After "Outing" won the Jury Prize at the 70th Venice Film Festival, Cai Mingliang said, "It has been 20 years since "Long Live Love" won the Golden Lion Award. ". Slowness is indeed the most external feature in Cai Mingliang's films. Some like it, because he explores new narrative grounds between human body and environment, action and broken landscape, and his images take on an improvisational character; others don't, because he never creates with stories Based on the blueprint, he abandoned the traditional dramatic techniques and theories left by his forefathers--inheritance, causality, and dramatic conflict. To this day, Tsai Ming-liang's films still only live in major European film festivals, not in cinemas that audiences are familiar with. Even in Taiwan, where he grew up, his films are still very few at the box office and no one cares about them. After Tsai Ming-liang won the award again, Long Yingtai sighed with emotion, "art can endure loneliness and do not seek immediate results", that is to say, he praised him for not catering to the mainstream, but for daring to develop film themes, language innovation and narrative style exploration. Experiment boldly and be unique.
█Common People Complex and Family Fables
Audiences who are familiar with Tsai Ming-liang should know that Tsai Ming-liang is the most important "author's film" director after the new wave of Taiwanese films, who has developed a new vision and spirit of film realism. In the 1990s, Tsai Ming-liang shot the "Taipei Trilogy" that made him famous in the future - "Youth Nezha", "Long Live Love" and "River", which keenly captured the living conditions of the marginalized people in Taiwan. From Aze, who steals for a living, a lover who sells pirated pornographic videos, to market vendors and temple believers, all of them are low-level people living in the city. They have a strong sense of frustration in the materialized and modernized city. Unfamiliar and helpless, and lack of identity, urban men and women are constantly intertwined and separated in a prison city that is disordered, alienated, and desires flow. Taiwanese film historian Lu Feiyi believes that Tsai Ming-liang is different from "new film" directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Yang Dechang. He refuses to bear historical responsibility, and refuses to take care of historical suffering. He pays more attention to the modern urban landscape and the desolate and empty heart. Colors create an apocalyptic atmosphere, as well as the wandering young souls who are at a loss for what to do. It should be said that Cai Mingliang's early works absurdly displayed the depression, frustration, emptiness and disintegration of value norms in postmodern society.
In Tsai Ming-liang's works ("Youth Nezha" and "River") there is a family composed of Xiaokang and his parents, which is the matrix of all Tsai Ming-liang films. Old husbands and young wives, and the spouses of foreign and native provinces, are also a typical family form in Taiwanese society after the war. In these families, life is dead, the father and son are often separated, and they cannot get along in harmony; the husband and wife rarely communicate, and the wife is often scolded by the husband. Compared with the traditional family relationship (although it has been undercurrent, but finally returned to calm) in Ang Lee's "Father Trilogy" ("Pushing Hand", "Wedding Banquet" and "Food Man and Woman"), Cai Mingliang obviously wants to. More rebellious and more allegorical, he continually dismantles the combined family or habit, magnifying its conflicting and contradictory sides, leaving it exposed and precarious. It is in this family structure that the protagonist Xiaokang, the protagonist of Cai Mingliang's films from beginning to end, began to drift away, from one place to another, met by chance, and then parted ways-Xiaokang gave up the joint entrance examination in "Youth Nezha" Follow A Rong and A Ze; in "Long Live Love", Xiaokang, A Rong, and Amei, three lonely strangers, walk in the same empty house, chatting for comfort; at the end of "River", the roof leaks, Xiaokang climbs out of the window, Stick to a filthy, corpse-like family.
