Green tea movie

The film Green Tea is a different one among all Bird's works. On the one hand, this film adapted from the novel Adia by the Water follows the simple and clear plot framework of the original work. On the other hand, it is quite realistic compared with the original work, and it is also a narrative way that the director used to be good at. Instead, the unrealistic formula of "dual personality" is applied to describe this emotion, thus deducing a seemingly frivolous but unreasonable plot. In this gap, director Bird's postmodern turn attempt looms.

First of all, the film Green Tea tries to construct a plane maze with reduced logical depth. This restoration is especially reflected in the inevitable connection between Wu Fang/Lang Lang's family history and his personality. In the novel, the imprisonment of his mother directly led Lang Lang to play the piano to earn money. Obviously, this is a heavy code of "selling one's body to save one's mother". But the film deliberately avoids the narrative of this causal relationship. When his mother was released from prison, Lang Lang did not give up the life of "playing the piano"-the painful past history became a memorial that seemed to be forgotten, and the direct consequence was that the audience who were used to seeking reasonable exits from the plot logic entered a dead end.

Interestingly, this map can't follow the logical direction, but it leaves us with "similarity". In fact, isn't the film constantly copying Andy Hall on the negative of "concealment"? It's just that Lang Lang's parents, Chen Mingliang and his ex-girlfriend, Lao Fang and his girlfriend all ended in violence because of "communication failure after the truth was exposed", and after a slap in the face of deja vu, they served as the background for Wu Fang/Lang Lang and Chen Mingliang's "blind date". Here, we can almost see many collage styles that have been popular in love movies, such as spicy love soup or presbyopia. However, the film has also entered its own adaptation paradox. Since the director only wants us to see a colorful decorative painting, these violent behaviors in the scene should not exist, or some cheerful brushstrokes should be painted, because these ugly folds are looming in the main body of the story, inducing the audience to think in vain, which contradicts the director's philosophy of reduction. But if you really erase them, the story will become a monochrome fragment.

Another flat feature of the film is reflected in the heroine's personality setting. In the novel, Lang Lang and "I" are two different lives of the heroine before and after her mother is released from prison. In the film, when Wu Fang lightly attributed her mother's return to prison to "maladjustment", she naturally told us that she was the successor of this maladjustment. For mother, this maladjustment is "going back to prison" in The Shawshank Redemption, while for her, it is "changing face" in the style of "Ashes of Time". In recent years, "changing face" has undoubtedly become a typed inner portrayal of urbanites' desire for communication and self-protection in film works. The film didn't avoid this mode, but ignored the positive-negative-combination relationship of the mode itself, and didn't give any explanation for its causes, which made Wu Fang and Lang Lang become different faces of the same person at the same time-"unsuitable" was finally labeled as a commodity and pushed to the audience.

At the same time, the emotional development clues of romantic films are intertwined with the suspense of suspense films. The fly in the ointment is that if the interweaving effect can be described as "one plus one is greater than two" in front of the film, then at the end of the film-perhaps because Chen Mingliang's truth-seeking action is too passive-we can only see the confrontation between the two. The "I" in the novel told the truth under Chen Mingliang's questioning. In Bird's story, there is a broken ending for no reason, and there is also a farce of "opening a house" which also lacks sufficient bedding. The cut is just a close-up of a cup of spinning green tea. At this point, the contradiction between planarization and logic is exposed again, and the emotional clues enter the climax and ending stage, while the suspense clues, that is, whether Chen Mingliang found the truth and why he found it, have not been shown, indicating that the film has been unable to take into account the ending of the two clues. Therefore, the director can only use the repetition of the action dialogue before and after and the blurred image behind the glass as a hint (according to the interview data, there was a plan to shoot a scene in the hotel room, but it was later cancelled), but the too strong freehand brushwork element still made the suspense line look thin and thin, thus making the end of the whole film tend to be hasty.

In any case, Bird finally succeeded in turning a weighty short story into an entertainment film. At least in form, green tea has everything a mass commodity should have: cheerful love stories, star charm, Du Kefeng's photography, Su Cong's music and Wang Shuo's lines. It does look beautiful, but it's also a bit awkward. It's like someone spreading out six sides of a beautiful Rubik's cube in front of you, telling you that it's not for turning, just a wonderful set of space colors.