original title:
It is meaningful to live in what you like
◎Master Shao
The Chinese version of “The Eight Dogs” was released on March 31, directed by Xu Ang, starring Feng Xiaogang, Chen Chong, Bai Jugang, Huang Chutong and others. The film takes Chongqing, full of smoke and fire, as the story scene, takes typical Chinese family life as the narrative main line, and uses China’s unique Chinese garden dog as the absolute protagonist. Through meticulous localization, the development of the times and the warmth of the family are closely integrated. It naturally aroused the emotional resonance of Chinese audiences, and was evaluated by the audience as “the most crying movie this year”.
The director of the film, Xu Ang, once adapted Japanese playwright Koki Mitani’s work “The University of Laughter” into the drama “The Sorrow of Comedy”, which achieved good box office results; in 2014, “Twelve Citizens” directed by Xu Ang was adapted from the American classic film “Twelve Angry Men”, the Douban score of the film has remained at 8.4 so far.
Kaneto Shindo’s original script “Hachiko” was put on the big screen in Japan in 1987 and became famous far and wide. How to tell a well-known story to the audience has become the biggest challenge that the filming team needs to face. The Chinese version of “Hachiko the Faithful Dog” is not presented from the first perspective of the dog “Batong”, and does not exaggerate the subjective consciousness of the dog. Instead, it carefully takes care of the emotional interaction between the dog and family members through the language of the lens. With Chinese-style implicit romance, it conveys the philosophical interpretation of “love and parting” to the audience.
Localization of “imported classics”
In order to enhance the sense of substitution of “family”, the director specially recruited actors who look like “family”. The core family members in the film include the father Chen Jingxiu played by Feng Xiaogang, the mother Li Jiazhen played by Chen Chong, and the sons Chen Yuanqiao played by Bai Jugang and Huang Chutong. Chen Xiaozhou’s daughter, only Chen Chong is a professional actor. But the faces and smiles of the father and son, mother and daughter in the family they played are very similar, and the scene of the four of them sitting around eating makes the audience enter the play instantly. In addition, the intimacy, naturalness, and tacit understanding of the actors’ gestures allow the audience to feel the heart of the film’s casting.
In order to embed the story into the Chinese background, the Chinese version of “The Faithful Dog Hachiko” adopts a two-line time axis to assist the narrative: on the one hand, at the macro level, it marks the development process of the big era with important node events, such as witnessing as a senior fan The glorious father of Chinese football in the past, “Yunyang Bangbang” (manpower porter) who was waiting for work at the ticket office of the Yangtze River cableway switched careers and returned to his hometown. The Internet industry that his son is engaged in has ushered in a boom in development, and various districts on both sides of the Yangtze River have successively undergone large-scale demolition; On the other hand, a timeline describes the joys and sorrows of small days with the “big life events” of family members at the micro level, such as daughters marrying far away, sons go north, and fathers die of illness. The macro timeline and the micro timeline converge in this family of four, interpenetrating and embedding each other, regardless of priority. The localization of both the grand background and subtle details allows the foreign story of “The Dog of Hachiko”, which is well-known to movie fans, to perfectly integrate with Chongqing, a Chinese city full of rivers and lakes, and endows this remake with a unique Chinese cultural identity.
How to comprehend the pain of “parting from love”
“The Loyal Dog Hachiko” regards “love” and “parting” as the main contradiction, burying the pain of “love and parting” in Buddhism in the life of “Batong”, and strung together with different levels of farewell scenes again and again. Ordinary people gather and disperse indiscriminately, gaining and losing their ordinary lives without reason.
At the wedding banquet of his daughter’s wedding, his father, Chen Jingxiu, said with emotion that “people always have to make some lively noises to help them get through some sad moments”; on the eve of his son’s decision to go to Beijing for work alone, he braved the rain to buy his son’s favorite hometown lo mei ; Before the business trip, I made an agreement with my wife to go home and eat a bowl of noodle soup topped with tamales. These scenes do not directly describe the “parting”, but they evoked all the audience’s memories of “parting” in advance, connected all the audience’s emotions about “parting”, and triggered the audience’s self-substitution about the loss of their loved ones. This kind of narrative technique deliberately spreads the impact of “lost”, weakens the tear-jerking intensity of the tragic bridge, is not limited by the limitations of the original story, does not fall into the stereotype of forced sensationalism, and opens up a new narrative of sentimental films. path.
The Chinese version of “The Faithful Dog Hachiko” is supported by the dog “Batong” who has been persistently waiting throughout his life. It aims at the common human emotions of “love and parting”, trying to lead the audience to find a logical level of self-consistency. and spiritual relief. In previous films with the theme of “dogs and people”, we used to take humans as the main perspective and interpret the behavior of dogs as “loyalty”, so we naturally praised “loyalty” and “sacrifice”, but were ignorant of the deviation of idealism. “A child is not a fish, how do you know the joy of a fish?” In our eyes, it must be painful to leave a warm home and wander outside. It must be painful without a master to protect and a partner. It must be a fruitless wait for more than 3,600 days is painful. We define the behavior of “Batong” as “self-sacrifice”, and we are proud of its magnificent behavior like holding a pillar at the end.
However, at the end of the film, “Eight Tubes” finally “reunited” with Lao Chen while dying. It returned to its happiest childhood, was embraced on the Yangtze River cableway that it had been looking forward to for more than ten years, and entered the next journey of life with the person it wanted to see the most. This makes people think of Chen Jingxiu’s generous statement “A person’s life, if he grows up for decades, if he can live in his favorite, that is called living!”.
Is there another possibility—”Batong” chose to return to the abandoned old house because he missed his favorite panda doll when he was a child; because he missed the newspaper that Lao Chen must buy and his favorite cold shrimp, he chose to wait every day Outside the ticket office, the so-called “you are everything when you are there, and everything is you when you are not”; because I cherish the happy memories with Lao Chen too much, I choose to live in the past with Lao Chen. Recalling the past seems to be of no benefit, but the past may be the whole meaning of “Ba Tong”‘s life.
From this point of view, “Batong” is the minnow that swims calmly under the Haoliang River. It has only chosen Lao Chen as its master for a lifetime; it has chosen to refuse to accept death and try to keep memories; It is also its choice to spend the rest of its life recreating the beauty of the past. Any life has the right to choose to spend his life in the way he likes and with the people he likes. As long as we are not willing, death cannot separate us from the one we love, because death ends life and cannot end relationships. If the miss is strong enough, we can gain the courage to bear the “separation of love”. If love never disappears, we can travel through mountains and seas, across life and death, and live in our love all the time.