Text丨Mr. Infamous
The evaluation of Hong Kong movies as "crazy" and "excessive" is still mentioned from time to time, but even though it has been said that it is bad, not many people really realize that Hong Kong movies have not been crazy or popular for a long time. .
As Iris mentioned in yesterday’s article, Hong Kong movies have embarked on another path that emphasizes local social criticism and seems to have sealed away the original style characteristics.
But Paul Cheng used " Wisdom Teeth ", which has been gaining momentum for many years, to bring Hong Kong movies back to madness and excess.
The main plot of this movie is actually a common police story. In the face of a series of murders, the old policeman Zhan Ge (played by Lin Jiadong) who has just been reinstated has to take the new policeman Ren Kai (played by Li Chun) into the dark jungle full of dangers. This kind of way of combining the three major genres of crime, action and suspense has probably been well demonstrated in previous Hong Kong films, especially the works of Galaxy Image .
The film inserts a chilling memory into the murder case - a few years ago, Wang Tao ( Liu Yase) drove and crashed a woman, and this woman was Brother Zhan's wife. Now that Wang Tao has returned to society, Zhan Ge, regardless of his status as a police officer, is determined to kill her by any means necessary. The situation is getting worse. Wang Tao, who is just a street gangster, has to fend off the persecution of both black and white and the serial killer at the same time.
html When the Berlin International Film Festival was held in early 2019, the "vibrant" mark of "Wisdom Teeth" raised the audience's expectations, and last week at the Udine Far East International Film Festival, it attracted more viewers and also made its character " The word "vivid" transcends intuitive visual stimulation. Zheng Baorui takes the social form we are familiar with one step further, using a speculative image to present an extreme state of today's society, or a world that has always existed but that we have not yet perceived.
So this story can be successfully transplanted from the mainland in the name of common symptoms. Zheng Baorui mentioned Remi's original novel, "It is about a southern city that is humid, chaotic, noisy, and full of people. It is very similar to the state of some slums I saw when I went to Hong Kong from Macau in the 1980s. I told the whole story Moved to Hong Kong."
not only moved those humid and chaotic conditions, but Zheng Baorui also doubled down on the "dirty" and "stinky" environment. In 2017, the whole team filmed for more than three months, transporting 15 trucks of garbage every day to maintain the corrupt and dirty state. The endless piles of garbage, corpses, mannequins, mosquitoes and flies, all stinked under the heavy rain in the south. Brother Piansheng Zhan has a keen sense of smell. When he smells it, it seems that the smell reaches the nose of the audience.
This kind of movie is exactly what Zheng Baorui is good at and prefers. In the 2005 " monster ", Yan Hong (played by Lin Jiaxin ) lived in a rotten wooden house area strewn with garbage. When he went dormant in the community, he also hid in dark corners and gutters, feeding on garbage.
The next year's masterpiece "Dog Eat Dog" opens with a group of children captured on video numbly eating in a landfill, and the killer Peng ( Edison Chen ) meets a mentally retarded girl ( Pei Weiying) who changes him ), it was in the shack next to the garbage mountain.
"Dog Eat Dog"
More than ten years later, "Wisdom Teeth" finally followed the style of "Dog Eat Dog", using junk elements to the extreme. This garbage all over the mountains and plains gives Hong Kong's "edge" a different-dimensional texture, and echoes the riddled core of modern cities, just like the reality of today's society that people choose to ignore.
In recent years, Hong Kong movies have mostly filmed the bottom, but it has never been so dirty. In other words, it is rare to be able to express the world's feelings and people's hearts in such a straightforward way in the form of metaphors.In addition to Cheng Baorui's own movies, I am afraid that these disgusting reflections can only be seen in some B-level movies in the 1990s, such as Qiu Litao 's "Eight Immortals Restaurant: Human Barbecued Pork Buns", "Ebola Virus", etc.
"Ebola Virus"
It just so happens that these two Hong Kong cult film directors, who are good at finding voice in the filth, have been able to win high-box office commercial films in the mainland in recent years. Qiu Litao even made "The Bomb Disposal Expert 2" a hit at the box office, which carries indescribable expressions. When Andy Lau is becoming more and more a symbol of discipline, the "morbidity" of him and the character in the movie can better reflect this. A society that uses everything to its best advantage and throws it away is already terminally ill.
"Wisdom Teeth" uses the defacement of objects and bodies, as well as the most iconic garbage, to show the shocking degree of the collapse of the human world. The stinky garbage with no end in sight under the lens is a prison that people inside and outside the movie cannot escape. This allows Cheng Baorui to go more completely than the darkness played by traditional Hong Kong movies.
With such a social perspective, Zheng Baorui can place more elements with personal discernment. One of them is the repeated appearance of severed limbs. They are presented together with the incomplete human body model, forming a landscape where real people and dummies set off or even blend with each other. The boundaries of life are blurred. Real people are both materialized and What is damaged is also fragmented when compared to the reality that "Wisdom Teeth" is intended to reflect.
