This article is transferred from WeChat public account “ gun draft (ID: QiangGaooooo) “, author: On Yin, title figure: “South station party” stills.

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In 1987, Director Zhou Xiaowen made a film “The Last Crazy”. This crime-themed film does not have too many complicated plots, and its main content can be described with only two words: “escape” and “chasing”.

Many young viewers today may not even know about the existence of this film, but in the 1980s, it opened the door to domestic police genre-type movies, not only because of its cold and full of distance processing methods gradually blurred The boundary between righteousness and evil is more important, because it for the first time portrays a negative character—a murderer and a fugitive—as the main character. What the audience sees in the film is that the police and the bandits are competing like rivals in the competition, rather than justice relentlessly crushing evil in an irrefutable manner.

“Last Madness” is the first domestic police bandit to portray “bad guys” as protagonists.

More boldly, we can even glimpse the murderer in itEmotional states in daily life and unique values ​​that are constantly expressed in various ways.

Because of various limitations, after the 1990s, we can no longer see more lively “negative characters” appearing on the screen as the protagonists of the film, even if it is the great director Li Anzai “Lust | Caution” allowing his heroine to loosen her stance a little will also lead to unanimous condemnation. Probably because of this, the popular “black film” (Film Noir) , which is popular in Western movies, has not really taken root in China as a genre. The basics.

Until Diao Yinan’s “Meeting at Southern Station”.

The scene of Hu Ge’s shooting is a tribute to the old Martin’s “Taxi Driver”.

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Actually, as early as Diao Yinan ’s last film, Fireworks, it was revealed that the male protagonist was set aside and the “femme beauty” female murderer was promoted to a hidden protagonist. intention.

And in “Meeting at the South Station”, this subversive attempt finally surfaced and became an obvious fact: the film features the criminal actor Zhou Zenong who flees after killing the police, and gradually moves to destruction in the besieged The process is trunk. It not only evokes the cold and emotional distance in The Last Madness, but also throws good and evil in ethical and moral values ​​aside, and instead depicts the individual’s performance under the fate of fate Struggling out of despair.

This is the most standard content and emotional configuration of film noir. It is also the most different feature of “Meeting at Southern Station” compared to other domestic films.

In the previous film “Day Fireworks”, Diao Yinan has already tried to portray the female murderer Wu Zhizhen as a hidden heroine.

However, those who are looking forward to watching a classic Hollywood model noir movie may be a little confused about the final appearance of “Meeting at South Station”: It is not compact and coherent, it lacks a tight plot, and more There is no standard appearance of handsome men and women. The audience of the traditional crime film may not have much satisfaction, because “Meeting at the South Station” is not a suspicious reasoning pursuit detective film. On the contrary, taking the familiar subject matter as the carrier, this time he showed a long and slow wandering escape under a gloomy night.

The “Meeting at the South Railway Station” is a fictional “Wild Goose Pond” similar to the old Sanctuary of Kowloon City in Hong Kong. , the actor Zhou Zenong who accidentally killed the police, Liu Aiai, a swimmer who helped him escape for tens of thousands of errands, hid in this “crime enclave”. Seemingly losing his motivation to survive, Zhou Zenong wanted to meet his wife Yang Shujun in Yege Lake and explain to the latter to report himself in order to get 300,000 police bounty. But in fact, what we see are several main characters wandering in dark alleys, closed penthouses, ambiguous lakes, and small, dirty restaurants that look like they are clamped by iron tongs in the jungle. The beast with legs and feet is still moving in despair, looking forward to avoid hunting.

Police and fugitives chased me in dark and overwhelming surroundings by wild grassy lakes, gloomy and dilapidated pied houses, alleys with unclear roads, etc. Hurry.

In the history of the film, the portrayal of the character’s trance state has extremely special aesthetic significance.

In his 1948 business card “Zero Germany”, the famous Italian director Rossellini described the image of a boy hovering in the ruins of the post-war city. There was no precise reason for his actions, and no clear expected results. And his “wandering” state in a particular era brings us not a linear storyline, but an overall appearance of the era as reflected by a prism.

Rossini’s methods and concepts are regarded by French philosophy and film theorist Jill Deleuze as a revolutionary rebellion against the classic Hollywood plot structure: it is the existence of a character without a wandering state. The primary and secondary story lines are clear, the characters’ psychological motivations are clear, and the structure of the play with a strong purpose of action and discourse is directly collapsed. Instead, it is rendered in a rendered depiction of confused and distracted emotions.

