Many people in life often use those disheartening examples to quench their eager artistic enthusiasm.
Later, I found a way of life in Gu Changwei's lens that I tried to explore but refused to face directly.
Watching joys and sorrows have been staged in the movies for nearly two hours, and perhaps every soul who has been confused and struggled will get courage and grow.
It was not until I saw beginning of spring that I suddenly remembered that there was such an ideal in my life.
When watching this movie, it is easy to think of Xu Anhua's My Aunt's Postmodern Life.
Beginning of spring continues the consistent theme of Li Yong's Peacock and My Aunt's Postmodern Life-the unwillingness of little people.
The writers of the two films are both Li Yong, so they are similar in breath, but completely different in style.
Xu Anhua is the kind of graceful and restrained type, who likes to be tepid and meticulous;
While Gu Changwei is incisively and vividly, choppy, whether pain or lament, always make a sound.
When I first went to college, I wrote in my diary "I am determined to cultivate into a literary youth"
At that time, I thought it was a noble name, and it was a good attitude to life that I could choose after climbing out of terminator line's analytic geometry.
But a few years later, I was horrified to find that the word "literary youth" gradually changed its flavor.
Today, this is almost a smelly street vocabulary, and soon it will be "you are a literary youth!" Your whole family is a literary youth! " The point.
In the flood of film reviews of beginning of spring, Wang Cailing was bound with the slogan "Young Women in Literature and Art".
It is almost equivalent to wearing a big hat of ghosts and gods. On the surface, it seems that there is nothing to say, but it has already been paved with nails and felt, which reveals deeper contempt and contempt.
I remember when I read Life, Gao Jialin looked down on the loess countryside in his bones, including the farmers who were facing the loess and facing the sky.
After the film made the young man walk around the city, he returned to the yellow land.
Qiao Zhen, a woman who loved him as much as a treasure, also married someone else's wife, and his own utopia also swayed with the yellow sand and went to that Java country.
In a word, it interprets the essence of little people to the extreme.
Gu Changwei's "beginning of spring" naturally does not have such a height, where a group of quasi-artists in a small town in the north live without any gains in love and career.
If Wang Yu saw this movie, he would definitely shout, "I want to leave every day. I don't know when I can be reborn."
To tell the truth, at the movies, I can still talk to those people in the movies who are crying and crying about going to Beijing.
I have had countless dreams of going north to Guangzhou. But as much as I hate myself, it's hard for me to have a good impression on movies like beginning of spring.
No matter with the help of external environment, it is not as calm and natural as people who adapt to the environment.
Beginning of spring is a drama starring Jiang Wenli, Zhang Yao, Li Guangjie and Jiao Gang in 2008.
The film tells the story of Wang Cailing and other young artists struggling in a small county town in the 1980s.
Starring Jiang Wenli won the Best Actress in the 27th Golden Rooster Award after winning the second Rome International Film Festival.
Douban scored 8. 1 and IDMb scored 8.6, which was not high at the box office but received rave reviews.
The image reveals a strong humanistic concern and sacredness that will eventually fall into the secular narrative trend, giving people a helpless sadness with stinging pain.
But in fact, this film takes the folk solar terms of "being in the cold and intending to spring" as the main metaphor.
The so-called "artistic youth" in the social transformation period who are unwilling to be mediocre are just some people who can't tell themselves apart from being trapped and fleeing.
Or delusional patients who think they are struggling for self-realization.
The ultimate disillusionment or imaginative continuation of their "persistent pursuit of ideals" is the most common and humble charm.
This may be one of the reasons why Gu Changwei called beginning of spring a cruel realistic work.
Gu Changwei said that beginning of spring is a story about dreams and inspiration.
In my opinion, "beginning of spring" is a story about the disillusionment of dreams.
As a result, beginning of spring didn't succeed in Peacock, which was unexpected.
I can't accept some people's criticism of beginning of spring. They don't believe that there will be an alien like Wang Cailing in real life. They say that this is another artificial "selling meat" film that deliberately shows the dark side of China society to please foreign judges.
