Jiang Wenli pretends to be ugly. Those literary and artistic young people who have been defeated by reality, stop talking nonsense. You are not Wang Cailing.

There were many moments when I seemed to see a future that could be predicted at a glance while the young men and women around me were struggling to pursue their dreams.

Many people in life often use frustrating examples to quench their artistic enthusiasm.

Later, in Gu Changwei’s lens, I found a way of life that I was trying to discover but had never faced directly.

Watching the joys and sorrows unfold in the nearly two-hour movie, perhaps every soul who has been confused and struggling will gain courage and grow from it.

It wasn't until I watched "The Beginning of Spring" that I suddenly remembered that such an ideal had existed in my life.

When watching this movie, it is easy to think of Xu Anhua's "Aunt's Postmodern Life".

"The Beginning of Spring" continues the consistent theme of Li Qiang's "Peacock" and "Aunt's Postmodern Life" - the unwillingness of the little people

The screenwriters of both films are Li Qiang , so their scents are similar, but their styles are completely different.

Xu Anhua is the kind of graceful and reserved type, who likes to be tepid and meticulous;

But Gu Changwei is vivid and choppy, whether it is pain or sighing, he always makes a sound.

When I first entered college, I wrote in my diary with great ambition, "I am determined to cultivate myself into a literary and artistic youth."

At that time, I felt that this was an extremely noble title. After crawling out of the quagmire of line analytic geometry, you can choose a very good attitude towards life.

But a few years later, I was horrified to discover that the term "artistic youth" had gradually changed its meaning.

Today, this is almost a dirty word, and it has immediately reached the point of "You are just a young artist! Your whole family is a young artist!"

In the flood of film reviews for "The Beginning of Spring", Wang Cailing was labeled as a "literary young woman".

It is almost like putting on the big hat of a ghost and a snake god. On the surface, it seems to say nothing, but secretly it has already been covered with nails, revealing a deeper contempt and contempt.

I remember when I first watched "Life", Gao Jialin looked down on the loess countryside, including the farmers who faced the loess and turned their backs to the sky.

The movie allowed the young man to walk around the city and then return to the yellow land.

The woman Qiaozhen who loved him deeply also married someone else, and his own ideal country also drifted with the sand and disappeared to that Java country.

In one sentence, it interprets the essence of a little person to the core to the extreme.

Gu Changwei's "The Beginning of Spring" naturally does not have such heights. A group of quasi-artists in a small northern town are living without any gains in love or career.

If Wang Yu watches this movie, he will definitely shout, "I want to leave every day, and I don’t know when I will be able to reincarnate."

To be honest, while watching During the movie, I still had some quarrels with those people in the movie who were crying and shouting that they wanted to go to Beijing.

I have dreamed of traveling to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou countless times. But as much as I hate myself, it’s hard to have a good impression of a movie like “The Beginning of Spring.”

No matter how much you rely on the external environment, you cannot be as calm and natural as those who adapt to the environment.

"The Beginning of Spring" is a 2008 drama starring Jiang Wenli, Zhang Yao, Li Guangjie and Jiao Gang.

The film tells the story of the painful struggle between Wang Cailing and other artistic young people in a small county in the 1980s between their dreams and reality.

Starring Jiang Wenli won Best Actress at the 2nd Rome International Film Festival and Best Actress at the 27th Golden Rooster Award for this film.

Douban scored 8.1 and IDMb scored 8.6. The box office was not high but it received rave reviews.

The image reveals a strong humanistic concern and a narrative trend in which the sacred will eventually fall into the secular world, giving people a stinging helpless sadness.

But in fact, this film uses the folk solar term of "being in severe cold and looking forward to spring" as the main metaphor.

Those so-called "artistic youths" who are "unwilling to be mediocre" during the social transformation period are just some who cannot distinguish themselves between being trapped and escaping.

Or a delusional patient who thinks he is fighting painfully for self-realization.

The final disillusionment or imaginary continuation of their "ideal pursuits" is the most mediocre and humble charm.

This may be one of the reasons why Gu Changwei calls "The Beginning of Spring" a work of cruel realism.

Gu Changwei said that "The Beginning of Spring" is a story about dreams and inspiration.

