Recently, the long downturn in theatrical films finally ushered in a new work - "Broken Bridge" directed by Li Yu and . The film has racked up more than 150 million at the box office since its release last weekend. But word of mouth also experiences polarization.
is a crime-themed suspense film, in fact, the suspenseful core of the film has been revealed long ago. The story setting is not complicated either. The film describes the death of the father of a girl ( Ma Sichun played by Wen Xiaoyu), which was exposed 8 years later in the broken bridge accident. With the help of a strange boy ( Wang Junkai, played by Meng Chao) who was carrying the murder case, the truth surfaced. The real murderer of the girl's father was Zhu Fangzheng (, Fan Wei, ), her father's friend and the girl's adoptive father. A domestic film like
, which was difficult to release, has met the expectations of fans. Most of the controversy in the film revolves around the setting of the script itself, such as why the protagonist did not choose to call the police and investigate privately? Why do you want to kill someone to get revenge after you get the evidence? Is the hero's sacrifice necessary? Judging from these doubts, "Broken Bridge" is indeed not a harmonious masterpiece. However, today's article does not want to criticize the plot itself, but to take advantage of the opportunity of the release of this new film to talk to you about the shaping of female characters in Li Yu's films.
started from the documentary "Sister", through " Hong Yan ", "Apple", " Guanyin Mountain ", and then "Broken Bridge", we can see how the female image in the eyes of a female director has changed. And this evolution also echoes our struggles and thinking about women's roles and positions in real life.
"Broken Bridge": The victim is "male"
It is quite challenging to write reviews for domestic films. This challenge is not a matter of "review independence", but the cinematic films we see are often difficult to judge Whether it is the whole picture of creation. Realistic themes have never been easy to release. The crime-themed film "Broken Bridge", which was suddenly released in August, was completed in November 2020. After a long period of post-production and several rounds of re-cuts, it was possible to meet the audience this summer. We don't know if this version can see it all. But it undoubtedly brought the long-lost theater popularity to the summer file (star lineup, long-lost themes, etc. have attracted considerable attention). At the same time, the film has also experienced huge controversy in its popularity.
"Broken Bridge" movie stills.
The plot story of this film is not complicated, and most of the controversial points focus on the film's abandonment of the "suspense" narrative. Under the cultivation of short videos locking the audience in 5 seconds and pursuing the completion rate of 15 seconds, this is undoubtedly challenging the patience of the audience. This also goes against the viewing habits of most audiences. The film exposes a clear villain to the sun at the beginning, which weakens the viewability of the story to a certain extent. The fourth wall suspended between the characters and the audience is as thin as a cicada's wings, but so the audience enjoys Fan Wei's exquisite performance with a magnifying glass-like gaze. This made some viewers wonder, how can such a story that knows the answer when it comes up can still be watched for more than 2 hours?
A crime story, if suspenseful narrative is not the director's pursuit, what is the driving force behind her to tell it under this coat? There are familiar parts in the
film, such as the video style from "The Beauty" and "Guanyin Mountain" to "Broken Bridge", the water, rain, fish, Sichuan dialect and foggy atmosphere in the film. But there are also unfamiliar parts. The biggest sense of unfamiliarity is that the heroine becomes the "alive" one for the first time in Li Yu's movie.
"Broken Bridge" movie stills.
The victim of this film is Meng Chao, the boy who has never seen the light. Wen Xiaoyu has become a fulfilled daughter and a rescued sister, and she has become a survivor of this battle. At this point, 26 years have passed since Li Yu made the short documentary "Sister" in 1996. In the past 26 years, most of the women in Li Yu's works have had a thin fate. The two identities of "daughter" and "sister" in East Asian family narratives mean acquiesced sacrifice. Such insight and expression is also the reason why the 20-minute documentary "Sister" has reached today with a high score of 9.2. If you go back, those works were really fierce in the era when the word "fierce" was not popular. So far, there is a sentence in the Douban hot comment of the movie "Hong Yan": Li Yu is a confidant of Chinese women. Apart from unsuccessful commercialization attempts,
has indeed never missed the point in the author's female expression. In such a context, how to understand this "Broken Bridge" with mixed reviews? This article combines the director's past workThis article teases out a "visible woman" thread created by the director, and explores the new image that Li Yu hopes to try to build on Wen Xiaoyu.
How to talk about "gender" in Li Yu's film
"Women's film" is a specific concept originating from the West. From the women's movement in the late 1960s, it initially focused on women's economic and political status, and gradually extended to cultural field. After decades of development, in China in the 1990s, there was a far-reaching TV show "Half the Sky", which was established on the occasion of the World Women's Conference in 1995. In the context of that time, "women" was a booming cultural topic, and television was also an important window of new knowledge for the Chinese people. At that time, Li Yu, who was working in the "Living Space" of Oriental Time and Space, filmed a program, "Sister", which won the China Documentary Association Award in 1996. A still from the
documentary "Sister".
