I don't know when it started. Many domestic audiences talked about Ee Hirokazu and always commented on him as "Ozu's successor" and "the next Ozu Yasujiro". Even though Hou Hsiao and himself clearly stated in more than one interview that he did not have Ozu’s genetic factor, Hou Hyo-hsien had a greater influence on his movies than Ozu, but he still did not change most of them. People stubbornly hold this view.
Perhaps it’s because most of the audience knew it was Hirokazu Edema’s "Nobody Knows" that started in 2004, and the "Haijie Diary" that was popular in 2015. Interspersed among them are "Non-stop", "Miracle", "As Father Like Son". "Three. These works are all about family, life and children. The plot is simple, the shots are flat, the rhythm is slow, and the emotions are delicate. This point is undoubtedly completely consistent with everyone's understanding of Ozu Yasujiro. At the same time, two audiences who are also from Japan, are also famous internationally, are also known as masters, and are soon drawn inexplicably connected by the audience who are keen to trace their roots.
But in fact, it is also a family drama. Compared with Ozu Yasujiro's aesthetic harmony and morality, it is Hirokazu Edema that is more inclined to the complexity of family and human nature. Regarding the complexity of human nature, Ozu Yasujiro may be tolerantly hiding these, but Hirokazu Eede cruelly confronted and even exposed all of them.
Who should be responsible for the miserable lives of mothers and children who are unable to take charge in "Nobody Knows"? How to solve the eldest son who died inexplicably because of saving drowning children in "Non-stop", so that it seems that the whole film is absent but is everywhere? In "Haijie Diary", the father and the mysterious mother who died at the beginning, how can the remaining people continue to live?
If you think about these things carefully, you can truly understand the essence of Hirowa Kee's movies, the cruelty hidden behind the seemingly beautiful family life. And this is undoubtedly more obvious in Shie Hiro and this award-winning Palme d’Or “The Thief Family”.
Because this time he will not only dazzle you in front of you, but also go deep into layers, peeling off the cocoon, and let you see the maggot-like truth of life in the depths of ordinary life little by little. Let you watch it, force you to examine it, no blinking, no shaking of God, no hiding, no retreat, until you realize what the truth of society, family, and life means.
The truth of this cruel life can be roughly divided into five levels, from shallow to deep.
First of all, before watching the movie, it can be seen from the four characters of the title "The Thief Family". The so-called "thief family", the predicament of this family's life can be imagined, they must use thief-like means to maintain family expenses. Thief, of course, is not a glorious job, it is a helpless way of making a living.
Specifically, how do they make a living? The father worked so hard that he broke his leg. The mother was too capable but was fired. The younger sister could only make money through pornographic performances. The two children had nothing to do and could only steal. The grandmother could only receive a meager pension and her ex-husband’s. The son asks for pension from his home. This is the first layer of the truth about cruel life.
After the movie is halfway through, you suddenly realize that the real focus of the four words "thief family" lies in the word "family" at the back. The "family" here is not the so-called "family" in the general sense. They have no blood relatives, but are just a group of abandoned people meeting each other, pitying each other with the same illness, holding a group for warmth, and barely making ends meet.
How do they maintain this if-if-nothing connection? The son who ostensibly refuses to recognize the relationship between father and son, the sister who is lost for self and love, the tender love between father and mother, the elderly grandma facing death, and the helpless intruder little girl suddenly appears . They have nothing but love. This is the second layer of the truth about cruel life.
But things are far from simple, and the "secrets" behind all members of this family are even more complicated. Of course, Hirokazu Ke does not bother to explain everyone's ins and outs through various flashbacks, and only use a few words to leave a lot of space for the audience to imagine. And all imaginations must have a miserable background. After all, the only relatively clear life experience is the little girl who was domestically abused and abandoned.
How did they come together? The father and mother are a pair of desperate mandarin ducks, who are kept incognito because of legitimate defense and murder; the younger sister ran away from home because she could not get the love of her parents, but was forgotten by her family; the son was abandoned by her family and happened to be picked up by the father who was stealing; Grandma is a lonely and helpless old man. This is the third layer of the truth about cruel life.
There are too many flashing details here that require multiple viewings to be confirmed one by one. For example, the sentence between father and mother, "put on makeup, and then vote" is enough to make up for the pimping activities that the two had made in the early years of life; such as the sentence of the sister's father, "in "Studying in Australia" and the mother’s awkward smile are enough to imagine how my sister ran away from home and how she was forgotten by her family; another example is the son’s "living in a car", which is enough to make people imagine how young he experienced it. What a miserable wandering life.
If all of this is unfolded, it will surely be even more tearful. But Hirokazu Kee did not. He buried everything in silence through limited words and left it to the audience to imagine. And when you can really imagine all of this, it is enough to crush people's hearts and make people cry. This is the fourth layer of the truth about cruel life.