The film is extremely ugly to the protagonist Wang Cailing, with buckteeth, acne and bowlegs. ...
On the one hand, it is elegant opera, holy mind, on the other hand, it is self-deception and full of vulgarity.
/kloc-the law of opposition between beauty and ugliness in romantic literature in the 0/9th century, which may have unexpected effects because it is not directly used in literature, once it is implemented as an image, ugliness will be unbearable and hinder recognition.
The opposition between beauty and ugliness not only refers to the opposition between the appearance and the heart of the character, but also divides the character's heart.
On the one hand, we feel the sublimity of Wang Cailing's pursuit of dreams, on the other hand, we pity their illusion of self-deception.
Wang Cailing didn't have the perfect unity of her sister Zhang Jingchu's appearance and heart in Peacock at all. Vulgar and sublime coexisted, so the feeling for the audience was vacillating.
Although the three brothers and sisters in Peacock are slightly different, they are generally normal and represent most ordinary people with dreams, so they are easily recognized by most audiences.
The protagonist and thoughts are far away from the public, so the minority has become an alternative. Most people have dreams, but it's really rare to be obsessed with dreams like Wang Cailing.
Therefore, when the audience looks at them, they are afraid of sympathy, more pitiful and deplorable, and perhaps disgusting.
And all this was caused by a woman named "Wang Cailing".
Who is Wang Cailing?
It is you and me who are unwilling to be mediocre in every ordinary life and walk alone on the road of chasing dreams.
She is incompatible with the environment but always refuses to give in like a soldier. She is the epitome of everyone struggling between ideal and reality.
She is similar to a poet, with wings hanging from the sky and no sky, but she has never given up the construction of her spiritual world.
The opening sentence seems to contain some kind of mood. When beginning of spring arrives, can warmth be far behind?
The heroine Wang Cailing stood out at this time.
Wang Cailing is definitely a cultural person in this little-known city of Heyang.
She can correctly and completely explain the meaning of "silk is not as good as bamboo, and bamboo is not as good as meat": "Silk is a string, and bamboo is a wind music. She means that strings are not as good as wind music, and wind music is not as good as human voice."
Coincidentally, Wang Cailing verified this idiom correctly and completely with her life (voice).
Such an ugly woman has arrogant ideals and ridiculous pride. She is so out of tune with the world. She is a different kind in that city.
Fortunately, she still sings.
As a music teacher, Wang Cailing has a good voice and can sing very beautiful operas.
"I'm poor and ugly, and God gave me a good voice. Besides that, I'm a waste."
Wang Cailing likes to sing "Late Spring". As the lyrics say, "Life is so cruel to me" seems to be a cry for her unfair fate.
No matter day or night, Wang Cailing's crying reflects the despair and helplessness of disillusionment, but in reality, she deceives herself again and again with lies and deception.
As far as conditions are concerned, her life is thinner than paper, but her heart is higher than the sky: she wants to be admitted to the Central Conservatory of Music and become the chief soprano of the Central Opera House after graduation. Her only goal in life.
To this end, she learned Italian, made her own costumes, and worked hard on Schumann's piano selections. These are actually "small things".
In the film, she spent more than 30 thousand yuan to entrust someone to open a Beijing hukou, which can show her determination.
Wang Cailing's experience reminds me of Pan Hongxia in Jiang Yun's novel Secret Bloom.
An ordinary woman in a small city has a dream of being unwilling to be mediocre and a love of self-longing.
In the depressing atmosphere of a small town, her soul struggles against life and destiny, but her dreams have always been stored in their hearts and never forgotten.
Everyone understands that beautiful women are loved by everyone, and ugly women can only love themselves.
The art organizations in Beijing are bloated, and the first impression of the selection criteria is only based on looks, so she can't get in at all;
Beijing hukou can't be done, and her level can't reach the foreign score line, and the Central Conservatory of Music has become out of reach for her;
As a foreigner, she is not even qualified to work as a temporary worker at the Central Conservatory of Music.