In my opinion, "The Beginning of Spring" is rather a story about disillusioned dreams.

As a result, "The Beginning of Spring" was not as successful as "Peacock", which was unexpected.

I cannot accept the criticism of "The Beginning of Spring" by some people. They do not believe that an outlier like Wang Cailing can appear in real life. They say that this is another film that deliberately shows the dark side of Chinese society to please foreign judges. A contrived "meat-selling" video.

The film vilifies the protagonist Wang Cailing to the extreme, with buck teeth, acne, bow legs...

On the one hand, it is an elegant opera and a holy heart, but on the other hand, it is full of self-deception and vulgar.

The principle of contrasting beauty and ugliness in 19th-century romantic literature may produce unexpected effects when used in literature without direct appeal to images. Once implemented into images, ugliness becomes unbearable to see and hinders recognition.

The opposition between beauty and ugliness not only refers to the opposition between the character's appearance and his heart, but also the split within the character's heart.

On the one hand, we feel the nobility of Wang Cailing’s pursuit of their dreams, and on the other hand, we pity their self-deceptive illusions.

Wang Cailing completely lacks the perfect unity of appearance and heart of her sister Zhang Jingchu in "Peacock". The vulgar and the sublime coexist, and the audience's feelings are therefore wavering.

Although the three siblings in "Peacock" have slightly different personalities, they are generally normal and represent most ordinary people with dreams, so they are easily recognized by most audiences.

The protagonist and ideas are far away from the public, so the niche becomes an alternative. Most people have dreams, but it’s rare to see people who are so persistent in their dreams like Wang Cailing.

Therefore, when the audience looks at them, they are afraid that besides sympathy, they will be more pitiful and deplorable, and maybe also disgusting.

All of this was caused by a woman named "Wang Cailing".

Who is Wang Cailing?

It is you and me who are unwilling to be mediocre in every ordinary life and walk alone on the road to pursue dreams.

She is incompatible with the environment but always refuses to give in like a warrior. She is the epitome of everyone struggling between ideals and reality.

She is similar to the poet. She has wings hanging from the sky but no sky, but she has never given up on the construction of her own spiritual world.

The sentence at the beginning of the film seems to contain a certain mood. The beginning of spring is here, can the warmth be far behind?

It was at this moment that the heroine Wang Cailing stood out.

Wang Cailing can definitely be regarded as a cultural person in the little-known small city of Heyang.

She can correctly and completely explain the meaning of "Silk is not as good as bamboo, and bamboo is not as good as meat": "Silk is a string instrument, and bamboo is a wind instrument. What she means by this sentence is that string instruments are not as good as wind instruments. , wind instruments are not as good as human voices.”

Coincidentally, Wang Cailing also verified this idiom correctly and completely with her life (human voice).

Such an ugly woman has arrogant ideals and ridiculous pride. She is so out of tune with the world. She is an alien in that city.

Fortunately, she still has a singing voice.

As a music teacher, Wang Cailing has a good voice and can sing very beautiful operas.

"I am poor and not good-looking. God gave me a good voice, but other than that, I am a waste."

Wang Cailing likes to sing "Late Spring". As the lyrics say, "Life is so cruel to me" seems to be her cry against the injustice of her fate.

No matter day or night, Wang Cailing’s crying projects the despair and helplessness of shattered ideals, but in reality, she deceives herself and others with lies and deception time and time again.

As far as conditions are concerned, her life is as thin as paper, but her heart is as high as the sky: she wants to be admitted to the Central Conservatory of Music and become the prima soprano of the Central Opera House after graduation. Her only goal in life.

For this reason, she learned Italian, made her own performance costumes stitch by stitch, and practiced Schumann's piano music selections diligently. These were actually "little things."

In the film, she spends more than 30,000 yuan to apply for a Beijing household registration, which shows her determination even more.

Wang Cailing’s experience reminds me of Pan Hongxia in Jiang Yun’s novel "Secret Blooming".

An ordinary woman in a small city has a dream that refuses to be mediocre and a love that she longs for.

In the depressive atmosphere of the small town, her soul struggles and cannot compete with life and destiny, but her dreams have always been stored in their hearts and have never been forgotten.

Everyone knows that beautiful women are loved by everyone, but ugly women can only love themselves.

