Xu Zheng made " Retrograde Life ", and the controversy came faster than the feature film.
html Before the movie was officially released on August 9, a poster had already caused discomfort among the audience - the delivery boy played by Xu Zheng and other actors was smiling brightly in the front row, while the nameless delivery boy was busy expressionlessly in the back row. Before entering the theater, everyone has already concluded that happiness is the wishful thinking of the rich towards the poor.In the film, Xu Zheng plays a high-level employee of a large factory who encounters layoffs and age discrimination. In addition, his father suddenly becomes seriously ill. This middle-class family whose family fortune was robbed in the p2p explosion can no longer cope with the high mortgage loan and cannot find a suitable partner. He had to work as a delivery boy, slowly learning and adapting to their working mechanism. This outsider's perspective popularizes the real work intensity and life status of delivery workers to a certain extent, but it cannot meet the audience's higher expectations, which is to explore deeper issues. For example, the delivery webmaster played by Jia Bing Riders are taught to "swipe! Rush over!" when they are blocked by security guards. When he was the security captain, his winning strategy for delivery riders was to "click! Stop them!" Conflicts that occur every day in real life were mentioned in the form of jokes.
In fact, if you have actually watched the movie, you will find that the smiling face in the poster is an assessment initiated by the food delivery platform to the riders - a smile photo test that may pop up at any time, and the rider has to "check in with a smile" even if he falls to the ground. ". The movie shows this system's disregard for human nature, but then the narrative moves towards how the rider finally adapts to the system through hard work and self-persuasion.
This is certainly not enough for viewers. Perhaps Xu Zheng himself is indeed unable to fully empathize with the lower class, because he has never been one, and middle-class anxiety is his comfort zone.
Xu Zheng is good at playing middle-class people and also good at filming middle-class people. The image of the middle class in the "囧" series cannot be said to be atypical, with a decent but tired face, always business class tickets, a mess of intimate relationships, and a situation of neither upper nor lower. He will never be a bad person, and will eventually become a good person. After making the same mistakes that all men in the world make, he will enter the grassroots world to experience it, receive education from the bottom, and usher in the realization of his mistakes, the ability to correct them, and the reunion of his family. The finale, everyone has a bright future.
At that time, the main consumer force in the film market was still a group of prosperous new middle class. Although Xu Zheng's films contained many bloody jokes, they still satisfied the aesthetic taste of some people. Since then, from the success of " I am not the god of medicine " (directed by Wen Muye) to the popularity of "Retrograde Life", we can see the progress of the "Xu Zheng-style middle-class universe", which is infinitely approaching us The current reality - from helping migrant workers asking for wages to becoming a member of the food delivery group, the middle class has completed the "transformation" of questioning ordinary people, understanding ordinary people, and becoming ordinary people.
The most sympathetic part of "Retrograde Life" is precisely the middle-class perspective that director Xu Zheng and actor Xu Zheng are good at. The so-called middle-class life collapsed immediately after a personnel interview. This was very realistic. You see, the middle class cannot afford to pay off their mortgage, the middle class cannot afford their children’s school fees, and the middle class cannot afford not to get sick.
To be fair, "Retrograde Life" is much more mature than the "囧" series. It's just that the speed of Xu Zheng's progress cannot keep up with the changes of the times and the growth of the audience - the successful man played by Xu Zheng in "囧囧" tells that the scallion pancake stall owner played by Wang Baoqiang can open a scallion pancake chain store, showing an entrepreneurial thinking that is different from grassroots , however, in "Retrograde Life", a former programmer from a large factory developed the "Passepartout" applet, which only made it easier for him to become a cow horse under the algorithm mechanism. This is a cruel reality that even the middle class cannot escape.
There is a sentence in the film that says, "If you take off Kong Yiji's gown, you have not yet become a camel Xiangzi." But why should we have to accept the fate of being a camel Xiangzi? The food delivery staff’s hard work and hard work all started due to the countdown to food delivery. In the film, a conflict broke out among the delivery staff. Dahei, who has long occupied the “single king” position, was jointly attacked by other delivery staff because his speed made the platform Raising the bar for everyone.Obviously the deliveryman's difficulties are not caused by a faster colleague. What is the purpose of our era's endless demand for faster and faster? However, the movie has no intention of fighting here. After having a big drink and settling all the old grudges, everyone still tried their best to "deliver the goods on time".
Although it would be too heavy to hand over the responsibility of "dare to speak and be able to speak" to a movie, people still look forward to hearing some truly comforting voices besides the elitist rhetoric of "failure is because you don't work hard enough". For example, you don’t have to laugh when you don’t want to, and it doesn’t matter if you run slower. For us, Xu Zheng-style metamorphosis of the middle class is common, but the voices of ordinary people in the ending credits are rarely heard, and their faces become blurred in the wave of development. How many delivery people running on the road have time to look up at that beam of sunshine?
Southern People Weekly special writer Kai Ge
Editor Yang Jingru
