Director Zhong Menghong's sixth feature film "Waterfall ", talks about the first shot of the mother and daughter Jia Jing and Wang Jing:
The clock on the living room wall flipped over 07:30, their beautiful middle-class life turned to another axis of the story without special consciousness, a bit like "Stop Today" waking up and switching to the beginning of a nightmare without realizing it. The daily conversation between mother and daughter begins with
, hiding a little tension of confrontation. attempts to frame his daughter in the schedule, and tries to break away from his daughter controlled by his mother. This sharp story of love and killing is because the existence of masks is a microcosm of a special era.
"Flowers" is completed after "Sunshine". Both use the story background, focus on the emotions in the family, each with an animation fable that is rich in symbolicity and can directly point to the core of the plot, and even a poster style where family members display one by one and look straight ahead. From all aspects, they all look like twins.
The so-called twinning is also because Chen Yiwen, Wu Jianhe’s father and son, and Jia Jing’s mother and daughter are entangled inability to love.
Chen Yiwen could not overcome the setback of his eldest son's departure, so he built a high wall of indifference to his second son; in the room that was about to be cured, Jia Jingwen maintained a preparedness attitude of reuniting and was aggressive towards her daughter who interfered with it. Wu Jianhe has to be farther away from his original family, so far away that he can't be imprinted in a place where the shadows of the high walls cannot be imprinted, so that he can be re-seemed; Wang Jing has to put down his sharp prejudices and enter the distorted world in his mother's cognition, so that he can safely bring the two back to reality. These pains of turning around in a desperate situation make the two works seem twin.
But "Sunshine" and "Flowers" both suppress a puzzle. The former is the unfathomable inner state of the eldest son, and the latter is the daughter's hostility if there is no such thing as an absent mind. Before the riddle is opened, also uses realistic techniques to manage the story, which will look similar to at first glance. It was not until the eldest son fell from the building and the mother fell ill that the two films clearly parted ways.
It turns out that what "Waterfall" originally mistakenly believes in is actually always wandering between the reality of mental symptoms. It witnesses an elegant person peeling and collapse and entering the category of psychological thriller. Especially the perspective is still in the first half of Alyssa Chia.
- Delusion: A false idea that cannot be shaken by using facts to confront each other
- Hallucination: The perceptual experience still arises under the lack of external stimulation
Jia Jingwen woke up in the middle of the night and heard the heavy rain outside the house. Her daughter who was locked in the room for several days, I don’t know if she had heard of this rain. He broke into the room where his daughter was warning on the door. In the room, there was no one on the bed except for the trembling rain and wind blew in from outside the window. Jia Jingwen ran to the main road, but she didn't hold on to the umbrella, and she anxiously looked at where her daughter had gone.
Wang Jing woke up in the middle of the night and received a call. He ignored the restrictions during the quarantine period and walked forward on the streets of Taipei late at night. The camera locks Wang Jing's speed, and the afterimage of people, cars, and neon lights dragging out and falling speed in the background. Wang Jing ran to the door of the emergency room, but did not bring his health insurance card, and anxiously identified the familiar figure in the patient's clothes.
This drama reverses the character relationship that the audience has established before. will have such a flip because the creator deliberately takes the mother played by Alyssa Chia as the main body in the presentation of the perspective. The reaction of the audience's daughter Wang Jing is not based on reality, but on the feelings interpreted by the mother after the distortion.
Recall again, my daughter sneered at her mother in a kind manner, warn slogans posted on the door, swear words scratched from the dining plate, and sitting in the living room without wearing a mask and saying coldly: "I seem to be sick." These hostility spreading around with isolation as a spear cannot explain why Wang Jing's attitude can become so violent in a rain?
She was worried about her mother's safety, which was completely different from her previous rebellion. Wang Jing's performance also made me believe from her eyes that her daughter had no trace of fraud. The most reasonable explanation is that there is no such rain at all.This key rain is a fusion of mother's auditory hallucinations and delusions. It is a critical step for mothers to be unable to withstand the information released by dopamine in their brains and to believe all false information to be true.
Previously, the mother and daughter were tense on their way to school, at the dining table, and in the living room. It was not the daughter who had the problem, but the mother who had the problem. A mother who is immersed in the dysfunction of thoughts and consciousness gradually appears to have a sense of reality.
Delusion is for the deviation of the thinking content, and hallucinations are for the improper activity of perceptual reactions, which cannot be measured objectively, and emphasize the subjective feelings of the sick person. When film and television works deal with mental symptoms, if they hope to achieve the effect of the audience's empathy, erasing the traces of reality is a necessary method. The differences in the treatment of different works are at the time when the purpose of mental illness, the ratio of virtual and real, and the process of entering the disease.