Beijing’s art groups are bloated, and the selection criteria are based solely on appearance. There is no way she can get in;

Beijing’s household registration cannot be obtained, and her level is not good enough. After reaching the score line from outside the city, the Central Conservatory of Music became out of reach for her;

As a foreigner, she was not even qualified to work as a temporary worker at the Central Conservatory of Music.

Wang Cailing's life reminds me of Yu Jie's master's thesis "Records of Abnormal People". The literary theory focuses on "social" alternative like Yu Dafu, but it is actually very sad.

In an inland county in the early 1980s, Huang Sibao, a steel-making worker, dreamed of Van Gogh, was passionate about painting human bodies, and wanted to take the Central Academy of Fine Arts entrance exam after repeated failures.

Wang Cailing, a music teacher at a normal school, is obsessed with opera and dreams of singing at the Paris Opera House. She keeps saying that the Central Opera House wants to transfer her, and she travels to Beijing again and again to get her hukou in Beijing.

Hu Jinquan, the dance teacher of the Qunyi Hall, is known as Eryizi (a person who is neither male nor female). He actually danced ballet in a street performance in this small and remote town, which made the crowd burst into laughter.

They are out of time, a group of young ladies who have given birth to maids.

However, they did not succumb to fate, but did it despite knowing that they could not do anything. They worked tirelessly and relentlessly to attack fate again and again.

They are actually like Sisyphus in the ancient Greek mythology who pushed the stone up the mountain. Although the stone would fall down every time he pushed it to the top, the value of life does not lie in obedience, but in the despair of fate. of struggle.

Resisting despair...

While we lament the cruelty and ruthlessness of fate, we cannot help but be moved by these weak individuals who are impacted by hopelessness.

This is also a theme that Lu Xun is passionate about.

Standing in the 21st century today, looking back at the 1980s when we were born seems like a world away.

What is easily overlooked is that if the key word of the 1990s was "economy", then the theme of the 1980s was "culture."

Thinking about the intellectuals in the 1980s, I am reminded of Wang Xiaobo's words in "The Bronze Age":

Perhaps the ultimate development of culture is the proliferation of liberalism. Such a result can be imagined in China, so there is this troubled period in the movie.

The first person who made Wang Cailing wake up from her dream of being an artist was Hu Jinquan.

This "Er Youzi" in the eyes of the world loves ballet. As a crane living among chickens, he has been facing the dual accusations of being engaged in "tight pants art" and being single. .

As Hu Jinquan himself said, he is like a fish bone stuck in the throats of people in this city. One snowy night, Hu Jinquan, who was on the verge of collapse, proposed to Wang Cailing a fake marriage.

"Just get a marriage certificate and nothing else will happen."

Wang Cailing did not want to be "cannon fodder" and flatly refused.

After an attempted rape in broad daylight, Hu Jinquan was imprisoned.

"My fish bone has finally been pulled out." When visiting the prison, Wang Cailing listened to Hu Jinquan's words and watched Hu Jinquan standing on tiptoes in prison shoes, and shed tears of guilt - that snowy night, if If she didn't refuse...

Hu Jinquan's imprisonment was like a sap, which made Wang Cailing, who was in the same situation, dizzy.

With no hope of going to Beijing, in this city, she might be the next fish bone...

We dare not say that at this time, Wang Cailing has already understood her life as a prima soprano. The goal was completely hopeless, but since Hu Jinquan was imprisoned, Wang Cailing has never sung an opera again, not even a word.

Just when Wang Cailing's opera dream gradually faded, the second person who woke Wang Cailing from her dream appeared "at the right time". She was Wang Cailing's female neighbor, Teacher Xiao Zhang.

This female neighbor is an absolute beauty and naturally married a civil servant from the tax bureau.

Wang Cailing, who had unbearable stomach pain, went to her neighbor's house to borrow medicine. The affection between her female neighbor and her husband made Wang Cailing envious.

Coupled with the expectation of her parents for Wang Cailing to start a family soon when she returns home for the Chinese New Year - Wang Cailing finally no longer only has opera in her heart.

When Wang Cailing started to use earth cubes for self-beautification, the last and most powerful awakener appeared.