European films after Rossellini, whether it is Italian neo-realism, French new wave or German new film, all attach great importance to giving characters a puppet state of roaming in the city. It fundamentally deconstructs modern social machinery The orderly power architecture model has become one of the most important signs that distinguishes European films from Hollywood commercial films.

The Chinese film developed in the cracks, thanks to the portrayal of the “character drifting” state, has gained a hint of substantial freedom of expression: whether it is Huang Jianxin’s “Reincarnation” in the late 1980s, or Zhang Yuan’s “Beijing Hybrid” in the 1990s, or later Jia Zhangke’s “Xiao Wu”, “Ren Xiaoyao”, and “Three Gorges Good Man”, an image of marginal people wandering at the junction of the self-spirited world and social reality, became a symbol of Chinese art films Sexual thoughts and emotions expression vector.

Xiao Wu swayed around the county seat, sometimes decisively and sometimes weakly, unable to reconcile with himself. This “dangling” of the protagonist is one of the motifs of European movies.

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However, the characters in “Meeting at Southern Station” “wander” are different.

Zhou Zenong, who was wounded by a gunshot in the film, has been unable to travel further. He can only succumb to the dirt and crime-ridden slum on the shore of Yege Lake. The small train station and the lake where desires thrive meet people of all kinds and look forward to finding a glimmer of life in them.

However, a large net that is hunting quietly unfolds around him, continuously compressing his space of activity, and these “Wild Goose Lake people” who have contacted him, whether they are loyal associates or speculations The middle man, even the enemies who were deliberately trying to put him to death, died behind his wandering figure, until he himself was squeezed into a narrow alley and ran desperately, but he remained silent and fell into the water. In the darkness.

On the way of Zhou Zenong’s escape, his brothers who wanted to protect his clients, his clients who wanted to profit, and his enemies who wanted to get revenge on him died.

We realized that what we saw in “Meeting at the South Station” was not the free roaming of the characters in the urban space to break free of chains. On the contrary, this is a Under the orderly organization mechanism, the “wandering” that was suffocated and eventually disappeared. Zhou Nong’s despair from emotions and ideas (Failed to see the expected wife and children) , to the point where he was squeezed in the small space of the noodle house in a physical sense, he lost In fact, it is an activity space on all levels from the spirit to the material, and such a life has no meaning even if it exists. This is the ultimate reason for him to gradually resolutely die in the wandering.

Finally, only the two women around Zhou Zenong — the swimmer Liu Aiai and his wife Yang Shujun — quietly jumped out of the encirclement with a lot of cash and gained a glimmer of vitality. This ineffective lingering destruction and the freedom to escape from money are different from the “roaming puppet” state we have seen in all previous films. It is undoubtedly the most emotional and emotional core of this era Close analogy.

The two women in the film have always been ambiguous towards Zhou Zenong. The two of them received a bounty in total, which to some extent metaphorized women’s victory.

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In such a dark and gloomy atmosphere, “Meeting at the South Station” left its characters a formal vitality in a special way: In a slow rhythm and low to almost whispered lines During the gap, the movie will suddenly insert some action scenes.

It is not a coherent combination of pictures, but a close-up of some key actions and objects. It creates a sensory effect for the film that suddenly accelerates to dizziness and leaves only visual residue. The audience originally thought that this would be a “slow motion” movie that would freeze and lengthen the repeated chewing experience, but these sudden accelerations suddenly combined different moments together and presented them in a high-speed omission manner.

So in the dark night of the wild goose pond, we have a peculiar time-shifting experience: it is sometimes the character ’s inner despair and anxiety for time to stopThe stagnant portrayal is sometimes the impulse to accelerate to the end after the character loses hope. It is this combination of relaxation, fastness, and slowness that combines the character’s uncontrollable desire with the slow and continuous pressure in the background environment to form a black world of wild goose pond with surreal colors.

The surreal images in the film are reminiscent of the flow and stagnation in Antonioni films.

We can’t expect any substantial entertainment pleasure from “Meeting at South Station”, it is not one of the many domestic imitators of many Korean rough crime movies. Perhaps the sloppy and loose narrative structure of its plot logic will prevent many audiences from smoothly accepting its emotional atmosphere, and it is difficult for researchers seeking high-level meaning expressions to read more explicit socio-political meanings.

But it is quite memorable that, in a purely fictional situation, we drew a certain critical state of the character. If we realize it carefully, we can find their way, path and mentality to the end. The overall reality outside has produced some subtle potential echoes and reflections.