Take "Beautiful Realm" as an example. Mental symptoms occupy almost all the story . The whole film is the rich, active and highly systematic display of delusions and hallucinations of the protagonist John Nash. The diagnosis is nearing the end. The audience is surprised that the clues have been swaying in front of them for so long and turned a blind eye. As for whether John Nash is sick, he cannot stir up any emotions. Anthony Hopkins plays the demented father's "Father", wandering between reality and reality, emphasizing the shared feelings between the audience and the father who suffers from the pain of memories scattered all over the ground.
"Flowerfall" folds the perspective of the story in half with the acute attack of the disease. Before that non-existent heavy rain, Alyssa Chia's subjective dominant role relationship was established. At this moment, she experienced the delusional atmosphere that was not right around her, but she couldn't tell the truth. It was the sentence: "Her (Wang Jing)'s eyes were different from before", and she had "very feeling" about her ex-husband's constant surge. is a typical example of the prodromal period of psychiatric disorders and the mental symptoms still vaguely.
When the disease course continues to develop, delusions and hallucinations are condensed and formed, and pour out in the acute phase, a person's sense of reality will gradually be completely immersed in the symptoms. Take the non-existent heavy rain as an example. It was the sound of night hallucination that formed the sound of rain. Alyssa Chia, who was awakened, flashed with an unrealistic idea that Wang Jing was no longer at home. She trusted this idea very much and rushed to the road regardless of everything.
It is precisely because of this rain that Jia Jingwen has removed her elegance and self-support. Her neat suit is even more smart and capable, and replaced by patient suits without personality and lack of status symbols. The perspective of the story and the dominance of action are also moved to Wang Jing at this moment.
When Wang Jing becomes the dominant in the second half of the story, this perspective becomes the sure basis for the audience to judge the truth - so when the delusion of "the guard stands guard at the doorstep" is vivid, the audience can no longer be confused and watch how his daughter is in the abyss of disease like Orpheus leading his wife out of the underworld, taking his mother to break the trial of every moment of the disease.
If "Flowers" explains that the course of sensation disorder seems too close to the cautious and neatness of the textbook, then the creator's handling of "water" as a symbol of the whole line shows his ability to easily achieve artistic achievements.
arranges the plot elements about "water" in causal order, which will look like this:
Jia Jingwen's initial auditory hallucination was the sound of water rumbling and I don't know where to hit it. But the large piece of blue canvas on the exterior wall of the old building is like a waterfall in the city in the big view of Taipei City. So, the mother and daughter live behind the water curtains of the waterfall. The mother who was about to start illness, the visual image that was hinted all day long inspired the wrong auditory experience. When the auditory errors continued to stack, the stream finally gathered the non-existent but lifelike heavy rain.
ward corridor humming "Choose", the lyrics "scattered and sprinkled all over the ground", and the image of "water" gradually slows down from the torrent and slows down with only "scattered and dots" as heals and gets rid of the mental pressure given by the waterfall or marriage. A conversation between mother and daughter after being discharged from the hospital was the beginning of Jia Jingwen's sense of reality on the establishment of mental symptoms. She suddenly understood that the rumbling waterfall was the waterfall at the beginning, and the current turbulent current had passed through the flat ground, and everything was fine.
However, the creator seems to want to keep his last move by the trials put on this mother and daughter. When the last scene was chosen by the stream representing "Water through the plains", it was the place where my daughter went on a trip with a classmate, so I wanted to verify whether everything could really escape after so long. This is a borrower from the creator who actually traveled by the stream and visited whether his condition was safe.
But there was a rain on the mountain. The water that was discharged from the flood quickly swallowed the tranquility of the river like a dragon. Wang Jing, who had no time to escape, was uncertain about his life and death. My mother, who received the news at home alone, stared at the TV screen anxiously.
shows the protagonist's state through the image of "water", examining the mother-daughter relationship in "Flowers".
However, in the last scene, the audience lacked Wang Jing as an objective point of view, and the entire perspective was brought over by the sick mother. Will the skyrocketing river water and the appearance of TV screens be another hallucination and delusional scam? 's somewhat openness to the interpretation of the ending makes people shudder.
"The Waterfall" filmed by director Meng Hong in a special period is like a wake-up call to record the era. The mother-daughter relationship in the play, which is in love and kills each other, opens up the ghosts that are estranged from people's hearts, but overcomes obstacles on the road of distorted delusions and seeks the truth, goodness and beauty in faith. The audience is watching the mother and daughter help each other and stalwart each other, which is a difficult Odyssey.