Bald Beibei, who has excellent singing talent, used her cancer to impress Wang Cailing, who she considered to have "Beijing connections".

Wang Cailing brought Beibei and her dwarf mother to Beijing, and spent all the 12,000 yuan she had left to apply for a Beijing household registration on Beibei's participation.

In the end, Beibei got the second place. Just when Wang Cailing and Beibei and her daughter, who had realized their unfinished ideals, were holding each other's arms and crying, Beibei and her daughter suddenly fell to their knees.

It turns out that Beibei's cancer was a lie, "It's too difficult to become famous. There are so many people who can sing well, and we are from a small place. We can't get out without some special means."

p>

Such an "impure" girl can actually sing well. This completely shattered Wang Cailing’s artistic dream.

The attacks continue. Immediately afterwards, the female neighbor’s husband took away all the family’s savings and disappeared.

This made Wang Cailing lose confidence in marriage.

In fact, Wang Cailing is self-aware. She understands her situation very well, but she cannot help but think that she is a talented person.

Until my eyes were stung deeply by the sun, and I sobbed softly in the middle of the night.

At the end of "The Beginning of Spring", Wang Cailing did not get married, but adopted an orphan with a harelip.

Perhaps after experiencing various situations brought about by pursuing her ideals, she compromised with her fate and began to live a peaceful and tranquil life.

He raised the child by selling pork and also gave her plastic surgery.

After curing her daughter's illness, she taught her daughter to sing nursery rhymes and took her daughter to Beijing to play.

The ideal of a young literary and artistic woman has come to an end.

The end of the film shows a female singer singing Puccini's famous "Aria" at the Chinese Opera House. I actually felt a little melancholy and watched it over and over again several times.

When I saw the scene where Teacher Hu, who was imprisoned for the crime of gangster obscenity in order to prove that he was a normal man, finally stood on tiptoe in prison uniform to comfort the sad Wang Cailing.

This man who was despised by me at first actually made me respect him when I finally saw him.

Idealists are admirable and sad at the same time. What is admirable about them lies in their persistence in their ideal world, but what is sad is that they are incompatible with the real world.

Therefore, there are two endings for idealists, either to integrate into reality, or to die in the ideal world they made up.

Among the people Wang Cailing made friends with were two self-proclaimed "artistic youths" Huang Sibao and Zhou Yu.

The conceited Huang Sibao likes to paint his own oil paintings and wants to get admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but fails time and time again;

Zhou Yu, whose dream has not yet been extinguished, always laments the arrangement of fate. He is useless and a good voice is wasted.

Two equally different people are so small and humble in front of Wang Cailing.

That kind of hypocritical cloak and flaunted self cannot stand the test of time, nor can it stand the test of life.

The appearance of Zhou Yu is to prove that Wang Cailing, who is noble because of her art, will not give in to marry a pseudo-literary lover;

The appearance of Huang Sibao is to prove that Wang Cailing is a normal lover Women of the opposite sex who have similar interests.

In addition, Gu Changwei's "piggyback" shows that literary and artistic young people have taken another path besides Wang Cailing and Hu Jinquan - falling into the tide of market economy.

In other words, if you remove them, the development trajectory of Wang Cailing, a tragic character, is still clear.

The appearance of Hu Jinquan, who dances ballet, and Gao Beibei, who loves singing, once touched Wang Cailing's life, but this touch turned cold in the end.

Hu Jinquan could not stand the worldly view and wanted to marry Wang Cailing to hide his sexual orientation. After being rejected, he became desperate and finally had to prove himself by humiliating his students in public, even if the price was cold. Handcuffs.

Gao Beibei's deception was obviously an insult and blasphemy to art, which almost caused her to collapse.

In her eyes, the nobility and purity of art cannot tolerate any adulteration, and the blasphemy to art is far greater than the blasphemy to herself.

Teacher Xiao Zhang who lives next door is a confidant. She is young, beautiful and has her own family.

She was filled with a sense of superiority because she had such an ugly and single neighbor. Even when she called for bed in the middle of the night, she would raise her voice at the top of her voice, fearing that the neighbors next door wouldn't hear her.

Her natural superiority made her full of capital. She always kept talking about how wonderful her husband was, pretending to be kind, and even went so far as to buy her a sex device.

