Winter holidays, summer when cicadas are singing in childhood
Director: Hou Xiaoxian
Starring: Mei Fang/Gu Jun/Qiguang Wang/Yan Zhengguo/Chen Bozheng
Type: Plot/Children
Region: Taiwan Province, China
Douban score: 8.7
Major awards: < In a short holiday, in this rural town with distant mountains, streams, rice fields, trees and cicadas, the younger brother and sister experienced many things and gradually saw the various faces of the adult world.
Everyone has a summer when they can't go back in childhood. They chase and fight with their playmates by the river, go to a strange place to start an adventure trip, throw away their unfinished homework and play wildly. The long stream, boundless blue sky and white clouds and lush vegetation are also covered with a warm color filter of memories, which makes people set foot on that homeland again in countless midnight dreams.
After the summer vacation, the children also quietly finished their childhood farewell ceremony in the running collision. At some point we all grew up. So later, in the hurried and messy adult world, we miss those young summers over and over again.
The rhythm is long and leisurely, and the prose narrative makes the audience recall and be moved by the first sight and understanding of the world in the picturesque lens. The director uses a lot of long-range shots and empty shots to show the natural scenery of the countryside.
In the perspective shot, the integration of characters with fields, distant mountains, paddy fields and streams is the "harmony between man and nature" advocated by China's aesthetics, which sustains the director's infinite attachment to nature.
This film is the embryonic form of Hou Xiaoxian's poetic creation. The adult world is viewed from a child's perspective, in which the life experience interspersed is grand, deep but not heavy, revealing the aesthetic meaning of tranquility and nature. Many blank spaces in the narrative of the film represent the vague cognition of the adult world from the perspective of children, weaken the tension of drama and increase the imagination space of the audience.
There are many events in the film: violent evil, unmarried pregnancy, sexual assault and other serious social problems, but these social problems are hidden in the leisurely holidays of Dongdong and Tingting, and the game time of Dongdong and friends is interspersed with crisis events, which seems dull, but in fact it is a calm treatment of all unbearable.
The film is adapted from the novel "Summer Capital" by the director "old partner" Zhu Tianwen-one-one "Holiday in Peace". The theme of the story comes down in one continuous line with the original novel, depicting the ignorance of juvenile growth and the complexity of the world.
The character Hanzi in the film is what people call an evil madman. Only when Tingting's innocence slowly reveals the innocence and kindness hidden under her crazy appearance, can the audience know that she is actually a victim insulted by hooligans. The setting of this role contains the director's humanistic care for the disadvantaged groups in society and shows a pure and clean philosophy of life.