Wang Cailing's life reminds me of Yu Jie's master's thesis "The Record of Weird People". The literary theory focuses on social alternatives like Yu Dafu, but it is really sad.
In an inland county town in the early 1980s, steel worker Huang Sibao dreamed of Van Gogh's dream and was keen on painting human bodies. After repeated defeats and battles, he was admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Wang Cailing, a music teacher in a normal school, is obsessed with opera and dreams of singing to the Paris Opera House. She keeps saying that the Central Opera House wants to transfer her, and she wants to go to Beijing again and again to get her hukou.
Hu Jinquan, the dance teacher of the Group Art Museum, was called Er Pancreas (not a man or a woman), and even danced ballet in the street performance in this small town, which attracted the crowd to laugh.
They are out of place. They are a group of young ladies who have given birth to maids.
However, they don't give in to fate, knowing that they can't do it, and they tirelessly attack fate again and again.
In fact, they are just like Sisyphus who pushed a stone up the mountain in ancient Greek mythology. Although every time he pushed it to the top of the mountain, the stone would fall, but the value of life lies not in obedience, but in a desperate struggle against fate.
Resist despair ...
While feeling for the ruthlessness of fate, we can't help but be moved by these weak individuals who are hopelessly impacted.
This is also the theme that Lu Xun is keen on.
Standing in the 21st century today, it seems like a lifetime ago to look back on the 1980s when we were born.
What is easily overlooked is that if the key word in the 1990s is "economy", then the theme in the 1980s is "culture".
Think about the intellectuals in the 1980s, and I think of a sentence by Wang Xiaobo in the Bronze Age:
Perhaps the extreme of cultural development is the proliferation of liberalism, and this result can be imagined in China, so there is this eventful autumn in the film.
The first person who woke Wang Cailing from her artist dream was Hu Jinquan.
This "Er Pancreas" in the eyes of the world loves ballet. As a crane living in a flock of chickens, he has always been accused by the world of being engaged in "the art of tights" and always being single.
As Hu Jinquan himself said, he is a fishbone stuck in the throats of people in this city. One snowy night, on the verge of collapse, Hu Jinquan proposed a fake marriage to Wang Cailing.
Just get a marriage certificate, and nothing else will happen.
Wang Cailing refused to be "cannon fodder" and flatly refused.
After an attempted rape in broad daylight, Hu Jinquan was put in prison.
"My fishbone was finally pulled out." When visiting the prison, Wang Cailing listened to Hu Jinquan and watched Hu Jinquan stand on tiptoe in prison shoes, and shed tears of guilt-that snowy night, if she didn't refuse. ...
Hu Jinquan's imprisonment was like a sap, which made Wang Cailing in the same situation dizzy.
There is no hope of going to Beijing. In this city, she may be the next fishbone. ...
We dare not say that at this time, Wang Cailing has completely despaired of her life goal as the chief soprano, but since Hu Jinquan was imprisoned, Wang Cailing has never sung an opera again, not a word.
Just as Wang Cailing's opera dream faded, the second person who woke Wang Cailing up from her dream appeared "at the right time". She was Miss Zhang, Wang Cailing's female neighbor.
This female neighbor is an absolute beauty and naturally married a civil servant of the tax bureau.
Wang Cailing, who had unbearable stomachache, borrowed medicine from her neighbor's house. The love between her female neighbor and her husband made Wang Cailing envious.
Coupled with the parents' expectations for Wang Cailing to get married as soon as possible, Wang Cailing finally no longer has only opera in her heart.
When Wang Cailing began to beautify herself with earthwork, the last and most powerful wakener appeared.
Beibei, a bald girl with excellent singing talent, touched Wang Cailing, who has a "Beijing relationship" in her opinion, with her cancer.
Wang Cailing came to Beijing with Beibei and her dwarf mother, and spent all the remaining 1 2000 yuan from her Beijing hukou on Beibei's participation.
