"The Three Gorges" is a movie with a "threshold". It is not suitable for the following categories of people to watch: those who regard Jia Zhangke and his films as symbols of a certain petty bourgeois fashion taste, those who understand movies as mere entertainment that consumes life and satisfy the senses, those who like to write or People who read movie reviews with rhetoric and empty connotations.
1.
"The Three Gorges", which was acclaimed in Venice, was the opening film of this year's Tokyo Filmex Film Festival. The International Plaza, which can accommodate more than 2,000 people, had over 80% of the attendance, and the audience's questions were also very active. Ai Jing once sang about Hong Kong, "I heard that there is an important market for Lao Cui." It is certain that Japan is now an important market for Jia Zhangke. Previously, "The World" had received a screening scale rarely seen in an art film in Japan. However, I have always believed that the greatest significance of Jia Zhangke's films is to make Chinese audiences see and think. Especially Japan, which is a country where misunderstanding and contempt for China are most common and deep-rooted, I don't know how many Japanese people can really understand him and his works. Of course, this is not the responsibility of Jia Zhangke. He did not deliberately create a "fable" that satisfies the moral vanity and cultural superiority of foreign audiences like some of his peers. If he told the truth and filmed the truth, and his compatriots didn't like to listen to it or watch it, let alone reflect on it, whose sorrow should it be?
2.
To tell the truth, "The Three Gorges Good Man" is a bit like an urgent chapter. Jia Zhangke said that he was inspired to create a feature film when he was shooting a documentary, and it took only three days to write the script. No matter the length of the film or the content of the story, "The Good Man of the Three Gorges" is a bit thinner than his previous works, but what makes up all this is the Three Gorges Project itself. This event, which is enough to be listed as a super important level in Chinese history, has so far not seen a direct and powerful reflection in the works of art. Therefore, I say Jia Zhangke's sharpness and decisiveness are his greatest strengths, because the Three Gorges incident is a bonanza that can give birth to masters and classics like Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Zola's Germination, and Hugo's Les Miserables. Zhang Ming was a pioneer in Wushan Yunyu many years ago, but it is a pity that he did not go on, otherwise he could have recorded a city, a group of people, and a long and short history of destruction. Jia Zhangke's success is that he appeared at the last moment of this process, "grabbing" a precious opportunity, which was the cruelest moment before MadeIn.
Although the subject matter itself has enough weight, Jia Zhangke still reflects his meticulousness and ingenuity. As always, his eye for detail is astonishing. The exchange between Han Sanming and the migrant workers about the patterns of the Hukou Waterfall of the Yellow River and the Kuimen Gorge of the Yangtze River behind the RMB is a masterpiece. Another thing worth mentioning is that for the first time he used the chapters of "smoke", "wine", "tea", "sugar" to divide the paragraphs of the film. The novelty of this form is not dazzling and fashionable. The focus on still life and the appearance of subtitles not only adjust the rhythm of the film, but also have a profound meaning. Cheap cigarettes, Shanxi liquor, Wushan cloud tea, and white rabbit toffee are not necessities of life, but they bring small comfort, short rest and a little extravagant dependence to life, which condenses every humbleness in the film. The joys and sorrows of life. Compared with the great turmoil they were in, the joys and sorrows had a universal symbolic meaning that transcended the moment and the place.
3.
Jia Zhangke used the Flash screen for the first time in "The World", which was dismissed as a failure by some critics, but it actually showed the entanglement between the virtual world and the real world just right. One of the main differences between Jia Zhangke and those "big" directors in China is that he insists on realism, and the entanglement of virtuality and reality itself is a sincere realism. In "The Good Man in the Three Gorges", he used digital special effects for the first time, making this video work, which is firmly rooted in the truth of the life of the people at the bottom, suddenly has a strong absurd color.
Today's China is the largest surrealist stage in the modern history of mankind. Here, the dislocation of time and space, the distortion of good, evil, beauty and ugliness, the coexistence of development and backwardness, and countless split, extreme and self-contradictory scenes can all flash in one place. This magical and dreamlike surreal state is the most essential reality of contemporary China. Jia Zhangke realized this. In addition to the camera slowly sweeping across every passenger on the river boat like a scroll painting, he also created five "miracles": Han Sanming and Zhao Tao, who had just arrived in Fengjie, saw a flying saucer in the air. Passing by; an unfinished building known as a monument to immigrants rose into the sky like a rocket; Han Sanming saw the three brothers Liu Guan and Zhang in full costumes sitting at the adjacent table playing with computers and mobile phones; Han Sanming and his wife reunited, the original high-rise building suddenly collapsed; when Han Sanming was about to return home, he saw someone walking on the steel cables between the roofs. Similar to these artificially created "spectacles", there are also health workers in protective suits spraying disinfectant between the topless demolition workers swinging hammers to smash the houses. On the desolate and dilapidated ruins, there is a sharp contrast between primitive human labor and cold technological means. These pictures are more shocking than the bland documentary. Because they mean deeper doubts, harsher criticisms from the creator's heart.
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