(Originally published in "Beijing Youth Daily" on August 24)
"When the children sing your song in the hallway, that is the real rock. Don't pay too much attention to the amateur effect of the recording." In the movie "Midsummer", the Leningrad rock elder Mike comforted his little friend Victor. Cui, the fledgling future rock star, has very high self-demand from the beginning.
Yes, the best recording studio in Brezhnev's period is obviously for the people's meritorious artists. Without the decadent Western capitalism, there would be no commercial circulation mechanism for the rebellious and restless youth. Before the World Cup trip to Russia, in order to avoid restrictions on the transnational copyright of mobile music, I downloaded the first two albums of Victor Cui and KINO from the online music platform in advance, "45" and "46". The effect was terrible. The shriveled guitar chords couldn't hold Victor's poetic expression. Besides, I didn't understand Russian. So I wandered around a city in Russia, eager to listen attentively, so I had to press the stop button.
However, "Midsummer", which has successively appeared at the Cannes Film Festival and the First Film Festival, has excellent sound and pictures. It is refreshing and far-reaching like the most beautiful 17-year-old singing in everyone's memory, but black and white, but translucent, like the most romantic summer we embellished with dreams. day. The story begins in Leningrad in the early 1980s. The first scene from the outside to the inside clearly explains the background of the times. Two young girls climbed the ladder and turned the window. With the help of the show planner, they sneaked into Leningrad No. 2 Rock Club. It was a common auditorium in socialist Soviets, with plastic benches that bounced up and made noises when they left the seats, and the Zoopark band with long hair and shawls on the stage roared with the inflammatory punk song "You Are Rubbish." However, under the close supervision of the tour manager, the audience in the audience can only tap their toes lightly, not daring to shake their bodies, let alone dancing, and the song ends, clapping hands to thank you, just like playing hard on the stage. The classical orchestra in the Mariinsky Theatre.
Rock fans remember the "1991 Moscow Red Square Rock Festival" where famous metal groups such as Metallica, Pantera, AC/DC, etc. appeared. In the video, crowded audiences were screaming, and the police who kept order were beating the fans with iron rods. . Of course, this may be a sense of opposition deliberately created by the editing. There are even more rumors that the audience of this music festival exceeded one million, trampled to death 32 people, and killed dozens of people. The complete disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 added a certain causality to this festival and its rumors. This can be reversed back to 10 years ago, when the folk flag Vysowski passed away before the Moscow Winter Olympics. The sad crowd heard that Victor Cui, his spiritual heir, was angry with the status quo but still couldn’t rock the rock. The scene was fully vented.
The story of "Midsummer" is very short. It is almost the first summer when Victor Cui joined the Leningrad rock circle. The plot is also very simple. Victor and Mike, who appreciates him, cherish the heroes, but also add Go to Mike's beautiful wife Natacha, and develop a frank and tangled love triangle.
Viktor Tsoi (Viktor Tsoi) in the double actor is a well-known rock hero for Soviet Russian fans. For Chinese music fans, because Victor and our rock godfather Cui Jian have the same surname and the same Korean nationality, Produced a coincidence miracle, but in fact, from the time of his debut, Victor Choi is far from the godfather of Soviet rock and roll. At least the second actor, Mike, is even more of a big-time figure in the Leningrad rock circle. Although Mike's band "Animal Park" also runs through "Midsummer", its later influence is far less than Victor. Choi and his KINO band. Nowadays, in the central parks of many cities in Russia, there may be a sculpture of folk hero Vysowski holding a guitar, but Victor Cui is the most graffiti image that appears in the poor streets and alleys, just as Mike wanted in the movie. Children in large and small towns still hold their guitars and sing his famous song "Blood Type" in the corridors, just like walking into a remote village in Yunnan and you might see a teenager playing Beyond's "Broad Sea and Sky". On the day of the World Cup final, I walked through the underground passage of Lenin Square in Yekaterinburg, with Victor Choi painted on the wall, and the Youth Orchestra was playing the ending song of the movie "Midsummer"-"Late Summer".