And when her own husband took away all his property and left, she, who had no capital, began to understand what it means to be connected by the same disease.

Therefore, they are all dwarfs in front of Wang Cailing.

Maybe you want to ask, what is art? What is the ideal?

"I must sing to the Paris Opera House", Wang Cailing said this again and again, but she knew that all this was just a beautiful fantasy.

On the train to Beijing, she yearned for art and love. "It would be great if this was a train bound for Paris"

The two people's admiration began to go too far, so when a word of rejection woke her up, she looked around and it was still infinitely cruel.

When the drunken Huang Sibao lying on the platform came into view together with the scattered easels and mats, as an audience, we also lamented the huge difference between ideal and reality.

When Gao Beibei cried on TV holding flowers and certificates, we lamented that the realization of this ideal was so disgraceful and even bleak.

When Hu Jinquan was still standing on his toes with his cloth shoes in prison, we no longer lamented because the "ideal" was too heavy and crushed the soul.

Therefore, the "art" in "The Beginning of Spring" is more like some kind of spiritual anesthetic.

As Gu Changwei's second work, it is inevitable to compare it with the masterpiece "Peacock".

"Peacock" writes about the distortion of human nature caused by the Cultural Revolution; "The Beginning of Spring" shows people who are depressed and psychologically abnormal.

To be fair, "The Beginning of Spring" is not as heavy as "Peacock", the character setting is not as reasonable as "Peacock", and the shock to the audience is not as strong as "Peacock".

But one of the highlights of "The Beginning of Spring" is something that "Peacock" does not have, and that is Jiang Wenli's actress-level performance.

When Wang Cailing turned around and appeared for the first time, I even felt nervous: That is the national goddess Jiang Wenli.

Once the actor does not handle it well, the aesthetic expectations brought by the appearance to the audience can only be It exposes the shortcomings of the actors and makes the characters look horribly fake.

Looking at the details, Jiang Wenli’s profound acting skills allowed Gu Changwei to dare to use long lenses.

Gu Changwei's long lens also allowed Jiang Wenli to achieve a more complete performance, and Wang Cailing's character became more real and credible in this lens language that is closest to documentary.

From the beginning Wang Cailing pretended to be arrogant, but in the end she exuded the brilliance of motherhood when she was with her adopted daughter.

In Wang Cailing's eyes, there is less and less attachment and more and more peace, less and less vulnerability and more and more strength.

Even with just one expression change from joy to sadness and anger, she expressed a thousand words in Wang Cailing's heart.

In my opinion, this is what attracts me most about this movie.

In terms of constructing the historical reality of the film through details, "The Beginning of Spring" also maintains the level of Gu Changwei's previous film.

Beijing Asian Games stickers on the bridge, Huang Sibao’s old-fashioned jeans and Zhou Yu’s “ancestral” cultural shirt;

The 80’s version of the fence on Tiananmen Square, the retro armed police "Pink Memories" resounded in the karaoke hall;

Wang Cailing's Camel brand ink, Beijing instant noodles, lamps with Slam Dunk stickers, the old CCTV 2 logo on TV, her adopted daughter Wahaha AD Calcium Milk in my hand;

I even saw the poster of "Red Sorghum" which was very popular at the time and the 1992 Spring Festival Gala.

The historical atmosphere and sense of the times throughout the film are emanated from these things.

This sentence, which implies the eternal gap between ideal and reality, also reflects the distance between historical imagination and current expression in "The Beginning of Spring".

Many people think that it is an inner spirit of "I have suffered a bloody head but my dream is still there", but it can also be seen as a pathological manifestation of relying on vain dreams to escape helpless reality.

But I always believe that the real charm of "The Beginning of Spring" does not lie in the twists and turns of its story, but in the way it creates a Kraft-like character that is rare in Chinese movies. Card-style characters with absurd feelings.

At the same time, it is covered up by strange arrangements and universal themes about dreams.

It’s not because her practice of elegant art is not accepted by others, but because she is expressing her nobility and soaringness in a way that hits a wall that her body cannot carry.

The imaginative satisfaction of Wang Cailing singing in the Grand Theater at the end of the film may be the greatest comfort that the audience can get.