Many people in life often use those frustrating examples to douse their ardent artistic enthusiasm.
Later, I found a lifestyle in Gu Changwei's lens that I tried to explore but refused to face directly.
Watching the joys and sorrows play out in the movie for nearly two hours, maybe every soul who has been confused and struggled will get courage and growth.
It was not until I saw beginning of spring that I suddenly remembered that I still had 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 have similar breath, but totally different styles.
Xu Anhua is the kind of graceful and restrained type, who likes tepid and meticulous;
And Gu Changwei is incisively and vividly, choppy, no matter pain or lament, always make a sound.
When I first went to college, I wrote in my diary, "I am determined to cultivate a literary youth."
At that time, I thought it was a noble name, and it was a good attitude towards life that I could choose after climbing out of the analytic geometry of Terminator Line.
But a few years later, I was horrified to find that the word "literary youth" gradually changed.
Today, this is almost a stinking street word, and soon it will be "You are a literary youth!" Your family are all young artists! "The key.
In the torrent of film criticism of beginning of spring, Wang Cailing was bound with the slogan of "young women in literature and art".
Almost equivalent to wearing a big hat of ghosts and gods. On the surface, there seems to be nothing to say, but in fact, nails and blankets have already been laid, revealing deeper contempt and contempt.
I remember that when reading Life, Gao Jialin looked down on the loess countryside from his bones, including the peasants with their backs to the loess.
After the film made the young man walk around the city, he returned to the yellow land.
Qiao Zhen, a woman who loves him like a treasure, also married someone else's wife, and her utopia 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 has no such height, and a group of quasi-artists in northern towns are living in love and career without any gains.
If Wang Yu sees this movie, he will shout, "I want to leave every day. I don't know when I can be reborn. "
To tell the truth, when I watch a movie, I can still talk to those people in the movie who are crying and crying to go 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.
Regardless of the external environment, it is not as calm and natural as those who adapt to the environment.
Beginning of spring is a TV series starring Jiang, Zhu, Zhu and Zhu in 2008.
This film tells the story of Wang Cailing and other young artists struggling in a small county in the 1980s.
After winning the second Rome International Film Festival, Jiang won the 27th Golden Rooster Award for Best Actress.
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 a sense of sacredness that will eventually fall into the secular narrative trend, giving people a painful helplessness.
But in fact, this film is based on the folk solar terms of "coming from cold to summer, meaning spring".
The so-called "artistic youth" who are unwilling to be mediocre in the social transformation period are just people who can't tell themselves apart from being trapped and fleeing.
Or paranoid people think they are fighting 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, "Spring" failed 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 Rainbow Chua Ling in real life. They said that this is another man-made "selling meat" movie, which deliberately shows the dark side of China society to please foreign judges.
The film's description of the protagonist Wang Cailing is extremely ugly, with buck teeth, acne and bowlegs. ...
On the one hand, it is elegant opera and holy mind, on the other hand, it is self-deception and vulgar.
/kloc-the law of opposition between beauty and ugliness in romantic literature in the 0/9th century may have unexpected effects because it is not directly used in literature. Once implemented as an image, ugliness is unbearable and hinders 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 dream pursuit, on the other hand, we pity their illusion of self-deception.
Wang Cailing has no perfect unity of appearance and heart of her sister Zhang Jingchu in Peacock. Vulgarity and sublimity coexist, so the feeling given to the audience is vacillating.
Although the three brothers and sisters in Peacock are slightly different, they are generally normal, representing 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 becomes an alternative. Most people have dreams, but few people are really obsessed with dreams, Rainbow Cai Ling.
So when the audience looks at them, they are afraid of sympathy, more pity and lamentation, and maybe nausea.
And all this is caused by a woman named "Wang Cailing".
Who is Wang Cailing?
It's you and me, unwilling to be mediocre in every ordinary life, walking alone on the road of chasing dreams.
She is out of tune with the environment, but she always refuses to give in like a soldier. She is the epitome of everyone who struggles between ideal and reality.
She is similar to a poet, with wings hanging in 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 emotion. When beginning of spring arrives, can warmth be far behind?
The heroine Wang Cailing stands out at this time.
Wang Cailing is definitely a cultural person in Heyang, a little-known city.
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 correctly and completely verified this idiom with life (voice).
Such an ugly girl has arrogant ideals and ridiculous pride. She is out of place in this world. She is an anomaly in that city.
