This movie is about the city, about the present, and the so-called "childhood" is just a dark shadow over the minds of the characters, which is probably the biggest difference between Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien. The so-called "childhood sweethearts" are just a layer of memories shrouding the minds of the characters in the movie. This is probably the biggest difference between Yang Dechang and Hou Hsiao-hsien; the latter is a poet with a sense of the countryside, while Yang Dechang has always been a realist facing the present, and this difference has also led to the divergence of the two men's artistic approaches. Hou Hsiao-hsien loves to use relatively static long shots, he is Ozu's way. Yang Dechang, on the contrary, in "Green Plum and Bamboo Horses", the urbanized landscape constantly switches back and forth with the faces of the characters who feel lost, the densely-packed buildings, the streets with cars coming and going, the big sunglasses on Tsai Chin's face, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien walking alone on the road, the relationship between people and the environment seems to have Antonioni's shadow, and the characters' behaviors are sometimes sudden and neurotic, but the psychological factors are precisely related to the urbanized background. The characters' behavior is sometimes sudden and neurotic, but their psychological factors are precisely related to the background of urbanization, thus character behavior, psychological motivation, background factors and montage techniques are merged into one (this technique is especially obvious in The Terrorist). Yang likes to use violence to solve narrative problems, and in his early films there are often characters who die as a result of violence, and A Green Plum and a Horse is no exception. When the young man on the motorcycle waits at the intersection, I guessed the ending because the main character (played by Hou Hsiao-Hsien) has nowhere to go, history, memories, the countryside, modernization, the U.S., Japan, the continent, politics, reality, and the crush of contradictions, his ultimate end is inevitably a dead end. Its ultimate end is inevitably a dead end.
Japan, the United States, the mainland for Taiwan means what, which factors can be said to be more complex, due to well-known reasons, I'm not good to talk about it, but just think of the "Crush of Peach Blossom Garden" in the sentence: "found that a lot of things are not the way we think, it seems desperate, but as long as a change of point of view, you can get a new direction." It is lamentable that Yang Dechang's last film "One by One", from a certain level is the realization of this sentence, "as long as a change of point of view", anger strong return to calm, all kinds of pallid state of mind y buried, we can only use the individualistic point of view to see the weight of history and reality, can only be so, necessarily so.