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Two Japanese Movies “Bouquet” and “Car”: Presenting Two Different Values ​​of Love

2022-05-07 10:48:09Source: Beijing Daily

Recently, two Japanese films have attracted a lot of attention in China, and they have also received a lot of repercussions in the academic circles. One is “Love Like a Bouquet” (referred to as “Bouquet”), and the other is “Driving My Car” (referred to as “Car”), both of which are related to love.

“Love Like a Bouquet”: The Fading of Young Love Utopia

Over the years, Japanese films have not been absent from the Chinese film market, although the response does not seem to be great. The low-budget film “Bouquet” directed by Yutai Doi earned 90 million at the box office in China. In the special period of the downturn in the film market, this result is still very good.

Of course, “Bouquet” made even greater economic gains in Japan last year, winning the box-office top spot for several weeks. There are many movies regarding love. What is it that touches young people today and makes them so fascinated by this movie? “Car” is also a film regarding love or relationships, and it expresses a very different purpose from “Bouquet”. If “Bouquet” is a relatively easy-to-understand film that can be enjoyed with the help of the audience’s general sensibility, then “Che” is a literati film or an intellectual film, because it requires rich cultural accumulation to interpret it. There are small texts nested within the large text, and if you are unfamiliar with these texts, it can be difficult to find your way into the film.

Regarding “Bouquet”, we can see the process of the blooming and fading of the love between two young people in more than two hours. The male protagonist Mai (Shanyin Mai) and the female protagonist Silk (Yatani Su) are two young men and women who are separated from society and crowds, and have a slightly urban loneliness. Two unrelated people met unexpectedly at the station because the college classmate’s sorority failed to catch the last bus. During their brief exchange, the two found that they were very similar to each other. They liked to wear white cloth shoes, liked the performance of small guinea pigs, and loved dramas such as “Land of Gems” and “Golden God”.

These commonalities create an atmosphere of destiny. In this atmosphere, the first half of the movie is like a candy candy. This narrative mode is very convenient for young men and women, but it is also a very common narrative technique. Romance movies often have narrative routines and fixed structural templates. Using this template to measure “Bouquet”, its overall storyline trend It doesn’t deviate from the pattern of ordinary romance films. But why does it have a score of 8.7 on Douban?

From the author’s point of view, from the beginning to the end of the whole film, the successful detailed performance of the emotional ups and downs of Mai and Xuan gives this popular romance a unique charm. The capture of believable details of life shows the memorable psychological ups and downs in love, which allows the audience to find the tears of emotional explosion, so the film has a lot of stamina. This may be the reason why the box office of this film was relatively sluggish when it premiered, but it has exploded in the subsequent period.

What caused Mai and Xuan to finally break up was nothing more than the fact that the two entered social life from college life. Facing the pressure from society, the two developed different viewpoints and their emotions gradually deteriorated. Mai changed from being a literary and artistic youth at the beginning to not talking regarding ideals, but more in line with the conventions of the secular society. The books he read also changed from literary and artistic works to inspirational works. Silk still maintains the appearance of her college days. In her spare time, she plays games and goes shopping, and the books she reads are also literature and art books. The former sees the latter as naive, rambunctious, and anachronistically maintaining a student status, while the latter seems to think that the former betrays the spirituality of the past. “Bouquet” abandons those bloody incidents, and there is no third-party intervention, and restores love to its original state, simple and simple but touching.

A beautiful utopian love can’t stand the reality of “the wind, the sword, the frost and the sword”. The love in the past is like a mirror, but it makes people feel melancholy. The film expresses eternal love, but the development of this love has a close interaction with the current reality of Japan. The director used the emotional changes of Mai and Xuan to implicitly satirize the social status quo. It is said that contemporary Japanese “social animal” youth have three ways out: either like the truck driver of the Mai Company, in order to resist the state of mind that he is willing to become a social animal, he threw the goods into the sea and eventually collapsed; or like Mai generally recognized this social phenomenon, willingly Become a screw in the capital machine; or, like silk, give up higher material pursuits and seek a space that belongs to you.

“Driving My Car”: The repressed inner world of middle-aged people

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the director of “Car”, is a “phenomenal” director in the international film industry in recent years. He won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film this year, which makes him a newcomer in the international film industry. Although his films were not released in Chinese theaters, his two films, “Accident and Imagination” and “Driving My Car”, became the most important works of Chinese film critics last year.

The format of Car is unique, and the story is cleverly constructed. It can be said to be a “drama within a play” – Ryusuke Hamaguchi used “Uncle Vanya” to connect the whole film content, the director’s story and Chekhov’s story penetrated each other, trying to use “intertext” to stimulate profound Feelings and thoughts.

It can be said that the content of this film is a bit brain-burning, because it requires us to understand multiple texts and consider the relationship between the two texts. The story of Uncle Vanya takes place on a farm in Russia. Retired professor Serebryakov and his wife Yelena returned to the countryside to live. Uncle Vanya, who regards the professor as an idol, has worked diligently to run the farm for 25 years, support the professor, and entrust his youth and ideals to the professor. In the end, he found that the professor was nothing but a mediocre person, and he was selfish. Furious, Uncle Vanya nearly shoots and kills the professor. This character has a spirit of daring to reflect and reveal regarding life.

The protagonist of “Car” Jiafu is the actor of Uncle Vanya. He broke the derailment of his wife Yin. However, he closed the door and left quietly, as if nothing had happened, and lived harmoniously and lovingly with his wife as always. . Until the death of his wife, Jia Fu failed to admit his inner world to his wife, which became his heart knot. Every time the performance of “Uncle Vanya” in the film, you can feel the different mood changes of family portraits. Uncle Vanya took out a gun in the face of the collapse of the idol. There is no family blessing, he chose to conceal it to maintain his appearance, but every time he played Uncle Vanya, it was like a kind of torture to him.

“Car” is an important image of the film. Jia Fu was going to perform outside the country and lived far away from the performance venue. The organizer arranged for a driver for Jia Fu to rehearse his lines in the car. His immersion in the text, but no longer at the wheel of his car, seems to suggest that his life is out of control—that he is no longer in control of his own life. He was immersed in the text, but he was no longer self-consistent.

This film is actually a journey of Jiafu’s spiritual healing. In “Uncle Vanya”, Vanya fell into a depressed state of life. He lost his purpose in life, his work was meaningless, and the emptiness and absurdity of life were spreading. Chekhov asked him to set aside The false clouds of life, face it bravely – although life may have no cure, he still takes the truth apart and shows it to others. In “Car”, Jia Fu may face the same life situation, but is he as frank as Uncle Vanya? Or even if it is honest, how can it be?

Regarding the plot design of the spiritual healing of “Car”, many people think that its expression lacks creativity, and even some film critics think that the process of treatment is deliberate. Although the film has received huge accolades, there are still doubts. Perhaps in this era of film depression, filmmakers have not been inspired by the social reality caused by the epidemic to be more creative.

“Love Like a Bouquet” gradually fades the sweet utopia of young people, while “Driving My Car” directly presents the repressed spiritual world of middle-aged people. It was opposed to utopian love from the beginning, but it is bitter There is a little bit of reluctance in the middle, but there is still no denying the existence of love. Those who are trapped in love are suffering, but they are still struggling to find the way to redemption. The two films tell regarding two different values ​​of love. If we watch the two films together, we may have a glimpse of the current social situation in Japan and the latest situation of Japanese films.

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