As for director Jing Wong, we seldom get his name in the current flood of commercial films, but if we dig deep into the excellent domest
As for director Jing Wong, we seldom get his name in the current flood of commercial films, but if we dig deep into the excellent domestic films with low cost in recent years, then he is definitely one of them. From 20 12' s "An Arrow Through the Heart" to 20 13' s "Daming Robbery", he completed his exposition in the dual context of reality and history.
The story of "an arrow goes through the heart" seems to exist in most urban families in China at the turn of the 20th century. Although this tragic conflict may not be everywhere, the characters in the film are really unpretentious like our childhood neighbors. This film tells the story of a powerful and philistine woman who forces her husband, a young cadre in a cultural class, to die in order to control the family's dominance. Although she worked hard for her son to enter the university for the next ten years, she got the result that her son "cut off the mother-child relationship".
Yan's wife, from the moment she appeared, occupied a dominant position. Whether she teased her husband Ma Xuewu for sex in bed or taunted her husband several times in the process of moving, her strong character was established. In a family where women are strong and men are weak, the result is that men can't bear to cheat. The bad habits he developed at that time became a bargaining chip for Li Baoli to regain the family dominance. In the process of her husband and lover checking in, Li Baoli dragged herself to the throne, and her husband had to bow to her and report to the police anonymously with guilt. When the husband later learned the truth, the spiritual oppression and the dilemma of survival naturally became his inevitable choice to commit suicide.
After her husband died, Li Baoli had to bear the living expenses of her son and mother-in-law. The film's handling at this juncture makes Li Baoli's indomitable character stand out. Instead of getting financial support from her friends, she chose to carry a pole and be a coolie. After ten years of hard work, she felt that she could change her son's comfort after he went to college. However, because of his mother's persecution of his father and the discovery of his mother's anonymous tip-off, his son cruelly asked his mother to leave the house where he had lived for more than ten years.
When the movie kicked off a tattered van and left home in Li Baoli, the heartbreaking pain of "an arrow goes through the heart" gradually solidified in the lifting lens of the movie. The film's title "A Thousand Arrows Through the Heart" comes from the geomantic custom in China, because the new home that Li Baoli moved into is a place where many roads pass by, and each road is ruthlessly inserted into the hearts of the Li Baoli family like an arrow. Everyone in the film is full of malice, whether it's her husband Ma Xuewu, her son or her mother-in-law, they all hold great resentment against Li Baoli's present or past.
With restrained lens language and concise narrative techniques, this small-budget ethics film can always tell a great tragedy of the characters, that is, Li Baoli's struggle. She is an indomitable strong woman with full confidence in survival, but it is this hardness that makes her besieged on all sides, and she has achieved it whether she is diligent in housekeeping or later efforts. She also did everything she should do, whether using her son to win her husband's heart or reporting her husband's infidelity too much, but movies seem to be life. No matter what she does, she is wrong. There is a huge fallacy that seems to fill the whole movie, that is: she is the wrong person, how can she do the right thing?
By 20 13, Jing Wong seems to have rewritten this proposition in the specific historical environment of Daming robbery, but this time it is: no matter what people in the wrong era do, it is difficult to promote the right thing.
The opening of Daming Robbery is a heavy curse. That sentence "1642, two years before the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, Li Zicheng led the peasant army to surround Kaifeng, and the Ming building will be built." From the beginning, I denied everyone's efforts in the film.
There are two main lines in this film. One is that Feng plays the wandering doctor Wu Youke to cure the plague, and the other is that Sun, the inspector of the Ming army, fights against the invading army. The two lines are intertwined in the middle of the film, but separated at the end, writing their own life stories respectively.
Similar to A Thousand Arrows Through the Heart, the characters or groups in this film are doing what they think is right, and there are also corresponding contradictions: Wu Youke thinks that healing is the first, while Sun thinks that saving the country and resisting the enemy is fundamental; Wu Youke believes that medical skills should keep pace with the times, while his teachers cling to their shortcomings and think that abiding by medical books is king. The local squire thinks it is not his business to change the dynasty, but it is his duty to keep his family business, and Sun sticks to the creed that if the country dies, the small family will not die. These three pairs of contradictions run through the whole movie, and the final contradiction is like an arrow, which pokes the last dead hole of the Ming army.
In fact, the excellence of "Daming Robbery" just contrasts a fundamental problem of domestic films-not telling a good story, although the pace in front of the film is too slow, the plot connection is a bit stiff, and the relative lack of climax and hasty ending make the film unable to maximize the viewing effect. But the outstanding feature of this film is that it can spread the story line calmly, similar to "A Thousand Arrows Through the Heart", and reconcile the tragedy of the characters into the dust of history. This way of environment leading characters' character and destiny is hard to see in domestic films in recent years. On the contrary, domestic commercial films use characters to break the limitations of the film environment, which leads to the cliff-like development of the story line and the arbitrary combination of characters, completely tearing the film narrative rules.
The artistic success of these two films also shows us that the middle-aged man who graduated from Nortel Photography has gradually formed his own realistic style in art. What is even more impressive is that Yan in "An Arrow Through the Heart" and Yan in "Daming Robbery" interpret their respective roles very well, especially Yan's role, which permeates every inch of skin with the struggle of the low-level nobody and the tragic feeling carried by his personality.
Can domestic movies return to the real days we lived in the 1990s? In the mainland film market where youth films and commercial films are flooding, it is difficult to get a definite answer to this question. Jing Wong's two films, An Arrow Through the Heart and Daming Robbery, seem to respond to this question in another tone, that is, driven by low-cost and high-quality production, let more people who love movies see this vibrant land. As for whether more seeds can be planted and whether they can germinate and blossom, this questionnaire cannot be handed in casually.
The phrase "less routines, more sincerity" is not just an online buzzword.
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