article | Linghu Boguang
One of the 2023 inventory articles, the best domestic movie this year, this literary film. I think they are "The Mistake by the River" and "Space Exploration Editorial Department". The latter has been written before, so I will write about the former here.
This movie is particularly suspenseful, artistic, and worthy of interpretation. In fact, Chinese movies have not produced this kind of movie for a long time.
This is the first time I have watched this kind of domestic film with a special artistic sense (there are quite a lot of foreign films), and it is about real detectives solving crimes. The outcome of the story has no answer. It's a movie worth trying. The important thing about this movie is not whether you understand it or not. What's important is the process rather than the result.
People continue to grow by making mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you won't grow. The story is also very charming. It is amazing that director Wei Shujun can make it like this. It has his original artistic value. This is not a commercial film, not to make money. The director is well aware of this, but he still presents it in the form of an art film and it's so good.
Camus is quoted at the beginning of the movie, "People cannot understand fate, so I pretend to be fate. I put on the stupid and incomprehensible face of God." and Yu Hua's "View of Destiny" in the preface to the novel , more accurate than us” Destiny + opinion is the theme
Who is the murderer? It's not important, "The Mistake by the River" is crazy.
My understanding is that the real murderer in this movie is not important. What is important is that it wants to highlight human alienation. Combined with the background of the rapid development of national reform and opening up in the 1990s, The emphasis is on the wave of the times washing away people's spiritual world. The following is some analysis:
1. Mazhe, no doubt it is Mazhe, Mazhe is contrary to the development trend of this era. The most intuitive expression in the movie is that Ma Zhe wears leather clothes at the beginning, and other police officers wear police uniforms, and later Ma Zhe also wears police uniforms. This can be understood as Ma Zhe's transformation from being aloof to being gregarious.
2. Ma Zhe’s third-class merit. The country and society can affect people's memory. This is also the same as Ma Zhe later said that he shot and killed a madman in the temple, which shows that our memory is not reliable and may be an affected memory. In the past, Ma Zhe was our pursuit, our theoretical weapon and ideological arm for transforming society. However, those achievements in the past seem to be less important. Instead, everyone pursues wealth and satisfies desires. Is this a fit?
The character design of Ma Zhe is very contradictory. He looks like an uncle, but he has the passion of a young man. As a policeman and a civil servant, he does not give the leader any face in the system. From the leader's smash, it can be seen that he is also interested in the workplace. A dismissive set. The third prize proposed by the leader later is like the pie that the leader draws for you. Ma Zhe seems to have really won the third prize, but when Ma Zhe asked his wife and comrades, they didn’t get the third prize. In fact, it was a hint from the leader. , Ma Zhe puts aside his naive ideas and can climb up together by being assimilated into the system.
But Ma Zhe's sense of justice did not allow it. From the beginning when Ma Zhe felt that the murderer was not a lunatic and chose to continue investigating the case, he has been making mistakes, indirectly killing Hong, who was having an affair, and Xu Liang, who was a cross-dresser, especially Xu Liang's death in front of him must have given him a small spiritual shock. When he first found Xu Liang, he also sympathized with Xu Liang's experience and felt unfair for him. This may be normal and often does not require the truth. When someone is caught, performance is raised immediately. No evidence is needed. Closing the case as soon as possible is the only business.
But Ma Zhe insisted on his sense of justice. He could catch the madman from the beginning and close the case. After all, the madman would not resist or refute. He insisted on continuing the investigation and finally found out about someone else's extramarital affair. Xu Liang His cross-dressing habit indirectly killed two people. His sense of justice was shaken or collapsed. Then he also had hallucinations and he shot and killed the madman.
At this time, he also knew that the madman was the murderer. Later, he went to the leader to resign. My feeling is that he still wanted to maintain his original intention. He killed someone, but it was not the madman who killed him, but Hong and Xu. Liang, he wanted to put down this position that brought him too many sins, and then the leader asked him to go back and rest, but he didn't kill anyone.
Here comes the interesting part. The next scene is that Ma Zhe came to the river to commit suicide. My understanding is that he killed the passionate Ma Zhe in the past who insisted on his own justice. He chose to be assimilated, so he caught him immediately. He killed the madman and closed the case. In the end, he also achieved success and won the third prize that the leader said.
2023 is over, and Zhu Yilong’s new film is still underestimated.