Luckily, she is still singing.
As a music teacher, Wang Cailing has a good voice and can sing very beautiful operas.
"I am poor and ugly, and God gave me a good voice. Besides, I am 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 disillusioned despair and helplessness, 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 studied Italian, made her own clothes, and worked hard on Schumann's piano music selection. These are actually "small things".
In the film, she spent more than 30 thousand yuan to open a Beijing account, which shows her determination.
Wang Cailing's experience reminds me of Pan Xiahong in Jiang Yun's novel The Secret Bloom.
An ordinary woman in a small city has a dream that she is unwilling to be mediocre and a love that she longs for herself.
In the depressing atmosphere of the small town, her soul is struggling with life and fate, but her dream has been stored in their hearts and has never been forgotten.
Everyone knows that beautiful women are loved by everyone, and ugly women can only love themselves.
Beijing's art institutions 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, the 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 doesn't even have the qualification to be a temporary worker at the Central Conservatory of Music.
Wang Cailing's life reminds me of Yu Jie's master's thesis "Records of the Strange People". Literary theory pays attention to social otherness like Yu Dafu, but it is really sad.
In an inland county in the early 1980s, steel worker Huang dreamed of Van Gogh and was keen on painting human bodies. Repeated battles and defeats, 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 in the Paris Opera House. She kept saying that the Central Opera House wanted to transfer her and wanted to go to Beijing to get an account again and again.
Hu Jinquan, the dance teacher of the group art museum, called Er Yi (neither a man nor a woman), and even danced ballet in the street performance in this small town, which made everyone laugh.
They don't fit. 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, but they attack it relentlessly again and again.
In fact, they are just like Sisyphus who pushed stones up the mountain in ancient Greek mythology. Although every time he pushes it to the top of the mountain, the stone will fall, but the value of life lies not in obedience, but in a desperate struggle with fate.
Resist despair ...
While feeling that fate is ruthless, we can't help but be moved by these hopeless and weak individuals.
This is also the theme that Lu Xun is keen on.
Standing in today's 2 1 century, 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 was "economy", then the theme in the 1980s was "culture".
When I think about intellectuals in the 1980s, I think of a sentence from 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 awakened Wang Cailing from the artist's dream was Hu Jinquan.
The "er pancreas" in the eyes of the world loves ballet. As a crane living in a flock of chickens, he has been accused by the world of "the art of tights" and has been 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.
Hu Jinquan was put in prison after an attempted rape in broad daylight.
"My fishbone has finally been pulled out." When visiting the prison, Wang Cailing listened to Hu Jinquan's words and watched Hu Jinquan stand on tiptoe in prison shoes, and shed tears of guilt-that snowy night, if she hadn't refused. ...
Hu Jinquan's imprisonment was like a sap, which made Wang Cailing dizzy in the same situation.
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 drama dream faded away, the second person who woke Wang Cailing up from her dream appeared "at the right time". She is 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 has unbearable stomachache, borrowed medicine from her neighbor's house. The love between the female neighbor and her husband made Wang Cailing envious.
Coupled with parents' expectations for Wang Cailing's early marriage, Wang Cailing finally no longer has only drama 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 cancer.
Wang Cailing came to Beijing with Beibei and her dwarf mother, and spent all the remaining 65,438+2,000 yuan from her Beijing hukou on Beibei's participation.
Finally, Beibei won the second place. Just as Wang Cailing and Beibei's mother and daughter, who had realized their unfinished ideals, were crying, Beibei's mother and daughter suddenly fell to the ground.
It turns out that Beibei's cancer is a lie. "It's too difficult to be famous. There are many people who sing well. Because we are a small place, we can't get out without some special means. "
Such an impure girl can sing. This completely shattered Wang Cailing's artistic dream.
The blow continues. Then, the husband of the female neighbor took 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 thinking 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 cleft lip.
Perhaps after experiencing all kinds of circumstances brought about by the pursuit of ideals, she gave in to fate and began a quiet life.
Raise the child by selling pork and give her plastic surgery.
After curing her daughter's illness, she taught her daughter to sing nursery rhymes and took her daughter to Beijing to play.
The ideal of young women 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 several times.
When I saw the scene where Mr. Hu, who was deliberately rogue and obscene in order to prove that he was a normal person, 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, and their sadness lies in their incompatibility with the real world.
Therefore, idealists have two endings, 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" were Huang and Zhou Yu.
