Preface
Gansu is a magical place. To the east is the loess plateau, to the west is the vast cold green grassland; Tianshui , Zhangye , Wuwei , Dunhuang , listening to these names, you will feel that the light of the Qin and Han Empires has never gone away in this land, but now Gansu is desolate and lost its soul, and has lived for a long time at the end. It not only produces galloping horses and fragrant melons and fruits, but also laughs at bowed camels and barren land. People who travel here lament its majestic beauty, while those who have lived here for a long time are thinking of escaping.
Artists say that Gansu is a bitter water rose, which uses the most bitter water to produce the most beautiful flowers.
recently spent two hours finishing the " Hidden Into the Dust " in the popular Moments. As an indigenous person, I was actually very surprised by the film's emergence. First of all, whether on the screen or in reality, the Gansu dialect is indeed a minority, and it is not comparable to Guanzhong dialect and Sichuan dialect; moreover, the film is based on a 2011 masterpiece "Hello!" "Mr. Tree", will inevitably remind people of the embarrassment of applauding and not being well-received. And the name "Hidden into the Dust" is quite literary, and it doesn't look like it's going to the box office at first glance (just kidding). In short, when I watched this film with doubts, I found that in terms of narrative, film conception and characterization, "Hidden in the Dust" and "Hello!" "Mr. Tree" is quite different. This is a very commercial love movie. From beginning to end, the core of the story is clear and fixed, that is, telling an ancient love story. Rural elements, Gansu dialect is its wedding dress; and the suffering that happened on this land is the catalyst for this tragedy.
Below, I will explain from two aspects my most intuitive feeling about this movie as a native. Following my Q&A-style nonsense about "Downton Abbey II" in the last article, this time we will return to the mainstream and talk about "Hidden in the Dust" (note that the following content contains spoilers) The next
hides into the dust and tells the love story of an honest bachelor and a disabled girl. The background of the story is set in rural Gansu in 2011 (the actual filming location of the film is Huaqiangzi Village, Luocheng Town, Gaotai County, Zhangye City). Ma Youtie, the protagonist, is the fourth eldest in the family. He is a little unsociable but kind-hearted. At the beginning of the film, he lives in a dilapidated small side room of his brother Ma Youtong's house. Ma Youtie is honest and loyal, and is a good hand at work, but he is not welcomed by his brother's family everywhere.
The movie here does not explain why Ma Youtie didn't break up with his brother because of his age. The story behind proves that Ma Youtie is a good laborer, whether it is building a house or farming. Full of children and grandchildren. This is the first very abrupt point in the film, so let's just accept the setting and press it. The sister-in-law, eager to get rid of Ma Youtito, introduced the hard-working heroine, Cao Guiying, who was infertile, incontinent, and disabled in one leg. She, who is also the protagonist, has a brother and sister-in-law who also dislike her ( The background of Cao Guiying's character here is quite well explained ). As soon as the two families got together, they arranged for Ma and Cao's marriage, and they found an empty house in the village and split it out.
Just like that, the poor days of Ma and Cao began. Except for a donkey that has followed him for most of his life and a rack car , Ma Youtie has almost no possessions. But the life of the two gave Ma Youtie more or less hope for life. From the time he took Guiying to the graves of his parents to pay homage to Guiying's medical treatment, the two's lives began to be flamboyant. During the period, Ma Youtie donated blood to the richest man in the village under the moral kidnapping of everyone (this place is the second abrupt point of the film, so I will not list it first). Later, the village was paid to demolish the vacant houses, and the house where they lived was at risk of demolishing. Ma Youtie is determined to give Guiying a home of her own.From drying bricks to building beams, with Ma Youtie's efforts, the house rose from the mouth to the ground ( personally thinks that this section is very beautiful ).
Later, Ma Youtie's brother applied for a house in the city for Ma Youtie in the village (personal guess is as follows, Cao Guiying is infertile, and Ma Youtie has no children. It is estimated that the third child wants to inherit. But here is the shot The language is also very abrupt, so it is better to press it first). With their own home and a harvest year, Ma and Cao's life is getting more and more prosperous day by day. Suddenly one day, Guiying, who was sick, went to Tiantou to deliver food to Ma Youtie, and fell dizzy into the river and died. Ma You's heart is ashes, and after selling the seller's property to pay off the debt, the protagonist goes to another world with his wife.
The story ends here. From the perspective of the integrity of the story, the deduction logic of this tragedy is qualified. Although the ending was a bit flat and thunderous, compared to the film "One Life", which was also exhibited to the public, the operation of ending the love story with a tragedy of the times like 911, "Hidden in the Dust" is undoubtedly much smoother. And as an aboriginal, I would like to applaud the setting in the film about the countryside. The acting skills of the actors are very amazing, and some of the lens language is quite well expressed.
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Here, through a broken mirror, the expression of the two looking at each other is presented on the screen at the same time as
.
