905 Movie Network Special Article On the night of 520, three pure love movies "The Years I Missed You", "Tonight, Even if This Love Disappears from the World" and "April Girlfriend" gathered in the theater. While full of ritual feeling, they also Make the choice difficult. How good are they? Can pure love films still impress us Chinese audiences?
For this reason, this issue of "Today's Film Review" invites Lu Jianing, associate professor of Communication University of China, to make an appraisal report on 520 love movies.
"The Years I Missed You": The Growth Period of Love
"The Years I Missed You" is a story about the growth period of love. The film is based on the travel essay "Youth 18×2 Japan Slow Train Wandering". 18 years ago, Ami (played by Kiyohara Goya), a backpacker from Japan, came to the store where high school student Jimmy (played by Xu Guanghan) worked. The two spent a summer working together in the same store. Jimmy gradually develops a liking for Ami, but Ami will return to Japan. Facing Jimmy who couldn't sort out his mood, Ami made "a promise"... Time passed, and Jimmy, who returned to his hometown, discovered the postcard Ami sent from Japan 18 years ago. The memory of his first love emerged, and Jimmy took the train to Ami's hometown and began his journey to Japan alone.
Lu Jianing gave "Those Years I Missed You" a score of 3 stars for plot, 4 stars for cast, 3 stars for topicality, and 2 stars for emotional concentration. Audiences who particularly like Japanese movies can see "Slam Dunk" and "Love Letter" as tributes to some classic Japanese movies or animations. However, the plot of the film is loose and lacks urgency, so the emotional concentration of the film is not particularly high.
In terms of publicity, the film mainly relies on the star halo of the leading actor Xu Guanghan. In this film, Xu Guanghan's breakthrough is that he is no longer a teenager and is actually 12 years older than the heroine, but he wants to portray a boy who is younger than the heroine.
Judging from the reviews of the film, some netizens criticized this point: the male protagonist will only look for his first love when he is frustrated and unhappy in life. In this regard, Lu Jianing believes that this is a matter of perspective.
For example, in the popular TV series "My Altay", the male protagonist also set out to find himself, but when the male protagonist returned from riding in the snow, everyone felt very moved. This is because the heroine's life realm has improved at that time, and the audience can't help but feel love from the heroine's perspective. But in "Those Years I Missed You", the audience's perspective will always follow the character of Xu Guanghan, and they will think that the hero starts to miss the past because he is not having a satisfactory life. Therefore, two different narrative characters and perspectives will bring about different audience feelings and evaluations.
"April Girlfriend": Love Thought Period
As for "April Girlfriend", Lu Jianing gave a rating of 3 stars for plot, 4 stars for the cast, 3 stars for topicality, and 3 stars for emotional concentration.
The protagonists of the film, Takeru Sato and Masami Nagasawa, are Japanese actors familiar to most young and middle-aged Chinese audiences, and have a certain amount of mass accumulation. However, the story structure and character relationships of the film are very similar to the Japanese pure love movie "Call for Love in the Center of the World" a long time ago.
The story generally tells the story of a man whose fiancée suddenly disappeared before he got married. The fiancée knew what the hero’s previous girlfriend was like, so she wanted to track down the story of her husband’s ex-girlfriend, which also evoked the hero’s memories of his ex-girlfriend. . Therefore, many netizens will not understand this plot design.
As a movie that focuses on the period of thinking about love, the understanding of this kind of emotion can actually be understood from the perspective of traditional Japanese aesthetics. For example, the Japanese feeling of mourning for things is very common in some Japanese literary works such as "The Tale of Genji". "Sorrow for things" means that you perceive everything in the world, including the moods of other people. So when this woman follows her boyfriend's memory and wants to understand the story of him and his ex-girlfriend, this is actually a feeling of sorrow for things.
"Tonight, even if this love disappears from the world": The budding stage of love
The third pure love movie "Tonight, even if this love disappears from the world" begins with the sunny boy Kamiya Toru (played by Michichi Shunsuke) being The bullies were instructed to confess their love to their classmate Hinano Maori (played by Fukumoto Riko). After Maori agreed to Kamiya, Kamiya tried to explain, but Maori just pretended to be real and put forward three slightly strange conditions for the relationship. Thus, this love affair full of unknowns and novelties quietly began.
Lu Jianing gave the film 3 stars for plot, 4 stars for cast, 3 stars for topicality, and 5 stars for emotional concentration, and added: "It is indeed a bit bloody in terms of plot configuration. In the film Some people will have amnesia and some will be terminally ill, so the plot only has 3 stars. The reason why the emotional intensity is 5 stars is entirely due to the director's exquisite use of details in a relatively clichéd setting.
Some netizens said that the film was given 5 stars. The most touching part may not be love, but the bud of youth, that kind of very warm relationship between people that arises from friendship.
Especially when the hero and heroine first interact, the girl knows her own spirit. Due to the problem, she couldn't really fall in love with the male protagonist, so the two of them didn't move when they made an appointment. So for a long time, they interacted like friends, and slowly the two began a two-way secret love journey. At the fireworks display in August, the girl couldn't help but said she wanted to break the agreement, and then the boy looked at her and said, "I broke it a long time ago." At this time, the audience will feel that all the foreshadowing for them is a natural love. .
In the end, the girl discovered that she actually did not remember that this boy was her boyfriend, but when she saw the boy's portrait, she still burst into tears for no reason. In fact, there was something like that in the deepest memory. It has been engraved in the soul. These details will make the audience feel that even if they are "outrageous", you will not be picky.
On this day full of love, basically all the love movies chosen for release are. The reality of life is relatively excluded, focusing only on pure love. In fact, the narrative of love is not just about youth and pure love. It can also have love stories that are more grounded in reality, such as "The Myth of Love". "I Love You!" and so on, these love movies do not mean to exclude everything in pursuit of pure love, but to consider many realistic factors in life, because this will make a little romance in life more worth cherishing.
After all, Good love is not just about one-dimensional projection, but about perfecting oneself and becoming more self-consistent through the experience of love. This may be something very important besides pure love
.