The story begins in Datong, an ancient city in northern China. Gang boss Bin Ge (Liao Fan) was threatened with his life in a violent incident. His girlfriend Jojo (Zhao Tao) fired a warning shot to protect Bin Ge's street and was sentenced to five years in prison. After Qiao Qiao was released from prison, he became a "Jianghu person" in Brother Bin's mouth, but Goodbye to Brother Bin was mercilessly abandoned. Many years later, when Brother Bin suffered a stroke and his career fell into a trough, Jojo shouldered the moral responsibility of Jianghu and took Brother Bin in.
On the edge of the volcano, Brother Bin taught Jojo to point a gun at the distance and said to her, "Now you are a Jianghu person." Years later, it was still the same volcano or those two people. Jojo said to Brother Bin who once taught her that "where there are people, there are rivers and lakes": "Righteousness is heartless, but you are no longer a Jianghu person, and you don't understand."
So what is Jianghu? Brother Bin's mind is rich and powerful, loyal to the liver and courageous, crowding around, while his mind is benevolent and moral, kind. These two Jianghu people, a man and a woman, are affectionate and righteous. After vicissitudes of life, I finally drowned in the tide of the times, leaving only a sigh.
From Shanxi all the way down to the Three Gorges, from the Three Gorges to Wuhan, to the west to Xinjiang, and finally back to Shanxi, the space of 7,700 kilometers has changed. In seventeen years, the rivers and lakes have changed, and the feelings of rivers and lakes have also changed in the times.
Brother Bin, under the witness of Guan Gong, resolved the internal disputes between brothers and showed the loyalty of the Jianghu. Middle-aged women who took Jojo's wallet on the boat, restaurant diners who don't know if their lover is pregnant, obscene motorcycle drivers, Karamay men with unknown addresses ... It is this short and real variety of people that makes Jojo a real Jianghu middleman. Finally, this rambling and imaginative river and lake passed away in the tide of the times. Jia pinned his memory on this Jianghu spirit, which is the same sentence, "We are all prisoners of the universe".
Children of the Jianghu has an unprecedented ambition for Jia, which not only pays tribute to his past works in many places, but also expands the shaping of the world outlook in his works. Jojo saw an alien flying saucer in the middle of the night, probably because Jia wanted to express the power of a belief. Even though the situation has changed and the darkness is so dark, she is still strong with kindness and justice, faith, inner purity and eternal morality.
Jia's films have obvious poetic features, prose narrative style, attention to details, attention to listening rather than grandstanding, putting everything in front of him and telling it calmly, just like waking up from a big dream and feeling lost. Yang Dechang once said that a movie can explain the whole world, and a movie can also cover the whole China society. Jia's grasp of interpersonal relationships makes this film particularly real. Jia's films are often hard to bear to look directly at, because they are very sharp in expressing the present China.
At the end of the story, two people in the world of mortals who once loved and hated each other, after experiencing the sculpture of time, reconciled with their inner selves and forgot each other in the rivers and lakes. Just like "volcanic ash is the cleanest thing", they can all live well in their own lives with pure hearts.
At the beginning of the film, the real images on the bus, foreign songs in karaoke bars, tacky music and square dance, the coal capital of Shanxi, the construction of the Three Gorges Reservoir and the disappearance of the city ... The development, change and urbanization of China in the past ten years are presented to the audience one by one, and it is both a nostalgic sadness and a myth of an era to restore a real China.
For example, Jia told me: I want to care for ordinary people with movies. In the slow process of time, I feel the happiness or heaviness of every dull life. Life is like a quiet long river. Let's experience it.
Therefore, it is better to "take your time" and leave everything to time.