█ Long Shots and Silent Movies
After "Long Live Love", Cai Mingliang gradually established the film aesthetics of long shots. From "River", "The Hole", "What Time Are You Over There", "Staying" and "Dark Circles", we can see "silent long shots, fixed camera viewing methods, natural telephoto framing Attitude”, the camera often acts as a monitor, uncompromisingly and faithfully recording the actions of the characters. Many times, the time (movie time) recorded by Cai Mingliang in the camera is exactly the same as the time (real time) felt in real life. For example, at the end of "Long Live Love", the two long shots are impressive, 4 minutes of Ami walking alone in the park and 6 minutes of her crying on the open-air bench. The audience and the actors experienced a baptism of up to ten minutes. The emotions of the characters are easier to perceive and accept; the first shot of "The Hole" lasts for 3 minutes, and Xiaokang is curled up on the sofa under the fixed shot, as if time has stopped, and only a shining window is exposed in the depth of the field. In addition, it was raining heavily. Through this lens, Cai Mingliang allowed the audience to get close to the true emotions of the story characters at the beginning of the film. Many Western scholars believe that Tsai Ming-liang's long shots were deeply influenced by Bazin and Rossellini: on the one hand, they focus on the documentary nature of the film, admit that the film is the asymptote of life, and expose the history and society between people, things and living environments. On the other hand, he uses the perception of reality, the fusion of long shot and deep focus aesthetics to reproduce the concept of "real things are around" advocated by Italian neorealism. It should be said that the unique and fascinating film world established by Tsai Ming-liang was developed on the basis of the aesthetic paradigm of fixed shots, long shots and long shot sequences.
Another prominent feature of Tsai Ming-liang's films is the lack of dialogue and soundtracks. For example, there is no line in the whole film of "Dark Circles"; there is no soundtrack in "Long Live Love" and "River", not even the ending music; in "Long Live Love", the three protagonists have a job to sell by talking, but all dialogues In "River", Xiaokang never answered his father's questions, as if they had not communicated with each other for many years. There are a few lines of dialogue, and the only music is the soundtrack of "Dragon Inn" shown in the theater; the only line in "A Cloud in the Sky" is the plot of "What Time Are You Over There" and "The Overpass is Missing" , Xiangqi asked Xiaokang, "Are you still selling watches?" Cai Mingliang seemed to use the suffocating silence, the incessant sound of modern urban traffic, and the collision or friction of various objects, instead of the characters' words and artificial music. People's "aphasia" is Cai Mingliang's comment on the alienated relationship between people. In his eyes, language communication between individuals has become more and more difficult, and even the necessity of language communication has been lost. People can only hide in silence and loneliness in a corner of the world, living or dying.
█ Looking for an antidote and the possibility extended by "Outing" I
remember in "River", Xiaokang's body became increasingly sluggish and sluggish, and even his neck was crooked. To the long-distance bus), through many ways (from the building corridors in Taipei to the temples, hotels and three hot springs in Taichung), the only purpose is to find antidote (western medicine, acupuncture, even gods) in order to recover. Looking for a prescription is actually the eternal purpose of the actions of the characters in Tsai Ming-liang's films, such as Xiaokang's search for youth in "Youth Nezha", witnessing love in "Long Live Love", and exploring the souls of others in "What Time Are You Over There" , and sowing the seeds of desire in "The Overpass is Gone" is a kind of continuation of his actions in "River". However, the strange thing is that no matter how hard the protagonist tries, the result is always the opposite, and it is difficult for him to find an immediate remedy.
Cai Mingliang's new film "Outing" is no exception, and the characters are still looking for a cure for their survival dilemma. The film is split in two by the director and recounts two events. In the previous incident, when Li Kangsheng wanted to put his children on a boat on a rainy night, the two children were snatched away by Lu Yijing, whom he met working in a hypermarket. The father fell on the boat and screamed frantically; , the picture changed from violent to calm, and entered the second incident. The two children and their mother Xiang Qi were in a dark room and sang a birthday song for Li Kangsheng, which opened the prelude to another family life chronicle. In the film, the only scene where the characters in the two images meet occurs at the end of the film. The three protagonists arrive at the same ruin by coincidence. They look at the huge painting on the wall, stop and stare for a long time. The audience suddenly realizes that it seems that the director wants the protagonist and the audience to immerse themselves in the image he has created again, to become part of this giant painting. The audience can easily think of whether there is such a picture-in-picture relationship between the two events in the film? The life events of Li Kangsheng and the two children described in the first half are just a retrospective of a certain outing? Or is the second half of the story just a family memory of the first half of the story? And this kind of layered relationship may also exist in Cai Mingliang's previous works, living in a well-off life in different eras, constantly setting off, looking for an antidote, and never ending.
"Hainan Daily" 9/23
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