Realist works that are not masterpieces enough

Halie 2022-01-24 08:07:16

Before it was a change, a compromise, or a gentle and conservative work by Jia Zhangke, "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" was first of all a film with excellent workmanship and almost no shortcomings. This kind of excellence is not only reflected in the sound design and processing that impressed me the most (such as the drumbeat of "A Man Who Strengthens", a gunshot on the streets of Datong), but also the emotions of the characters, which are really like ashes after a volcanic eruption. The temperature is constantly freezing and receding. There is nothing to blame for Zhao Tao's superb performance only in a few scenes such as escape on a motorcycle and a room in Fengjie Hotel. Like the national standard dance and cigar, "Jianghu" is naturally an imported product from popular things like Hong Kong-produced films. "Jianghu Children" is a popular tragicomedy of "men go wrong, women go wrong", but it is also on a factual level. Last, digested the hard work of the section chief for nearly ten years (standing on the shoulders of "Ren Xiaoyao" and "The Good Man in Three Gorges"). There is no way to go back to Datong, but it disappears at the end of the surveillance camera screen and is actually connected to other independent movies.

Jan 2022-03-19 09:01:09

Before watching the film, I deliberately re-watched "Ren Xiaoyao" and "The Good Man in Three Gorges". I feel that in Jia Zhangke's movie world, there will always be things that resemble acquaintances, like unreliable memories, as if they are in the same world. The same group of people, with the changes of society, staged similar stories in the same era. The films directed by Jia Zhangke have never been of a highly dramatic genre, but the difference in "The Children of the Rivers and Lakes" is that it is relatively fragmented and melodramatic. It is not a short-film assemblage, but a linear narrative with a very large time span. There are not so many things that think about symbolic aesthetics, and it does not just stay at the level of sitcoms, but through the re-deconstruction of the previous works, the interest of the work is guaranteed. At the same time, it also makes the director's authoritarian things more systematic. I feel that Jia Zhangke has been filming the same story all his life, like many big directors, but this time you can see him at his current age, his observation of humanity and humanity, his understanding of women and men, and the change of people to carry the society. The great changes over the past ten years.