The pretentious Huang likes to paint his own oil paintings. He was bent on being admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but failed again and again.
Zhou Yu, who still has a dream, always laments her fate, and she is useless, wasting a good voice in vain.
Two similar people are so small and humble in front of Wang Cailing.
That kind of hypocritical coat, advertised self, can't compare with the test of time, and can't compare with 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;
Huang's appearance is to prove that Wang Cailing is a normal woman who likes like-minded members of the opposite sex.
In addition, Gu Changwei's "Farewell" shows the degeneration of literary youth in the tide of market economy, which is another road 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 ballerina, and Gao Beibei, who loves singing, once touched Wang Cailing's life, but this touch turned cold in the end.
Hu Jinquan can't stand the worldly vision and wants to fake marriage with Wang Cailing to cover up her sexual orientation. After being rejected, he was desperate. Finally, he can only prove himself by humiliating his students in public, even at the expense of wearing cold handcuffs.
Gao Beibei's deception is obviously an insult and blasphemy to art, which makes her almost collapse.
In her eyes, the nobility and purity of art are not allowed to be adulterated, 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 and beautiful, and has her own family.
Because she has such an ugly and single neighbor, she is full of superiority. Even the call for bed in the middle of the night raised its voice, for fear that the neighbors next door could not hear it.
A natural sense of superiority fills her with 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 sex toys.
When her own husband took all the property and left, she began to know what it meant to have no capital and be in the same boat.
Therefore, in front of Wang Cailing, they are all dwarfs.
Maybe you have to ask, what is art? What is the ideal?
"I must sing it to the Paris Opera House," Wang Cailing said over and over again, but she knew it was just a beautiful fantasy.
On the train to Beijing, she looked forward to art and love. "If only this was the train to Paris."
The desire of the two people began to go too far, so when a refusal woke her up, it was still infinitely cruel to look around.
When Huang, who was drunk on the podium, and the easels and mazes scattered all over the floor were in his eyes, 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 walking around on tiptoe in prison wearing cloth shoes, we no longer lamented that "ideal" overwhelmed our soul.
Therefore, the "art" in beginning of spring is more like some kind of psychoanesthetic.
As Gu Changwei's second work, it is inevitable to compare it with the masterpiece Peacock.
Peacock's writing about the Cultural Revolution led to the distortion of human nature. Beginning of spring is about 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 there is one bright spot in beginning of spring that peacocks don't have, and that's Jiang's behind-the-scenes performance.
When Wang Cailing turned around for the first time, my heart was even tighter: that is the national goddess Jiang.
Once the actor is not handled well, the aesthetic expectation brought by modeling can only expose the shortcomings of the actor and make the characters look terrible.
As far as details are concerned, Jiang's profound performance skills make Gu Changwei dare to use long shots.
Gu Changwei's long shot also made Jiang's performance more complete, and Wang Cailing's character became more authentic in the lens language closest to documentary.
From the beginning, Wang Cailing pretended to be cocky, and at the end, she was with her adopted daughter, and she exuded the brilliance of motherhood.
In Wang Cailing's eyes, persistence is less and less, peace is more and more, vulnerability is less and less, and strength is more and more.
Even the expression changed from joy to sadness, and she said a thousand words in Wang Cailing's heart.
In my opinion, this is what attracts me most about this film.
Beginning of spring also maintains the level of Gu Changwei's previous works in constructing the historical realism of movies through details.
Bridge opening is plastered with the Beijing Asian Games, Huang's old jeans and Zhou Yu's "ancestor-level" T-shirt;
The 80-edition fence on Tiananmen Square and the retro police uniform of the armed police resounded through the "pink memories" of the karaoke bars;
Camel brand ink of Wang Cailing's family, instant noodles in Beijing, desk lamp with dunk sticker, old logo of CCTV 2 on TV, Wahaha AD calcium milk for 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 flavor and sense of the times of the whole movie are all emitted from these things.
This sentence implies the eternal gap between ideal and reality, and also reflects the distance between historical imagination and 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 seen 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-style absurd feelings that is rare in China films.
At the same time, it is covered by strange arrangements and common themes about dreams.
It is not because her practice of elegant art is not accepted, but that she is using a way of hitting the wall to express the unbearable loftiness and flying of her body.
Perhaps the imaginary satisfaction of the film singing in the Grand Theatre at the end should be Wang Cailing, which is the greatest comfort that the audience can get.