's 26-year-old documentary "Sister" tells the story of a pair of twins who are about to be born. At the family meeting for caesarean section, everyone thought that the girl could take care of the boy and decided to take her out first. With human intervention, she was given the responsibility and obligation of her "sister" and arranged the girl's fate.
's subsequent thinking and observation of "gender" became an important narrative in Li Yu's films. When
arrived in the 2005 film "Red Face", Li Yu put the narrative space in the county seat of Sichuan and Chongqing, which became the place where most of her stories took place in the future. The small living space and inherent turnover rate in the county seat are devastating to a girl who is trapped in a moral prison. Looking at it now, the stories and emotions told in "Hong Yan" are more complex, more curious and bolder. The story of
tells that Xiao Yun, a 16-year-old female high school student, became pregnant unexpectedly. Soon the news could not be concealed, and both boys and girls were expelled from school. The protagonist Xiaoyun, whose father died young, lives with his mother who is a language teacher. The boy left, and the girl gave birth to a "dead" child under the arrangement of the mother. In fact, the mother secretly sent the child to an adoptive couple. In the following ten years, the girl became a Sichuan opera actress, and also sang popular songs on stage. My mother continued to be a primary school Chinese teacher, and there was a naughty male student in the class. The
character line just surfaced little by little. The baby to be sent away was left behind by the female doctor (the boy's sister), and the aunt became a mother for 10 years. The closeness and infatuation of the little boy's accidental voyeurism brought him and "Sister Yun" closer.
The three women and a little boy got along finely. The language teacher is actually the little boy's grandmother, his mother is his aunt, and the one who calls him "diwa'er" is his biological mother. In their unknowingly getting along, they have a very vivid relationship. The little boy in "Hong Yan" is very preciously portrayed, natural, obscure, instinctive and mischievous.
But the powerful part of the movie "Red Face" is not in ethics, but in how the author presents these women who are living in this time and place, and everything they undertake in a patriarchal society. After the secret was pierced, the fates of three generations of women were tied together in a surprisingly consistent manner. Grandmother (husband died early); aunt (mother) husband is a soldier, but divorced because he suspected that the little boy was not his own; the boy who made a mistake with Xiaoyun Juvenile left early. Although the mother did her best to protect her daughter's "reputation" back then, it was still difficult to change Xiaoyun's fate of being frivolous.
The 16-year-old Xiaoyun was beaten under his father's portrait, and the deterrent of patriarchy exists in this family order; A powerful symbol of power); Xiaoyun was frivolous by a married man, molested by a nouveau riche boss, and experienced embarrassing slut humiliation on an exposed stage. The pain of three generations of women is presented in the film at different levels, and they all silently accept this kind of life.
"Red Face" movie stills. The image of "fish" that
often appears in Li Yu's films is even more frequent in this film. In addition to the passivity that symbolizes the fate of women "people are swords, I am fish", there is a scene with strong torture. On the way to confirm the identity of the little boy, Mrs. Su, the grandmother, passed a fish that overturned all over the place. People were scrambling to deal with the fish that kept jumping out of the carriage and on the ground, but no one was first to straighten the overturned car. The attitude of one author was: Why are only women responsible for all this? When the car does not fall, the fish will not be scattered on the ground. Today, film scholars Dai Jinhua said, "Once a woman is caught in some kind of scandal, the world will restore her to a woman again."
At the end of the film, Xiaoyun ends all relationships in this small town, dissolves the fragile marriage, and sets foot on the away train. In
's 2007 movie "Apple", the narrative space moved from the county seat to the city of Beijing. Viewed from the creative context, Apple is like a runaway "little cloud". After leaving the county seat, the little clouds have become the "Liu Ping" in the city. Has the distance brought hope? The more poignant reality is that the far side of the movie brings greater disillusionment and new disaster.
"Apple" movie stills.
Xiaoyun and Apple are essentially a female group. As a foot-washing girl who is a migrant worker, Apple even has a rare love, but the success of the opening chapter quickly disintegrated after the rape by Boss Lin. But in this city, there are the foot-washing city boss who is accustomed to rape incidents, and An Kun, a partner who cannot be trusted with money. When the two men traded the children in their wombs, Liu Pingping was still the bearer of the harm, fulfilling the absurd childbirth agreement. In the cruel entanglement, it is not difficult to see the director's expression: women are always victims. The completion of Wen Xiaoyu in "Broken Bridge" seems to use all the previous female incomplete fragments to rebuild a woman who should see some light. Let the sister be protected and the daughter can take revenge. The landscape of female sacrifice and the overlapping heavy and desolate fates have been tortuously subverted in the course of the times.
The contradictory Wen Xiaoyu and the group of women behind
return to "Broken Bridge". There are still unforgettable group portraits of women in the story. They are those familiar women in Li Yu's films who have never been fulfilled. Incapacity appears in the fate of these women in various forms.