Some people don’t understand why some people can’t understand that Ma Zhe is marginalized in the police force. Does the movie have to use words to describe Ma Zhe's ostracism in order for it to be seen? It was strange from the beginning when the director asked Ma Zhe to move his office to a movie theater. At the end of the meeting, everyone left in twos and threes, except Ma Zhe.
Moreover, before the meeting, when the director was playing table tennis, everyone was complimenting the director on his good game. No one dared to beat the director in a fight. As a result, Ma Zhe directly smashed the director in a fight with the director.
This movie is not only open to the ending, but also to the process. Everyone can see the different core. The novel itself echoes the author's original sentence: "Fate's view is more accurate than ours."
Starting from the novel, I saw this core: Ma Zhe is a person with mental problems, but he and those around him No one realizes it. This is suggested by the fact that the fetus has a gene for intellectual disability and that he cannot find evidence that he has obtained third-class meritorious service. In the process of his investigation, he gradually discovered from more clues that he was also a madman.
And from his personal experience of being unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy, he explained from the side why madmen kill people. Ma Zhe has been looking for any connection between the three dead people. After reading it, he can find that the three dead people in this story are all aliens. The old lady is a masochist, the poet is a spiritual utopia, and the barber is a transvestite. They all have their own "madness" under the shell of normal people. They symbolize that all living beings have their own weird side, but they are just not known to outsiders.
After the barber's weirdness was exposed to the world, he chose to end his life, which is a metaphor that people can only hide their abnormal side, but once it is made public, they will face a devastating blow. So in the end, the madman puts on Ma Zhe's clothes, which is when he truly realizes the fact that he is also a madman. He beats the madman to death in an attempt to suppress or even eliminate his crazy side, and puts on the uniform and puts on a normal shell like everyone else.
In the last scene, it can be seen that his children also inherited his genes and are also crazy. Fate gave him a child and a case about a group of lunatics at the same time. Destiny had long seen through that Ma Zhe was a lunatic. One of the problematic aspects of this film is that when his wife was arguing with him, he yelled: "This is fate!"
In my opinion, there seems to be no truth in everything, only the facts in front of me. The result given by fate. Does "The Mistake by the River" really refer to Ma Zhe's mistake? All people are related to the river, including Yaosi’s mother-in-law’s sexual fetishes, Wang Hong and Qian Ling’s love that is not recognized by the times, and Xu Liang’s transvestism that is not accepted.
Maybe they are also the ones who made mistakes? They are the ones who make mistakes along the river of the times, and they go against the flow of the times. It seems that everything they do should not be called mistakes. Unless a premise is added, that is, mistakes made by the river of the times, then the ones who are wrong are really horses. Zhe? Was it the mistake Ma Zhe made on the riverside that he wanted to investigate the case further? Is it a mistake to search for a truth that seems to many to not exist?
Fans say it’s so enjoyable, but the audience doesn’t understand? We need "The Mistake by the River"
This story is not a detective suspense drama, nor a horror film. It is actually a part of scar literature. After all, the most popular thing in that era was scar literature. In this story, the culprit is not any specific person, but the social environment at the time. The timeline of the original work is not 1995 (after all, the original work was written in 1988), but an era when individual will must obey collective will, worldviews are broken, and thoughts are distorted.
In this era, everyone who doesn't fit in is a lunatic, and everyone who doesn't keep his secrets dies. Ma Zhe tried to use materialist thinking and dialectics to explain all this, but in the end it was in vain, and he followed them into madness.
In this story, apart from Ma Zhe, the only survivor is Qian Ling. Because the broken-down train suddenly blew its whistle, Qian Ling kept her secret. Until the end of the play, no one knew what Qian Ling's secret was, but she survived with her secret.
Nothing about Ma Zhe seems to be called a mistake. Maybe there is no answer to everything. When I was thinking about the so-called truth, I also became Ma Zhe. I am also the Ma Zhe who does not believe in the answers everyone says. I also want to Ma Zhe wants to thoroughly investigate the truth about the movie. I am also the Ma Zhe who made a mistake that goes against the mainstream. But is this really Ma Zhe's mistake?
I am not wrong, Ma Zhe is not wrong, Ma Zhe says he is not wrong, then who is wrong?
is not important, because it is just a movie, and such a movie worth interpreting is what we need.
