was extended from the Qingming Festival to the summer season. In the face of the box office market hit by the epidemic, the belated "The Great Events in Life" suddenly carried the burden of "save the market". The good reputation and box office results achieved by the film after its release can indeed be said to live up to expectations. In fact, funeral and death themes are not uncommon in East Asian movies. Japan and South Korea have long had very outstanding related works. Although there are not many involved in China, works such as "The Woman's Group of Ages and Music" occasionally appear. Coming to heavy subjects and finally returning to a profound discussion of death and life is almost the "standard" of such films. "The Great Events in Life" is no exception. It chooses a family fun route with tears in laughter, and "hilarious points" and "crying points" frequently overlap. From the perspective of drama, the film is a standard commercial film structure, with clear paragraphs, each paragraph has a distinct narrative function, and various events follow one after another. The rhythm of the second half is so fast that the protagonist's action of answering the phone has almost never stopped.
is written by a young creator. The film does have its immature and "routine", but it does not prevent the audience from crying, laughing, and empathizing with each other when they can basically guess the plot trend. The vivid and warmth behind the story makes "The Great Events of Life" different from previous films of the same type and has become a benchmark work for funeral-themed films in China.
"Going to Heaven" is the shortest distance between life and death
Many people praised "The Great Events of Life" for its excellent localized writing of Japanese and Korean films. The film has indeed put a lot of effort into "down-to-earth", and from dialect to the set, it exudes a strong sense of fireworks. However, the uniqueness of "The Great Events in Life" is not only the localization of the subject matter, but also the fact that it breaks out of some presupposition of the otherworldly destruction of death, and truly connects the vivid life and the sad death in a way that tells the story of warm parent, which makes the distance between life and death very life-like. In films of the same theme, the protagonists often have to go through the process of "avoiding the world, leaving the world and reentering the world". They lose their belief in life in a depressed life, and then return to their lives by getting close to the secret funeral industry. This is almost the most effective narrative strategy, because the protagonist's prejudice against funeral is the audience's taboo and barrier against death. People contact death and understand funeral through the protagonist's perspective, and then solemnly re-examine their own life. However, funeral and death are almost inevitably transformed and sanctified in this process, and people's perception of death and the meaning of life has become an almost metaphysical philosophy.
"The Great Events in Life" is a "day scripture" about funerals. The protagonist is no longer a "intruder" in the funeral industry, and the funeralist no longer appears in the story as a lonely practitioner. Just like the "Going Heaven Funeral Shop" is close to the front of the "Big Fat Wedding Shop", the distance between life and death has never been so close. The protagonist Mo Sanmei's family is engaged in funerals and runs a dilapidated "family business" in the fireworks alleys chattering in neighbors. He has been dealing with death with his father since he was a child. As soon as he appeared in the film, he lit cigarettes with the fire of burning paper money, and took off himself in front of the deceased just to prove his innocence that he had never stolen. Mo Sanmei has never been "born" from beginning to end. He is almost a "social animal" in the funeral industry, and funeral is his messy life itself. In "Going to Heaven", death has faded its mystery and is dragged back to the world, appearing in the streets and alleys, and truly becoming an inevitable part of every ordinary life. To a certain extent, the "aftermath" left by the film in exploring death may not be heavy, but this may be precisely what the creator strives to convey: when death is processed into a more embodied "experience", facing death becomes life itself. Apart from the macro-sensitivity of the awe and compassion for death, how should we specifically encounter and say goodbye to every part of our individual life? This is one of the most important parts of our relatively missing “death education.”
Mo Sanmei is always looking for this answer. His rampant life has always been in the shadow of funerals. His family-born life, his dead second brother, and his unremarkable funeral career have made him undecent.Death is the object of his anger, but it becomes the only bond he has connected with other lives. There are many relationships around Mo Sanmei in the film, but the two most important groups are undoubtedly Mo Sanmei and the "enemy from heaven" Wu Xiaowen, and Mo Sanmei and the "strict father" Lao Mo. The important funeral ceremonies in the film have occurred five times in total, namely Xiaowen’s grandmother, the girl who died unexpectedly, the dance companion grandfather who held her own funeral, the husband Lao Liu of the third sister’s ex-girlfriend, and the father Lao Mo. The first three times mainly resolved the relationship between Mo Sanmei and Wu Xiaowen, and the last two times mainly resolved the relationship between Mo Sanmei and her father, and finally settled on the mutual response of the two pairs of "father-son/daughter" emotions. The relationship between the third sister and Xiaowen is interpreted as "Wukong vs. Nezha". The two "don't bother" to meet each other, and they follow the drama of the enemy eventually becoming a father and daughter. For the professional funeralist represented by Mo Sanmei, the funeral is a life and an explanation to the surviving relatives. Xiaowen is not satisfied with this explanation. She cannot understand "grandma is in the box" and cannot accept "grandma is burned into cigarettes". She rushed to "go to heaven" with a red tassel gun and asked where her grandmother was hidden. Xiaowen's persistence and concern for his grandmother made Mo Sanmei have to learn how to "explain death" in addition to "handling death", and he also found that only by understanding life can he explain death. A little girl who does not understand death and a big man who does not understand life establishes an interdependent relationship through their respective questions, and finally finds the answer in each other: life and death are the two sides of life.