As a pair of disgusted couples, the starting point of Ma and Cao's love tragedy should naturally be the shaping of the character background. Here you can refer to the movie "The Life of the Disapproved Songzi". But the creators almost omitted the hero's past . In concentration, great efforts are made to express the sense of tearing between the hero and heroine and the surrounding environment and characters. Granted, narrative isolation is more sympathetic to the audience. But too much force is bound to be half the effort. For example, the second abrupt point is that in order to portray the indifference of the villagers and the honesty and kindness of Ma Youtie, the screenwriter asked the whole village to morally kidnap Ma Youtie to donate blood, on the grounds that only Ma Youtie is panda blood. Please note that the story took place in a remote and poor rural area in the northwest at the beginning of this century. As a native, I can tell you responsibly that the vast majority of my township party members do not know their blood type , let alone others. Very few people who have seen the world know that they are ABO and already burn high incense, let alone Rh blood type. And due to traditional traditions and lack of information, letting people donate blood is equivalent to calling people to commit suicide. If this kind of abruptness can be classified as artistic processing, what is even more abrupt and unavoidable is why almost all the villagers are so indifferent to Ma Youtie. He is obviously a good worker and honest, so why is he being targeted everywhere? The same operation also has five-guarantee households' buildings, so it doesn't affect one more building, right? I believe that if the creators put some effort into focusing on the story rather than the deliberate environment, and polish the story like Ning Hao polishes the "Crazy **" series, "Hidden in the Dust" will probably be the first film in the history of film. A love tragedy benchmark.
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is also a low-budget movie, Ning Hao's grasp of the storyline is as accurate as
, and the seemingly absurd storyline is extremely smooth.
2
On top of the dust and smoke,
positioned "Hidden in the Dust" as a love tragedy, and it will not satisfy the appetite of fans. And from the language of the lens, it can be seen that the creator's will will not stay on the tragedy of love. From various online media, public accounts to circle of friends, it seems that some audiences who can afford movie tickets are more willing to start from the love tragedy of Ma Youtie and Cao Guiying to create a big tragedy of the times, revealing the reaction in the film. The absurdity and indifference and indifference in the rural areas of Gansu in that era.
So, are the creators really expressing a realistic rural story or trying to reflect the truth on the loess?
Here, let's sort out the logic of the story first: the love tragedy between Ma and Cao presented in the film stems from the hero and heroine being rejected by the villagers and their relatives. Ma Youtie lived in poverty and could not even marry a daughter-in-law because he was rejected; Cao Guiying was disabled because he was rejected and abused by his brother and sister-in-law. The weird thing is that the creator doesn't care about the root cause of being disliked at all, as if the hero and heroine are born like this, and enter the narrative perspective with the well-known axiom of being disliked. Then, in order to exacerbate the tragedy of the story, the creator incarnates Pandora, focusing all the good qualities in the magic box on this pair of poor and miserable mandarin ducks, and releasing all the evil on the supporting characters surrounding the protagonist. In this Facebooking narrative, the insensitive villagers morally kidnapped Ma Youtie to donate blood to the rich, and the chatting after dinner in the village deliberately or unintentionally revealed the mockery of Ma and Cao, and the exchanges between the hero and heroine and the supporting actors. Almost all negative. Going further, the creators completely isolated their lives from the villagers. They built houses and beams. The nearly 2,000 kilograms of wheat mentioned later were completely handled by horses and irons, a prime-age labor force and a donkey. The writers have a morbid pursuit of about this sense of undefined (just what should be articulated) isolation, as if it were some kind of golden rule for shaping tragedy. So Ma Youtie became an omnipotent but impoverished rural superman; events such as weddings and funerals can be cut at will, Cao Guiying fell into a waist-deep canal and no one rescued him, and no one was able to salvage the body. The husband does it alone. In this polar opposite perspective, misery is misery itself, and if it's not miserable enough, let the bad guy be a little bit more evil (pull down the house with a bulldozer). So the story becomes, in a rural village in Gansu, the villagers have turned into evil minions, and they can't settle down because of their honest duties. The twisted era is like a bulldozer wielding a bucket, smashing a beautiful and pure love.
So really? As aboriginals, are ours, or are our countryside really as antagonistic as depicted in Genesis? Is the Gansu countryside really that ugly from the real perspective of ?
This clearly reflects the creator's cognitive misrepresentation . Starting from the real material world, Gansu's geographical features and backward road traffic determined that villages tended to be isolated in that era. Dozens of people in a village look up and see each other, and this almost constitutes the whole of this small society. In this human-friendly society, it is almost impossible to live in a similar city in a "squat" because the backward infrastructure cannot provide necessary life and production services. In other words, the communication between people is very sufficient, which is beyond the perceptual existence. Secondly, the backwardness of the productivity level determines that the labor force like Ma Cao and his wife cannot survive alone. For example, from sowing to harvesting to threshing to the final storage of 2,000 catties of wheat, it is unrealistic to rely only on a prime labor force to complete this process (the reason for this is that as an indigenous person, I have almost participated in the process from farming to fertilizing. The whole process from warehouse receipt to sale). Similar to building houses and building beams, weddings and funerals. Such an economic basis determines that the ubiquitous "isolation" in the film is extremely unrealistic (this kind of isolation is common in urban life). Remember, the worse the natural conditions, the more people tend to live in groups. This is the survival logic of our place, no matter how noisy as a matchmaker or as dumb as a fourth child.