In the end, Beibei got the second place. Just as Wang Cailing and Beibei's mother and daughter, who had realized their unfinished ideals, cried bitterly, Beibei's mother and daughter suddenly fell to their knees.
It turns out that Beibei's cancer is a lie. "It's too difficult to be famous. There are many people who sing well. As we are a small place, we can't get out without some special means."
A girl who is so "impure" can actually sing. This completely shattered Wang Cailing's artistic dream.
The blow continues. Then, the husband of the female neighbor took away all the savings at home and disappeared.
This made Wang Cailing lose confidence in marriage.
In fact, Wang Cailing still has self-knowledge. She knows her situation very well, but she can't help but think that she is a piece of material that can shine.
Until the sun stung my eyes deeply and I sobbed in the middle of the night.
At the end of beginning of spring, Wang Cailing didn't get married, but adopted an orphan with rabbit lips.
Perhaps after experiencing all kinds of situations brought about by the pursuit of ideals, she gave in to her fate and began to live a quiet life.
Raised the child by selling pork and gave her plastic surgery.
After curing her daughter's illness, she taught her daughter to sing nursery rhymes, and she took her daughter to Beijing to play.
The ideal of a young woman in literature and art has come to an end.
At the end of the film, a female singer sang Puccini's famous "Aria" at the China Opera House. I was a little disappointed and watched it over and over several times.
When I saw the scene where Mr. Hu, who deliberately committed hooliganism and indecency in order to prove that he was a normal man, finally stood on tiptoe in prison uniform to comfort the sad Wang Cailing.
This man, whom I spurned at first, finally made me respect him.
Idealists are respectable and sad at the same time. Their respectability lies in their insistence on their ideal world, while their sadness lies in their incompatibility with the real world.
Therefore, there are two endings for idealists, either to integrate into reality or to die in their own imaginary world.
Among the people Wang Cailing made friends with, first of all, two self-proclaimed "artistic youths", Huang Sibao and Zhou Yu.
The pretentious Huang Sibao likes to paint his own oil paintings. He is bent on getting into the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but he has failed again and again.
Zhou Yu, whose dream is still alive, always laments the fate, and she is useless, wasting a good voice in vain.
Two people of the same kind are so small and humble in front of Wang Cailing.
That kind of hypocritical coat and flaunted ego can't compete with the test of time, but the tempering of life.
Zhou Yu's appearance is to prove that Wang Cailing, who is lofty because of art, will not condescend to marry a pseudo-literary lover;
The appearance of Huang Sibao is to prove that Wang Cailing is a normal woman who likes the same interests and the opposite sex.
In addition, Gu Changwei's "piggyback" shows that literary youth have fallen in the tide of market economy, which is another way taken by Wang Cailing and Hu Jinquan.
In other words, if they are removed, the development track of Wang Cailing, a tragic figure, is still clear.
The appearance of Hu Jinquan, a ballet dancer, and Gao Beibei, who loves to sing, once touched Wang Cailing's life, but this touch turned cold at the end.
Hu Jinquan couldn't stand the worldly vision, and wanted to fake marriage with Wang Cailing to cover up his sexual orientation. After being rejected, he was desperate. In the end, he could only prove himself by humiliating his students in public, even at the cost of cold handcuffs.
And Gao Beibei's deception is obviously an insult and blasphemy to art, which makes her almost collapse.
In her eyes, the nobleness and purity of art allow no adulteration, and the blasphemy against art is far better than the blasphemy against herself.
Teacher Xiao Zhang, who lives next door, is a confidante. She is young, beautiful and has her own family.
Because she has such an ugly and single neighbor, she is full of superiority. Even calling for bed in the middle of the night raises her voice, for fear that the next-door neighbor will not hear her.
Natural superiority makes her full of capital. She always talks about how good her husband is, pretends to be kind enough to cure Wang Cailing's dark spots, and even buys her a sex toy.
