How to evaluate Shunji Iwai's China film Hello, China?

After watching Hello Zhihua, I was in a trance, which continued until the meeting after the whole screening until the end.

This is a film that I have been waiting for for a long time. Before seeing this film, I never thought that Shunji Iwai would shoot this film in this way.

Shunji Iwai is usually purely focused, and rarely has such a large layout and such scattered main branches. He used the large-scale group image structure like swallowtail butterfly in China, and constantly changed the center of gravity of the characters in a very risky way to complete the description of the group image. Among them, intertextuality and reflection between characters composed of "time and space information transmission", "body duality and dislocation" seems to be the opposite of "love letter", but in fact it is an exploration of intergenerational and family recording space.

Zhihua, played by Zhou Xun, chose to attend the reunion instead of her sister because of her sudden suicide, but unexpectedly met a young admirer Yin Chuan (Qin Hao). Yin Chuan escaped with Zhihua in the middle of the reunion, so they exchanged contact information.

The energy generated by this encounter spread throughout the winter, and everyone in this family was influenced by it and started their own stories. The interweaving of the past and reality warms the memory in the emerging letters and novels, and the secret of Zhinan's life experience is revealed bit by bit.

In this story, middle-aged China people take the role of threading the needle. She is ordinary, gentle and naive. She is looking forward to being discovered and guiding everyone to discover. Zhou Xun is a good substitute, quietly performing her rich and delicate inner activities.

And more pen and ink and breaking points come from the girl China/Zhou Saran, and the girl Nan Fang/Yuan of Anxi.

Shunji Iwai's youth movies can be divided into two categories, but in this kind of "pure love" movies, he rarely depicts love directly. His usual practice is to hide this unrequited love emotion in his daily life to express more "missed beauty", especially in Love Letter and April Story. In these two films, the hazy love seems to never be revealed and hidden, which can finally give people a sense of beauty at the end and nostalgia with years as poems.

Hello, Zhihua, while continuing, I broke this point.

Let's talk about the most touching part of the whole film, the confession of the failure of girl China.

She fell in love with Yin Chuan, and Yin Chuan transferred to another school before the entrance examination, but Yin Chuan entrusted Zhihua to send a love letter to her sister's south. In the constantly rotating lens, Zhihua has been thinking about how to speak, hesitation, sadness, injustice, pretending to be happy, and soon appeared on his face. Her back to Yin Chuan ushered in the first confession that ended in failure without opening her mouth. When Zifeng Zhang performed this passage, he did not use too many expressions, and naturally conveyed the complex feelings of the characters instantly and powerfully, which made people put themselves in their shoes. In the next few scenes, her performance is even more staggering.

Zhihua didn't pass those letters to her sister, which was finally discovered by Yin Chuan. When he went to explain to her, great guilt seemed to paralyze her limbs, so that she could only mechanically repeat her apology. Zhihua wants to tell the truth, but he can't say it. After all, she is dead. This is the second time that she failed without saying anything. She realized that she might have ruined the last possibility.

In the absence of retreat, Zhihua chose to give all the love letters to Zhinan, then walked face to face with Yin Chuan and handed him a humble love letter that read "Last Courage"-"I like you. Can we be friends? " Zhihua's third confession wrapped a girl's fear of loss. She completely exposed her thoughts, but she still dared not expect anything. She just wanted to be a friend, but she failed.

Echoing each other, at the end of the movie, the movie tells us that Zhou Saran wants to stay in his hometown only because he is afraid to see his deskmate when he starts school, and he can't hide his inner fear.

This truth is very simple and really funny, but it is inexplicably connected with girls' hearts. This kind of emotion was a great thing for them at that time-how to choose to face it, and if you hesitate, will you miss it? Will you regret missing it?

This is the technique used by Shunji Iwai in "Love Letters", which reflects the relationship between people in different time and space and themselves by setting up "mirror images".

In everyone's life, the audience is not only looking for the unsolved mystery "Why did the South commit suicide" set at the beginning of the film, but also looking for everyone's life that was silently affected by "traces left by others".

The pain in China and the suicide in South China are all nostalgia. Finally, they became a string of lost ripples and a little warm sunshine in the long winter. After the screening, everyone seemed to have no intention of sinking. Instead, they are asking Shunji Iwai what is the "best self". This is probably the vision given by this film:

Our life is made up of missing, and we often can't get what we want. Everyone is always forced to grow up and face his childlike innocence.

But learn to move on, and you can always see different lights.

Text/Xu Ruofeng