Cheng Baorui is proving the disability of society, and it is difficult not to remind people of the disability he often shows in movies. In addition to congenital and acquired physical disabilities, such as the various crazy physical tortures in "Wisdom Teeth", Yan Hong's "monster" state in "Monster", or the "mental retardation" of the girl in "Dog Eat Dog" These mental disabilities are compared with ordinary people. The former shows the alienation of the world and human nature, while the latter rediscovers the true nature of the world and human nature in alienation.
"Wisdom Teeth" combines these two opposite approaches. The victim's mutilated body repeatedly warns the perpetrator of the violence. This "perpetrator" is not only the killer, but also the people driven by hatred and delusion, and the people behind them. A society that has long been deformed. And some dirty characters who should be exterminated are shining with some very primitive and pure beautiful instincts. For example, the Japanese miss their mothers, and the lost girls long to be loved, but the world marginalizes and demonizes them first.
Therefore, this is not only a visual game that challenges mental endurance, but also an essential metaphor for modern life and interpersonal relationships.
In this analogy, there can only be endless pain. "Wisdom Teeth" requires painful pathological capture in order to move from image to perception. The movie is named after "wisdom teeth", which are inherently associated with the painful feeling of group consciousness. Ren Kai had wisdom teeth and was in great pain. However, during the continuous tasks, he had no chance to remove them, so he was always in a state of suffering.
At the same time, "wisdom teeth" also point to a kind of psychological pain. Painful things are weighing heavily on their hearts and they cannot let go. This is a heavy burden that falls on Brother Zhan and Wang Tao. Brother Zhan's family was destroyed, and he had to avenge his wife, and even more so himself. Therefore, Wang Tao had to suffer more than double the suffering, but in the abuse, he gradually recovered the humanity that made him feel contradictory and sad. As for Wang Tao, he has been trapped by the car accident that year, and was in a lowly to self-abuse situation. He went from just asking for help from Brother Zhan, being beaten and scolded, to hoping to survive without being able to survive.
The changing arc of the two people is the most dramatic emotional impact of the movie, and it is also the place that most tests the actors' acting skills. Obviously, these actors accurately conveyed the sharpness and cruelty of this story with a sense of skin-cutting pain.
This is also Zheng Baorui's usual style. Most of his best stories are full of pain." Sha Po Lang 2" continues the solid fist-to-flesh fighting of the previous series. It is a red-eyed conflict between men, spreading the oppression dominated by strength.
But the more daily pain women experience, the more terrifying it becomes. In "Monster", Yan Hong used her mouth to bite the lid of a can, and was suddenly scratched by a sharp edge. The scream could cut a knife into the hearts of the audience. The girl in "Dog Eat Dog" had a long nail pierced into her heel through her slipper, and it was horrifying to pull it out, not to mention that the baby was directly removed by caesarean section in the end.
"Monster"
This kind of tearing pain left scars in the hearts of movie fans more than ten years ago. Now the only person who can be crazier than Zheng Baorui is Zheng Baorui. The physical torture in "Wisdom Teeth" comes one after another, never ending. Wang Tao used a female body to bear the combined devastation of three men, becoming one of the most tragic characters under the lens of Zheng Baorui, and even in Chinese films.
Zheng Baorui constructed or restored a sick society through stench and severe pain. So, is there a way out? The English name of the movie is "limbo", which means the edge of hell. Zheng Baorui added that this is "a place waiting for redemption. In fact, it is very similar to the whole world. Epidemics and politics are all very chaotic."
After the official opening of "Wisdom Teeth", there are densely arranged Buddhist statues. They pass by with benevolent expressions, but there is no sense of Cihang Pudu. Instead, a severed hand discarded there highlights the extreme indifference, which becomes more and more... It indicates that the story is about to turn into the current situation of the world where the sea of suffering is always boiling and hell is always present.
The religion that is supposed to provide spiritual salvation is rather cold in his films. The dimness of "Dog Eat Dog" and the paleness of "Wisdom Teeth" are just evidence. Therefore, if you want to wait for salvation here, this "waiting" means endless suffering. Even if there is salvation, after the rain, I am afraid there will never be absolute sunshine.
is like another meaning of limbo, "uncertain state". It is in a dilemma and cannot be comprehensive. The people in the play are also in a state of suffering, which has a higher universality. Therefore, the black-and-white image is like the background of life that the protagonist can never escape. This background participates in the narrative and imprints sadness on people's hearts.
Admittedly, we cannot hope for Zheng Baorui’s happy redemption. He inherited the socially violent aesthetics of Lin Lingdong , as well as the black, ruthless and coldness that Galaxy Image is most famous for. His style is more like the You Dazhi here, leaving no room for hope, even if he is given a way out, There is no way to truly heal this way, so his fatalistic foundation is even more desolate and realistic.
This is his strong tribute to old Hong Kong films and a strong call for new Hong Kong films. Now that the reputation of Galaxy Video is waning, Zheng Baorui, who has finally returned to himself from commercial productions such as the "Journey to the West" series, has unleashed the real "wild beast" in himself.
He said in "The Guide Is Right", "Hong Kong movies are now more uncomfortable than death." This time, he spent eight years completing a story "more uncomfortable than death", which declared that Hong Kong movies are not dead. , and also created a new dawn.
I don’t expect this movie to be released in mainland China. Even if it is pruned, there is nowhere to cut it, so let it stay as it is now. This is best.
