Master Shuo's original work is "Ferocious Animals", the name of the film is somewhat more literary, this is indeed a film with the background of the Cultural Revolution, but there is no criticism of No Dou without the labels of the Cultural Revolution, and the film is actually more consistent with the name, this is It's just a portrait of a group of people living under the sun in their youth at that particular period. This group of children in the compound has nothing to do all day long. At that time, people didn't have any focus in life, and it seemed that the mutual criticism had emptied people's spiritual level. The director has no intention of criticizing or discussing anything about the Cultural Revolution. The director just uses the Cultural Revolution as a backdrop.
The theme of the film is fantasy. The beginning of the film is the fantasy of a child who wants to be a general, and then there is the sexual fantasy of Ma Xiaojun when he was young. He has a legendary knack for sliding doors and locks, and when he first opened a secret lock and entered a girl's home, he was drawn to a picture of a girl in a red swimsuit on the wall. So, on that sunny afternoon, when the sun was spreading wantonly, he was lying on the bed searching for the girl's scent, when he found a piece of girl's hair, he straightened it against the dazzling sunlight, then The film even omits the soundtrack, and what we see is the cute appearance of a simple boy.
After that, our protagonist achieved his goal. He begged to meet Milan, helped her douse her hair, and watched her sleep. However, that photo never seemed to exist, so what is true and what is false? There is no way to know, even the adult he said, "The first acquaintance between Milan and I was probably forged", "Maybe she never slept in front of me at all", "Memories are always taken by me. Emotional makeover", maybe it's all an illusion, or it's not at all, what is it? It's just a young boy's memory deviation from his childhood.
So, maybe everything about Milan may be false, or not all true, but it doesn't matter, this almost fantasy memory, as pure and beautiful as the sun, lovely as the big one he blew" balloon".
Thanks to Jiang Wen, the most "male" director in China at present, he candidly tells what others dare not tell, and this is the core of youth.
This is a film full of urban symbols, from the typical Beijing place name of the Moscow restaurant in the Dongdan Xidan exhibition hall to the Beijing Hutong Tongzilou that appears from time to time in the film, to a group of people riding cyclists who are surprisingly similar to "Seventeen-Year-Old Bicycle" Copying red slabs of bricks and shuttling through the alley to fight, and the sentence of Beijing scolding me, fuck you. Beijing is the most typical and representative city during the Cultural Revolution, which should resonate with more people.
At the end of the film, the grown children saw the fool at the gate of the original compound in the car. When they chanted Glenwood, his answer was "stupid."
When we think back to those sunny, ignorant, frivolous, innocent and cute days when we were young, would you also laugh at yourself and say to yourself, idiot?
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