When her own husband took away all the property and left, she began to know what it meant to be connected with the same disease without capital.
Therefore, they are all dwarfs in front of Wang Cailing.
Maybe you have to ask, what is art? What is the ideal?
"I must sing to the Paris Opera House", Wang Cailing said again and again, but she knew that all this was just a beautiful fantasy.
On the train to Beijing, she looked forward to art and love. "If only this was the train for Paris."
The longing of the two people began to go too far, so when a word of refusal woke her up, it was still infinitely cruel to look around.
When Huang Sibao, who was drunk on the platform, and those scattered easels and Mazar-e-Mazar were in the eye, as an audience, we also lamented the world difference between ideal and reality.
When Gao Beibei cried on TV with flowers and certificates, we lamented that the realization of this ideal was so disgraceful and even dim.
When Hu Jinquan was still spinning on his toes with cloth shoes in prison, we no longer lamented because the "ideal" was too heavy and crushed the soul.
Therefore, the "art" in beginning of spring is more like some kind of mind anesthetic.
As Gu Changwei's second work, it is inevitable to make a comparison with the masterpiece Peacock.
Peacock's writing about the Cultural Revolution led to the distortion of human nature. "beginning of spring" shows people who are depressed and psychopathic.
To be fair, beginning of spring is not as thick as Peacock, its characters are not as reasonable, and its shock to the audience is not as strong as Peacock.
But one of the highlights of beginning of spring is that Peacock doesn't have it, that is, Jiang Wenli's behind-the-scenes performance.
When Wang Cailing turned around for the first time, my heart even tightened: That's the national goddess Jiang Wenli
Once the actor doesn't handle it well, the aesthetic expectation brought by modeling can only expose the actor's shortcomings and make the characters look terrible.
As far as the details are concerned, Jiang Wenli's profound performance skills make Gu Changwei dare to use a long lens.
Gu Changwei's long shot also enabled Jiang Wenli to perform more completely, and Wang Cailing's character became more authentic in this lens language which is closest to documentary.
From the beginning, Wang Cailing pretended to hold her head high, and in the end, she was with her adopted daughter and she exuded maternal brilliance.
In Wang Cailing's eyes, persistence is less and less, peace is more and more, fragility is less and less, and strength is more and more.
Even with a change of expression from joy to grief, she revealed a thousand words in Wang Cailing's heart.
In my opinion, this is what attracts me most about this film.
In terms of constructing the historical realism of the film through details, beginning of spring also maintains the level of Gu Changwei's previous film.
Bridge opening posted on the Beijing Asian Games, Huang Sibao's old jeans and Zhou Yu's "ancestor-level" cultural shirt;
The 80-edition fence on Tiananmen Square, the retro police uniform of the armed police, resounded through the karaoke room's "Pink Memories";
Camel brand ink from Wang Cailing's family, instant noodles from Beijing, a desk lamp with a slam dunk sticker, the old logo of CCTV 2 on TV, Wahaha AD calcium milk from the adopted daughter;
I even saw the poster of Red Sorghum, which was very popular at that time, and the Spring Festival party in 1992.
The historical atmosphere and the sense of the times throughout the film emanate from these things.
This sentence, which implies the eternal gap between ideal and reality, also reflects the distance between the historical imagination and the present expression in beginning of spring.
Many people think that it is an inner spirit of "my head is broken but my dream is still there", but it can also be regarded as a pathological manifestation of relying on empty dreams to escape from helpless reality.
However, I always believe that the real charm of beginning of spring lies not in how tortuous and sad its story is, but in the fact that it creates a character with Kafka absurd feelings that is rare in China films.
At the same time, it is covered up with strange arrangements and common themes about dreams.
It is not because her practice of elegant art is not accepted, but because she is expressing the lofty and flying that her body can't bear in a way of hitting the wall.
Perhaps the imaginative satisfaction of the film's final singing in the Grand Theatre should be Wang Cailing, which is the greatest comfort that the audience can get.