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Weddings and funerals, building a house. All kinds of major events are always accompanied by all kinds of help and people watching the fun. This is the daily life.
is shaped by a binary masked character, plus the "sense of isolation" that the creator forcibly grafted into this land, which does not belong to the original, through a love story with a somewhat stumbling plot, to write a creator and a love story. Some fans call it a "tragedy of the times" in rural areas in backward areas. this is clearly not writtenRealism, but magic giant system. In fact, such creation itself is a tragedy, a tragedy that belongs to creation and aesthetics.
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The tragedy lies in its strong authenticity and the unavoidable nature of the tragedy. "I'm Not the God of Medicine" did a great job. With a little polish on
, "Hidden in the Dust" should have been a brilliant love tragedy. But creators love to "get out of the circle" as much as their fans, but at the same time they are unwilling to go deep into rural society and dig deep into the root of backwardness and suffering. They can only engage in binary opposition like religious stories. And the lack of the ability to condense narrative makes this love story anticlimactic. This is a huge waste of the exquisite set props and the superb acting skills of the actors.
3
This land is probably really long forgotten.
It is so long ago that suffering seems to be synonymous with the lingering of this land. The containers named "Gansu" and "rural" not only have to carry the real pain inside, but also serve the imagination The creator's "new word" nests home.
are just those real hurts that few people care about. I guarantee with my personality that the following narrative is a true story that happened on that piece of yellow land:
- is a happy family of four, the son goes out to work after getting married, and the old man is at home watching the house and farming in his prime. The ordinary days were interrupted by a phone call, and his son was electrocuted while working on a high platform. Because of the superstition that the corpse could not be transported to the village, he had to set up a tent outside the village to do things. The old man and his wife turned pale overnight, and there was a daughter-in-law who was pregnant with a posthumous child.
This is a tragedy because of the lack of science education.
- is a family of five with an old man and two children. Men are the absolute main force of labor in the family, and the whole family farms for a living. One day, while building a new house for someone else, he collapsed and broke his leg. The situation was complicated and he could not get effective treatment immediately. In the hospital, the doctor said that the limbs would be amputated, and the family members were scared to death when they heard it. Not to mention the cost of surgery and medicine, after the amputation, the mainstay of the family has become a burden, and in all likelihood it will return to poverty. The poor life that can't be seen at a glance is over.
This is tragic because of backward traffic medical care.
- A family of four, the man is seriously slurred, he is a bachelor, and his parents are still alive. Similar to "Hiding in the Dust", it talks about a wife with intellectual disabilities. A healthy baby was born a few years later. Later, when his wife fell ill, the family did not give treatment because the child had already been born. Villagers' intervention is invalid. Later died in a cold winter.
This is a tragedy because of the inherent cultural dross.
The suffering of this land is firmly written in the lives of the indigenous people, It is so heavy that bystanders do not need to process it, but only need to record every drop of sweat, every time he leans over, and between the strokes, the tragedy is over. to make.
is just too complicated to distill the real stories of these little people, and it's too troublesome to sort out the background. And it's far less effective than the indifferent villagers, the buckets wielding bulldozers, and the crumbling rubble. But in the eyes of director Li , the truth is a matter of the props team. What the story needs to be realistic, it is enough to be miserable. How easy it is for to bring the unspeakable original sin to the land and the villagers who live in it, and why bother to describe their joys, sorrows, sorrows and joys! How easy it is to let Cao Guiying drown, let's be abrupt, anyway, it's miserable enough. .
how easy it is to look at a vain graft story and shed a few tears, anyway good and evil are so clear; misleading stereotypes are formed, anywayI am creative freedom; but in reality, rural areas in Gansu just need to develop, improve living conditions, and build infrastructure, but what does this have to do with me, a filmmaker!
The film, which was released at the Berlin Film Festival, mocked this ancient yellow land. wonderful love.
loess really doesn't despise people.
Fortunately, reality does not depend on human will. Accompanied by heartbreak stories full of suffering and pain, redemption on the loess happens every day, the unstoppable ticking of time, the gradually clearing of the Yellow River and the rising sun.
The ending of the above incident, the family in the first story is going to break up; in the second story, the man's leg has been transferred to a large hospital to avoid amputation several times, and he has recovered and returned to life; in the third story, the woman is almost collectively forgotten a few years later. Life goes on. doesn't have a vigorous ending, but these together are the reality of the world.
End
PS: Some are really embarrassed, what "no romantic roses can grow in loess, but every inch of loess is sprinkled with his love"? Kushui rose is a national geographical indication product. From romantic confession to processing jam, the quality is consistent and trustworthy.
Source: Voice of Uncle Wang