This is where Hirokazu Ee's master is. He was able to tell this story so deeply and thoroughly in two hours, and buried so many thought-provoking foreshadowings. Telling the most complex stories with the least amount of material, the lens utilization rate is too high. Just like the silent spring rain that moisturizes things, no drop is wasted, and no shot is wasted.
Therefore, the six flesh and blood characters in the "Thief Family" can be simply divided into three groups: father and son, mother and little girl, grandma and sister, any one group is enough to extend another excellent movie. They live, they love each other; they are connected with each other, and their destinies are intertwined; they both think about life and death, but also have confusion about sex; they struggle at the bottom of society, but they do not forget the beauty of life and humanity; they have thousands of traces The ties are very strong; they are not family members, but they are better than family members.
In this small world, among the six characters, it is Zhi Yuhe who has constructed a complete society, inclusive of all things, seeing the big from the small, reflecting the countless real problems of this society. Similarly, the people in this family, whether it is father’s workmates, mother’s colleagues, sister’s dumb No. 4 guest, and the lonely grandfather of the canteen, they are all poor people who are also bent over by life. .
It was Hirokazu Kee once said: "I think the family needs to have deficiencies." This time, what the family lacks is actually a government that can protect the weak, a society that upholds the dignity of the marginalized. Because they are in love enough, why can't they still be happy? This is the fifth layer of the truth about cruel life.
The truth of these five cruel lives, from individual to family to society, goes deep into layers. When you truly realize all of this, perhaps you will understand that it is Edema Hirokazuma that is different from Ozu.
The reflection on the real society and the warm and warm understanding of human feelings together build the film world of Shige Hirokazu. And the source of all this is undoubtedly the early documentary career of Hirowa. Therefore, his works are often both documentary and feature films. He blurs the line, or that the line of classification does not exist for Shige Hirokazu.
Most people probably know that after Hirokazu Edema graduated from the Department of Literature at Waseda University, he first engaged in filming documentaries on TV. The subjects were socially caring and full of humanism.
Among the more well-known works are "Another Education", "But...In This Era of Abandoning Welfare", "August Day Without Him" and "When Memories Are Lost". The shooting experience of these documentary films has not only become an important source of inspiration for Zhi Yuhe's future feature films, but also laid a cruel background for his feature films to face humanity.
For example, although his debut feature film "Phantom Light" is adapted from Miyamoto Teru's novel of the same name, the state of living with a sense of guilt and dazed feeling in the film actually comes from the documentary "But... The era of abandoning well-being.
This documentary tells the growth process of two war orphans of similar age in different backgrounds, but in the end they all embarked on the road of suicide because the government ignored the welfare system and lost patient protection. One of them became a bar girl because of the poor environment of the adoptive family; the other received higher education and became a civil servant because of the better environment of the adoptive family.
It was Zhi Yuhe who spent a lot of time searching for news reports at the time and interviewing the family and friends of the two deceased. In the end, he found that the core of the problem was that his colleagues pointed to the injustice of the high-level government decision-making and the structure of the bureaucracy. The documentary was eventually banned by Japanese TV because of its sensitive content.
Another documentary also related to the social welfare system is "When the Memory Is Lost" in 1996. The protagonist of the documentary suffers from "amnesia" due to the negligence of the hospital during treatment, and cannot remember what happened every day after the operation, but the hospital has always refused to compensate. The government's welfare agency also cannot define the disability due to the particularity of his condition. , Refused to pay him welfare.
It was Hirokazu Ee, who recorded the miserable life of these four people in detail, and pointed out the problems of social welfare and medical system in Japanese society. This made Kee Hirokazu begin to think about caring about human life memory, and even deep philosophical issues related to human existence. Based on this, he shot his second feature feature film, "The Next Stop, Heaven" in 1998.
In addition to this, other films by Yukazu Kee are often based on real events. The main story of "Distance" in 2001 is from the sarin gas incident, and the story of "Nobody Knows" in 2004 is from the abandonment of Sugamo children in Tokyo in 1998.
Having said so much, I don't really want to distinguish the pros and cons between Ozu Yasujiro and Shiede Hiroka. After all, both of them are good masters. I just want to show that the styles of these two works are really different.
And the most important thing is that in the works of Hirokazu Zhi, don't just look at the quiet, peaceful, and warm days on the surface. Although these are enough reasons to like Yuka Kee. But if you can further think about the cruel truths hidden behind those ordinary lives, you can discover that it is Hirokazu Kee who really thinks about this world.
The official account "Yu Xiaodao's Movie Prejudice" has been issued, please reprint it with soybean oil.
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