Wuhai is the second feature film by Zhou Ziyang, the director of The Old Beast. It is somewhat different from the previous one in temperament, but it has the same origin. Similarly, it is a strong drama that men are superior to women. Tu Youyou plays the unruly role of an old bastard, and Huang Xuan plays the dangerous role of a small town called Phoenix Man. These two leading men are largely unlovable and convincing.

Huang Xuan plays Huayang.

The story of Wuhai contains a family's deep-rooted addiction for many years, and the new diseases that people can't prevent from mutating under the rapid development of society, but they broke out in just three days. The intense external drama conflict and people's inner tension combined to break up the seemingly calm and happy life.

The film begins with Huang Xuan's debt. This debt relationship involves accidents in urban development, P2P, usury, naked loans, class differences and other social problems, as well as suspicion and calculation between husband and wife, friends' dirty hearts, and torture of people's self-esteem, value and conscience. The urgency of debt collection day by day, the moral kidnapping of debt, the contempt of family, the estrangement and betrayal of wife, the bottleneck of career and the failure of making friends. In the process of recording these collapses, the camera captures the anxiety of the characters more sensitively.

Yang Zishan plays Miao Wei.

Wuhai is not only a place name, but also an image consistent with the narrative theme of the film. The last "old beast" was located in Ordos, and Wuhai is a small town adjacent to Ordos. Like Erdos, it has experienced rapid economic development and bubble burst, which belongs to the "bizarre" development of small cities in contemporary China. Primitive natural strangeness and seemingly incompatible post-modern humanistic landscape are mixed in the same time and space, and some designs of electronic sound are absurd and natural, providing a set of inexplicable and harmonious audio-visual system for movies.

At the same time, Wuhai literally means Black Sea, which is very consistent with the theme of being drowned by desire discussed in the film. In the film, whether it is the possessiveness of love, the freshness of external stimuli, the desire for success and money, and the desire for self-worth, it is all desire. In addition to the contradictions faced by couples, it is human nature that the protagonists Huang Xuan and Yang Zishan, the vanity of female college students who borrow money online, the sexual desire of messengers who take advantage of debts, the treacherous greed of friends and the superiority of in-laws. Everyone is trapped in the ocean of unconscious desires, some drift with the tide, and some are unconsciously swallowed up.

Of course, the three-day concentrated conflict will be too intensive in the rhythm of life flow, and the conflicts and contradictions brought about by some performance rhythms and narrative methods of the film make some changes and behavior choices of the characters appear abrupt and hasty.

Tu Nan plays Miao Wei's father.

The overall tone of Wuhai is cold from beginning to end, and there are some surreal absurd scenes, such as a group of old ladies posing in strange yoga postures, an old folk music band playing casually in the face of a burning tent, and a homeless person struggling to climb into the belly of a dinosaur with no eyes at night ... This is a director's aesthetic interest based on reality and a small glory worth tasting.

The actor's performance is another interesting part of the film, because there are highly dramatic parts in the plot, and whether the characters are credible is very important for the establishment of the film. Huang Xuan's works in recent years have undoubtedly got rid of the design of "national first love" and "cream niche" in previous years, but the complexity of Wu Hai's character still far exceeds his previous film and television works. This is a rare figure in Huang Xuan who has the meaning of "negation". He is not lovable, but he is not a villain. He is like Sisyphus pushing a stone, exhausted and endless. From the beginning, he mortgaged his family's property to do business, but in the face of "temptation", he didn't just refuse. We can see a little hesitation. He had nowhere to put blx in front of the superior Yue family, and even finally revealed the extreme ugliness of human nature after going to collapse.

"Wuhai" preview screenshot

Last year, after actor Qin Hao harvested a broken "climbing" stalk, Huang Xuan's "climbing" in this film was a storm that accumulated more energy. At the end of the film, the seemingly absent smile is loaded with fear, anger and relief, which makes an intriguing footnote for the film and the characters.

In contrast, Yang Zishan's performance is not so brilliant, and it is certainly not a collapse. It just seems that the actress has a set of fixed procedures in the way of mobilizing her expression, muscles and limbs, and her personal identity will hang over her role.

However, there are still surprises in the presentation of a hearty quarrel scene in the movie. After all, many times our aesthetic preference for the performance of literary films belongs to the scope of "introversion", and the intense emotions released to the outside world are easy to appear in TV dramas. At the same time, however, fierce quarrels in films such as Marriage Story, A Parting, and Stealing the Heart also provide an excellent section for the audience to wait and see the secular life.

In Wuhai, it is wonderful to explain this confrontation with a long lens. The performance is coordinated with the scheduling of the camera, the character, the family relationship of the character, the status quo of the character, and the inner inhuman subtext are all displayed. The inseparable gaze makes the viewer feel very substituted. Later, as Huang Xuan made a dash for the door, the sense of following all the situations that followed continued from the immersion of that moment.

"Wuhai" preview screenshot

As Zhou Ziyang's second feature film, although it is much more mature than the last one, it also gets a lot of inspiration from the masters. In addition to the quarrel in the above-mentioned analogy marriage story, the scene of burning tents is reminiscent of burning, and the strange dinosaur park seems to have a subtle intertextuality with Jia's "On Earth". But it does not prevent the director from showing some obvious personal styles and preferences for characters and observing the world.

Of course, the problems touched by Wuhai have not been further explored, and many problems that could have been further explored, like the dinosaur park, have become "landscapes" composed of unhappy lives of characters. There must be helplessness in this, but it is also a pity that the film is out of breath.

Proofreading: Liu Wei