Shanshan went to the funeral for her grandmother. She returned from Hong Kong to her hometown of Chaoshan after a long absence, and she was temporarily away from the unsatisfactory city life. Her arrival broke the otherwise calm country life. Childhood friends Azhen and Xiaosong are married and have a daughter. The relationship between the three of them began to become subtle, and Shanshan also confided her secret.
Watching a good movie, it is easy to feel the mood of the characters and the atmosphere of the scene. This feeling is related to the state at the time, a certain person you know, the past, the present and the future, and even the dream scene. When this feeling becomes clear and ethereal, it becomes an indescribable and indescribable homesickness.
I have found relatives and homes in the movie, the grandmother of "My Childhood", the ballads of "Yellow Earth", and even Brigitte Lin's red dress. But what really hit me and made me think about homesickness was "The Years Like Water". For this reason, after 30 years of filming, I returned to the location of "The Years Like Water" alone, the tower in Jieyang. Gangcun.
Seeing Stone Mountain from afar, I knew that the movie was there. Rows of new houses were built in the dirty, smelly and black pond. The old houses that were unoccupied were ruined and shattered, and there were more grass and flowers blooming. Fortunately, there is still shade under the big trees, the children climbing the trees are gone, and the people in the village seem to have disappeared before my eyes. Finally, an old woman walked from the ancestral home, she asked, brother, have you eaten?
I walked through the three-entry courtyard, walked around the small temple, and climbed to the mountain to overlook this no longer peaceful village. The machines in the quarry roared from afar, and the factory chimneys close to the village were emitting smoke into the sky. A few kilometers away, the viaduct of the Xiamen-Shenzhen high-speed rail emerged from the tunnel, straddling the cultivated fields, crossing the Rongjiang River, and heading further south. What I saw before my eyes seemed very far away. But the ones that have been gone for a long time appear as real things. I realized that the movie nostalgia that I traced back is actually not clear, it is like the movie, hazy, discrete, illusory and real.
"Years Like Water" is a melancholy movie, which lingers with sadness and sorrow, like smoke and mist, which cannot be dissipated. Shanshan was weak and tired from the moment she appeared, so resentful that she could not laugh. The funeral journey influenced her emotional state, and it also brought infinite sadness to the film, just like the footnotes of death and separation in the film, as ripples continue to pass away.
As for birth and separation, it is the fulcrum that carries all the emotional weight of "The Years Like Water", and people are inevitably separated by time and space. It includes Shanshan's wandering experience from the countryside to the city, as well as the childhood relationship between her uncle and sons who were torn apart by the time of life, unable to return to the past.
At the end, the helpless Shanshan set off to return to Hong Kong, thinking that the other party would continue to be in the center of urban life, and she couldn't help crying when she thought of not knowing when to meet again. Gu Meihua and Siqin Gaowa held hands and said goodbye to each other. They cherish each other's emotions and no longer need to hide. In the
movie, Shantou in the 1980s was remote and friendly, with stone mountains, tracts of paddy fields, and wide river channels. In the middle few dialogues, it was mentioned that the sailing boat can lead to the sea.
The neat and consistent village buildings, the arcade post office in the town, and the sandy street view outside the window of the White Swan Hotel. The trip to Guangzhou was more a sign that the mainland will also usher in irreversible urbanization (especially a series of exaggerated reactions by young boys), and the rural homeland and the next generation will eventually be completely changed.
"The Years Like Water" has a destined coincidence. Its background is the Sino-British negotiations in 1984. Hong Kong people have to start thinking about where we belong. In the ending subtitles, Yan Hao stated that the creation of the film was related to his father's death.
For me, "The Years Like Water" provides enlarged private memories. From the beginning of the student team, flash back to the grave to burn gold and silver paper; from everyone shoveling pot ashes to a hundred-year-old tree that a few people can’t hug; from an old house lacking light, a bamboo basket hanging on a beam, a wooden clogs style Slippers, old-fashioned sleeping beds with mosquito nets in the south, tarpaulin umbrellas in the pouring rain... and then to the poetic kites, straw stacks and field chats. Like Shanshan, we can’t see the soup river , But can clearly feel that the time has passed between the coming and going of Gu Fan Yuanying.
In 1989, Zhang Wanting filmed the sequel to "The Years Like Water", "Eight Two Golds". From the stop of the ship, to the coastal water villages of South China, to the appearance of actor Xie Weixiong, the similarities between the two films It's too much. It’s just that Zhang Wanting and Luo Qirui seem to like politics moreSlogans and cultural differences.
The tone of "Eight Two Golds" ranges from cheerful to sad, and the colors are relatively exaggerated and rich, just like Zhang Aijia's new red outfit; while "Like Water Flowing Years" has fine brushwork and light ink from beginning to end, lightly singing and chanting. At the end of the two films, there is a long farewell. "Eight Two Golds" borrows from the change of human status and bluntly talks about the impermanence of the world. "The Years Like Water" is still filled with sorrow, and there is still no way to explain it. This kind of inexplicable, as if there is a story happening but nothing happened, is the brilliance of "The Years Like Water" and the origin of the poetry.