Lao Mo's characterization is very interesting. He is a typical "family business" parent. After losing his second son, he spoiled and hated his younger son, which led to Mo Sanmei giving up early in her growth process to "compete for favor" with her dead second brother and completely giving up on herself. In fact, Lao Mo's first few appearances were very functional. Each time, he was to create some stage-by-stage behavioral motivations for Mo Sanmei (such as transferring houses, raising up 300,000 yuan, etc.), and to create an opposite in the relationship between characters. The end of the father-son confrontation is mutual understanding and then the son inherits his father's business. His death can be predicted early, and it is basically an inevitable plot development for Mo Sanmei to prepare for her father's funeral. However, a character who "routinely" ended up taking on the most ritualistic death in the film: in the suicide note, Lao Mo, who had been a funeral for his whole life, asked his son to give himself a special funeral. Lao Mo refused to wear urns and mourning clothes, and personally completed the deconstruction of the funeral ceremony, and also completed the only time the father and son did not face to face but understood it. When the ashes turned into fireworks and bloomed in the night sky on the river, Mo Sanmei finally planted a star for her father and herself. The two groups of characters form a parent-child relationship that compares with each other in two generations, and the end, Lao Mo's death and Xiao Wen's return occur almost at the same time, which is both a redemption of death and a inheritance of life. By borrowing the eyes of Mo Sanmei, we also see the simple and simple view of life and death of the whole film: Lao Mo taught him to die without worries, and Xiaowen taught him to live with worries.
presents vivid characters in a simple way
In addition to the overall completion of the film, the actors' performances undoubtedly add a lot of color to the film, especially Zhu Yilong, who plays Mo Sanmei, Yang En, who plays Xiaowen, and Luo Jingmin, who plays Lao Mo, who plays Lao Mo, who plays the two most core characters in the film. Since the small-scale preview in April, various comments about the film have appeared in comments such as "Zhu Yilong is willing to go out", because he changed his gentle image in and out of the play, abandoned the so-called "idol baggage" and played the rough and irritable "street" Mo Sanmei, who is not afraid of the world, has made breakthroughs in appearance and performance style.
In fact, as long as you watch the movie, you will find that Mo Sanmei is really not a role that can be completed by "doing her best". In "The Big Events in Life", Wu Xiaowen is a child and an emotional engine. Her character's task is to lead Mo Sanmei to complete all emotional establishment. Therefore, this character can actually be relatively conceptualized. Her "Nezha" appearance and the endless red tassel gun and cloth tiger both contribute to the establishment of the character's concept.Through extremely spiritual performances, Yang En also created a "Nezha" image that combines cute, stubborn, wild, kindness and distinct personality. But the credibility of the entire story of "The Great Events in Life" actually lies in the fact that the play, director and actors must shape Xiaowen's target, namely Mo Sanmei, into a plump, real person that can be met in every fireworks alley. This kind of vividness is difficult to accomplish by relying solely on "disregarding" without regard for the image. You must grasp the real details of life of "Mo Sanmei", and also complete rich emotional expressions in every stage of Mo Sanmei's growth. What is surprising is that Zhu Yilong is not the kind of performance that is hard and trying to cleanse his past image, but a very simple performance that is truly built on life experience. In Zhu Yilong's previous performances, we can often see many designs he made to create characters, some of which were in motion, some even art and makeup. When he arrived at Mo Sanmei, he still had many improvisations in his performance, but he could hardly feel the traces of design and performance. In the first scene of his appearance, Mo Sanmei jumped out of the car. She wanted to light a cigarette but found that it was not hot. So she used the fire of paper burning on the roadside to light the cigarette and almost burned herself. He walked to the door of the room, threw away the cigarette butts, and accidentally hit his elbow because of his irritability. This set of actions completed the character's establishment in just five minutes, and the image of a "furious brother" who made funerals as his livelihood and had no belief in life and death became completely convincing. Although people have inevitably labeled him as "traffic" or "idol", Zhu Yilong's breakthrough in "The Great Events of Life" is far more than just throwing away the "idol baggage", but because although he is in the spotlight, he has not been impetuous. He still found a way to observe and experience life, and insisted on using the simplest, traditional but precious performance methods to create vivid and real characters.
Strictly speaking, "The Big Events in Life" is not perfect, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in narrative rhythm, secondary roles, and especially female roles. But today, both the market and the audience seem to need such a simple and moving film to present our emotions and concerns that we often have nowhere to go. "There is no major problem in life except death" is of course a kind of open-mindedness, but when Mo Sanmei lit the fireworks containing Lao Mo's ashes, the few seconds when the fireworks were slow to move, it is also our fragile, short, but irresistible nostalgia for the world.
Author: Yin Yiyi (Lecturer of the School of Art and Media, Beijing Normal University)
Editor: Guo Chaohao
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