Sunglasses and cigarettes, long hair and combed heads, short sleeves and long skirts. If the characters in the film were not speaking Russian, we might think that these good-looking youths were Manchester punk or San Francisco hippies. Leningrad rockers tried to make a voice that was different from that of the West and the Soviet Union, but they chased the Velvet Underground and David Bowie's records, and kept up with the trend from T-Rex gorgeous rock to Joy Division post-friends. They didn’t know the end of their country was approaching, nor did they find the collective value of the new generation in the 1980s. However, like their counterparts in the West, they pursue “peace and love” and believe that “artists cannot be bound by marriage”. It is the artist Mike who shouldn't be restrained who kisses (temporarily) the one he loves more. Like our senior music critics who promoted Western rock music, Mike was flipping through the album cover in the shabby room, looking up the Russian-English dictionary to translate Lou Reed's lyrics. He made an excuse to let Natacha and Victor spend the night with him. Under the frank and magnanimous surface, it was the painful body and mind of the rainy night on the Neva River; he encountered a mad man who had flown from Vladivostok over half of Russia in search of love. Woman, produced the same illusion and the same music as Leiden in "Training"-Lou Reed's "Perfect Day"-"Go to the park for a drink of sangria, go to the zoo, watch a movie , And then go home, what a perfect day."
All the fantasy images in the movie accompanied by the animation effect of stick figures were denied one by one by a sunglasses commentator, "This is not real." The fight between punk and KGB on the train is not real. It is not true that the audience and the supervisor at the performance dive and collide together, and the Perfect Day in the rainy night is not true. Sunglasses commented that the man is an invisible muse beyond the vision of the characters in the film. He listened to Mike’s blues about love and love, and criticized "Compared with Bob Dylan, the so-called Russian rock and roll does not care about reality at all, the world Where can there be a lyrical hero".
Apart from the Soviet auditorium and the living room of the big urban family in the movie, the most common indoor space is the kitchen. This is the most important ideological space of the former Soviet Union. In the interview memoir "Second Time" by the Belarusian Nobel writer Alekseyevich, the people of the Soviet Union had to "thank Khrushchev. It was under his leadership that people walked out of public dormitories and moved into private kitchens. There were scolding the government...family and friends together, generating all kinds of ideas, wild plans, nonsense political jokes...we eavesdropped on Vysowski’s folk songs and the enemy BBC... It’s just that most people are just'kitchens'. The dissident in', raised his middle finger in his pocket."
When the rock buddies just raised their middle fingers in their pockets, Victor Cui, whose music has become more mature, has boldly produced and released political issues and unlimited dissemination through famous songs such as "We Want to Change" and "Blood Type". His works also allowed him to stand out from the group of Leningrad friends and become a true rebellious hero of the times.
Of course, the movie does not want to tell the whole rock life of a hero. We all know that Victor Cui was only 28 years old in a car accident due to fatigue driving in Latvia in the early morning of August 15, 1990; we rarely know that Victor, a friend and rival in love in the movie Mike, also a year later, died of intracranial hemorrhage caused by an accident in the apartment on August 27. The huge motherland they sang and fought against collapsed four months later.
Similar to the other rock biographical film "Nico" last year, "Midsummer" is only an interception of a period of time in the life of a rock hero and polished it meticulously. But unlike the frustrated Nico, the early 1980s of "Midsummer" was Victor Choi's purest and most beautiful time, even though he listened to the frustrated Nico's underground velvet all day long. At the end of the film, a summer has passed, and it’s time to finish my heart-filled words. Victor kisses Natacha goodbye in a city ballad about poetic everyday life, and the scene shifts to a boring conversation between Mike and his wife the next morning about romance and dreams. , And then turn to the midsummer of the Baltic Sea in the Super 8 video. It was a beautiful midsummer when Victor first met his friends and lovers. It was the only colorful but distorted part of the film.
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