The original title: "De-violence": a contradictory work between typification and localization
"Deviolation" is a hard-line crime film rarely seen on the screen in recent years, showing that director Liu Haoliang always loves criminal action genre films. The film has all the characteristics of classic Hong Kong crime films, such as dual narratives, landscaped action scenes, comic characters, etc. However, on the artistic level, it failed to replicate the myth of the golden age of Hong Kong crime films, and even exposed the weakness of this model while performing the classic elements of Hong Kong films. In essence, this is the core proposition of discussing the cross-regional production of Hong Kong films: "Oranges born in Huainan are oranges, and oranges born in Huaibei are oranges". It is also an important criterion for the success of the Hong Kong director's Beishang co-production, that is, whether the so-called genre index can fit the current situation. Film culture and business context.
Strictly speaking, "De-violence" is a police film. As a sub-genre of crime films, police and criminal films can be regarded as one of the most localized genres in Hong Kong. In the 1980s, represented by Jackie Chan's "Police Story" series and Wu Yusen's "Heroes" series, the development of crime films entered a peak period. Wu Yusen created the classic "dual hero narrative" mode in the film "Blood Two Heroes", and in "De-violence", the director adopted the same camera position and composition, and used the form of parallel montage to compare the police Zhong Cheng with The gangster Zhang Fal watched the cross-editing of "Blood Two Heroes" in the same video room. This intertextual treatment not only identifies the narrative mode of "Blood Two Heroes", but also identifies the glory of the Hong Kong crime film it represents. However, it can be found that the director used this technique to confuse the boundary between the police and the bandit, emphasizing the common characteristics of the two, in order to complete the narrative intent, but it seems to have only played a little role in fanfare. The so-called "dual heroes play" aims to create a dual opposition of pros and cons/police and gangsters who sympathize with each other, are enemies and friends, and are both good and evil. However, in the current context, the depiction of the villain cannot be raised to the psychological level, regardless of the video or narrative, the tragic portrayal of the villain still appears restrained or even rejected.
In the film, Zhang Yan and his mistress have a very interesting conversation. After Zhang Yan learned that the woman became pregnant, he named the future child "Zhang Xiao", which means a generation of heroes. Through Zhang Fal's mouth, the director seemed to tell his expectations for character creation, which is exactly what the duo model requires, but this detail becomes an embarrassing footnote to tear the film. Zhang Fal can never be portrayed as a "lord". The audience can only perceive an innate anti-social personality through the unreasonable and unrestrained killing of the "Eagle Gang" represented by Zhang Fal. In other words, the director only portrays the external image of the gangster who suffers from violent crime and cannot portray or deliberately avoid the internal image of this character, including the psychological or social roots of personality tragedy. This also directly makes it difficult for the audience to empathize and sympathize with them. Even at the end of the film, Bao Qijing's mother of the gangster appears briefly, showing the appearance of a native family. Although Bao Qijing dedicated the most touching performance moment of the whole film, he could not save Zhang Fal's collapsed character image. The ambiguous mother-child relationship cannot explain anything, and Zhang Xuan's father's absence seems to point to the source of the personality tragedy. But this kind of speculation cannot be confirmed. Even if it is confirmed, it seems too general, superficial and naive.
In sharp contrast is the other end of the mirror image, Interpol Zhong Cheng. Zhong Cheng also did not follow the traditional way of so-called righteousness and evil, or that we can only see his high level. Whether Zhong Cheng was arrested as a pre-war mobilization, or a small colleague who was injured on the job tore up the small advertisements that covered the police posters, they all showed the main theme of the Hong Kong director. But as just said, the inappropriate expression tears the overall style of the film to a certain extent, that is, the director's "Orange is born in Huaibei".
In addition, the action scenes of "De-violence" also have the classic characteristics of Hong Kong crime films, which are highly formalized and landscaped. The action scenes of the film are dominated by gun battles.Following the pyrotechnic effects of typical Hong Kong-style action movies, various exaggerated heavy weapons, such as automatic rifles, submachine guns, and grenades, can be used almost infinitely, directly replacing urban streets with small war scenes. For the crime, a series of dramatic treatments were also carried out, such as provoking the police before and after. But all this is undoubtedly a fatal destruction of its style for a film with a realistic background. The director wants to retain the genre processing that Hong Kong crime films are good at, and also wants to express mainstream ideology with realistic themes.
In general, no matter the action scenes, character creation or narrative mode, the idea of paying tribute to the classics and learning from the ancestors is true, but the social and cultural background on which the classics rely is already a world of difference. Although the film's art and setting are quite remarkable, most of what is seen on the image level is the promotion and violation of a director who has just "goed north" and has just arrived. To a certain extent, choosing a specific bridging method is the only way for Hong Kong directors, especially commercial film directors, to make cross-regional productions. Before this, Chen Kexin, Lin Chaoxian and others have made active explorations on this issue, and related works can be used for reference. (Author: Hao Han, Department of the Beijing Film Academy directing 2020 PhD)
