Fang Ting took the initiative to cut Xiao Xia Hao's hair and cut out his secret love; In the adult world, two people who have just fallen in love snuggle up on the sofa. Swallow (Huang Lu) compares her fingers to scissors and fiddles with Xia Hao (Mason Lee)' s hair. There is an ambiguous warmth in the air.

The captain of the expedition is a warm-hearted and kind-hearted fat man, and there is also a naive and emotional fat man in his childhood playmates.

But the little fat man's personality seems to be more corresponding to the young surveying and mapping engineer ants. They are all reliable partners. Little fatty will send every friend to the door and then go home alone. Before he left, he would solemnly hug and say goodbye. And the ants got drunk and hugged everyone for no reason, and then ran away like crazy.

Xia Haotian, a pupil, is looking forward to hatching monsters from the eggs he got by poking a bird's nest with his friends in the suburbs every day, but he doesn't know that the eggs that leave the nest will never break.

In the next shot, Xia Hao, an adult, knocked the eggshell on his head and skillfully wiped it off. The egg became the perfect human food.

Not to mention the riddle that runs through two time and space-"What is the longest, shortest, fastest and slowest thing in the world that can cut a big piece?"

Primary school student Xia Hao knew the answer and won the girl's favor, while adults Xia Hao and Swallow were trapped in a dark room and felt deja vu in the riddle.

Is it "love"? The answer is not love.

The corresponding plots and symbols jump repeatedly in two time and space.

At the same time, the misplaced details make people feel that they have just clarified some ideas and immediately become confused.

The depth and cycle of the city

However, if we give up the entanglement of character symbols and details and focus on two spaces with common time and space, it is not difficult to find that beyond the flat geographical division of "Hangzhou suburbs", the director is trying to restore the deep space composed of "air-surface-underground".

People destroyed ancient farmland, forests and houses, and the ruins covered a new world. Tunnels are dug underground in the old suburbs to connect with the subway; Tall buildings grow on the ground, and the sky is no longer the same as before.

This city is like a spreading and accumulating heat island. The old suburb has become a city, and the new suburb is growing on the edge of the extended city.

The accumulation of ruins witnessed the alternation of old and new. In a sense, the urban depth that seems to be the linear development of progressivism is actually a circle connected into a cycle. People of different times are just spinning in the same trap.

For example, at the end of the film, Xia Hao, an adult, is still struggling to find suburban birds in his childhood memories, and in the suburban jungle further away, another teenager Xia Hao and his inseparable friends poke the nests of suburban birds again.

However, the story drifts between time and space.

Telescopes and cartographers are like media connecting wormholes in time and space. When adults are asleep, the two worlds are temporarily bordered, and children pass by, naughtily sticking the mapmaker with chewing gum. When they woke up and cursed their naughty children, the overlap between reality and the past caused confusion.

As a result, the ground collapsed, the tunnel oozed water, and cavities appeared under the accumulation depth, so the occurrence of disasters became inevitable.

I have to admit that the viewing experience of this work will not make people feel comfortable.

The 4: 3 frame and the off-guard zoom lens appear on the wide screen, which brings some untimely embarrassment and tension, such as the ruthless peep of strangers, rather than the openness and generosity shown by traditional cameras.

Mason Lee's Chinese pronunciation and his duet with Huang Lu also spread a sense of dislocation with different frequencies. Their intimate movements are always accompanied by the background sound of distant excavators, which eventually turns into silence and stickiness.

From the beginning, two eyes slept together, and finally the swallow walked with the section chief inexplicably, and the motives and behaviors of the characters were a little trance and confused.

Or perhaps this is a flaw left by the director on purpose. Together with the unpleasant viewing experience of the whole movie, in the suburbs of the city, in the alternation of the old and the new world, people's wandering and broken living conditions are constructed.

Many comments praised the director's fluency and spirituality in filming his childhood, but criticized the embarrassment and disappointment of the adult part.

However, in this embarrassment, I realized the resonance of some personal experiences-

When I walked out of the cinema, my mood was still in the film, and I saw seven or eight boys and girls in school uniforms jumping in the traffic, just like those children in the film. Ten years ago, I wore the same school uniform and was in the same place. At that time, I was still wandering around in the dust.

With the rise of high-rise buildings in the business circle, childhood partners also left one by one and were isolated on the roadside. Will these boys and girls lose each other like me in the next ten or twenty years? Will these tall buildings become new mortar and dust again?

At this point, the plot of the film has dissipated into pieces from the brain, and the dull mood has also surged away, leaving only a huge trance and loss.

It is true that Birds in the Suburb, as an art film, has not reached an amazing height, but as a directorial debut, this film is frank enough and has many surprises. The obscure plot is inevitably left to the audience for over-interpretation, which may be a powerful innovation in the form of the new generation of China films.