Gan Xiaoyang ( Zeng Meihuizi ), the red-clothed mistress of the last battle, this role is written in great detail. With no support for life, she completed a desperate transaction in the dark rainy night, but in such a transaction, she exposed the strangeness and immaturity (proposed to sign a contract). He has the habit of boxing, and in the sweaty attack, it can be seen that this is Gan Xiaoyang's hard work. If you win, take your daughter to "eat hot pot", and if you lose, tell your daughter to find that "sister". People like
can't judge her, and there is no strong shame in the struggle of life, but she can't help shouting "the most important thing to us is money" to Wen Xiaoyu, who is also a girl. She is unforgettable and indescribable. Gan Xiaoyang is still Xiaoyun to a certain extent, and Liu Pingping after giving birth to a child. They struggled desperately in the male-dependent space, and then ushered in a more tragic ending: she died on the road with a fantasy.
"Broken Bridge" movie still, right is Song Yami ( Wan Qian ).
Song Yami (played by Wan Qian), the proprietress of a dance hall for middle-aged and elderly people, is a college classmate of the heroine's father, Wen Liang (played by , Mo Xizi Shi, ). Eight years after Wen Liang's death, her arm was injured, and she still had to greet the guests at the night show. The character has only one scene, but the complexity of the character itself and a strong sense of the drama of fate come to the fore. On Wen Xiaoyu's way to find the answer, the so-called "mistress" of her father she met was just a life seeker who passively didn't want tomorrow. The gorgeous style can't hide the dazzling stump.
also has two "mothers" in the film. The villain's wife ( Gong Beibi ) who said nothing, with very few lines, looks like an outsider in this game. She doesn't participate, comment, or be present, but she relies on her restrained eyes in every scene to express the family's unrelenting secrets. As an all-knowing perspective, she is still a risk-bearer for her husband. She was not involved, but her innocence could not be guaranteed. Practicing Tai Chi, delivering medicine to Zhu, and doing moxibustion by hand basically exist in the background of the story, but such background has become the basis for Fan Wei and Ma Sichun's performance, which automatically adds depth of field to the level of the play.
Wen Xiaoyu's embarrassed biological mother ( Liu Lin ), with the actors' vivid performances and precise line rhythm, the embarrassment of life, the ignorance of her own life being manipulated by others, and the face of her daughter are unreserved. So much emotional dispatch is done in one scene. This ex-wife became an inexplicable victim in the seemingly impossible money-right deal.
These explicit and hidden situations of women bear the best expression of the director in "Broken Bridge" with a small number of scenes. From the basic lack of men in the early days (such as "Red Face"), to the completion of the male image in "Apple"From the implicit symbol of power to the specific narrative subject, to the appearance of "Broken Bridge" to avenge the father (also overthrow the father's power), and the male to become the victim, this covers more than 20 years of a director's creative career Here, there is no stopping thinking about women's exploration.
"Broken Bridge" movie stills. Compared with the narration of the overall environment and social climate in the whole film,
is obviously more familiar with the shaping of female images. Compared with previous films that explored the relationship between women and men/family, "Broken Bridge" has entered a social dimension. The film contains the author's obvious "comfort zone", as well as attempts to explore and rusty. But in the female contextual narrative she insists on, this time she is trying to put Wen Xiaoyu into a more realistic intricate world, not just a cross-section.
's original "heroes save the beauty" is nothing new, but when you enter the gender narrative discussed by Li Yu in the current context, you will feel that this subversion is a collective rebellion by all the women who have hurt the bearers in the past. Constantly presented and reiterated in the characters, why did these women encounter all this?
Li Yu's films always contain intense emotions. She hardly talks about details and daily life, but focuses on every important fold in life. This may be related to her early documentary acquisition - grasping those differences An ordinary moment. The shaping of Wen Xiaoyu is also full of dramatic constructions. The prematurely broken family faces Meng Chao, a father-killer who has a family foundation and a benefactor gifted by fate. She has the old dust of those past roles, and not only Meng Chao, but the new hope of these women who stayed or ran away, lived or died.
With the vigorous development of feminism in recent years, "women's films" have gradually become a popular subject. Works such as " send me to Qingyun ", " my sister " and " waterfall " are all trying to talk about the current situation of women in the way of movies. In Internet culture, "women's films" have become a spectacle. Dai Jinhua once wrote a book called Invisible Women: Women and Female Cinema in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. In Li Yu's works, all the women who are ignored, obscured and invisible are presented until Wen Xiaoyu. An image that is in line with other characters and is different from them. The tragedy brought about by the heroine's stubbornness and paranoia in the past did not happen to her, but the background of the story is still in the 1990s. The author gave this character a victory, Just in the gap between her subjectivity and passivity, a contradictory, unfinished image, floating between old and new women, was born in the author's new expression. This may become a kind of transitional node, with the women in the film twisting forward.
text / go go miss
edit / go go
proofread / Zhao Lin
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