Title: Home for the New Year
English title: Seventeen Years
Film type: Drama
Length: 90 min / Japan:89 min / Argentina:90 min (Mar del Plata Film Festival)
p>Country/Region: Italy China
Dialogue: Mandarin Chinese
Color: Color
Amplitude: 35 mm Screen Wide System
Mix: Dolby SR
Grade: Singapore:PG Argentina:13 Brazil:14 UK:PG
Washout Format: 35 mm Director: Zhang Yuan
Screenplay: Ning Dai Yu Hua Zhu Wen
Producer: Marco Muller
Cast
Li Bingbing as Chen Jie
Li Nopeng
Liang Song
Liu Lin as Taolan
Li Ruiz Production Company
Fondazione MonteCinemaVerità Locarno [Switzerland]
Fabrica [Italy]
Keetman Limited [Hong Kong]
Rai Cinemafiction [Italy]
The Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation [Switzerland]
United Colors of Benetton [Italy]
Distribution company
Istituto Luce [Italy]
K2 Entertainment [Japan]
Release Date
Argentina
November 21, 1999 ..... (Mar del Plata Film Festival)
Italy
Italy
March 31, 2000
Singapore
Singapore
April 15, 2000 ..... (Singapore International Film Festival)
Hong Kong, China
Hong Kong
May 11, 2000
Indonesia
November 12, 2000 ..... (Jakarta International Film Festival)
Japan
JapanDecember 30, 2000 ..... (Tokyo)
Malaysia
Malaysia
July 26, 2001
Israel
September 6, 2001
Argentina
October 2001 4 Seventeen years ago: factory technician Yu Zhenggao and female worker Tao Airong, a remarried couple with one daughter each, often bickered over minor family matters.
One day, Yu's daughter, Yu Xiaoqin, stole five dollars that her father had forgotten on the windowsill. The next day, her father rummaged through the closet looking for the five dollars. The mother suspected that the father had secretly given the money to Xiaoqin, and the father suspected that the mother was favoring her daughter, Tao Lan. The two quarreled fiercely and offered to search both daughters. Yu Xiaoqin was so scared that she secretly put the money under Tao Lan's pillow, and as a result, everyone searched Tao Lan's bed and found the money. The mother feels humiliated and scolds Tao Lan. On the way to school, Tao Lan defended herself, and Yu Xiaoqin said contemptuously: who will believe you. Tao Lan was so angry that she picked up a vegetable farmer's flat stick from the road and hit Yu Xiaoqin. Yu Xiaoqin died. In the early hours of the morning, Tao Lan returned home with a disheveled face. The mother, worried that Tao Lan is going to be shot, tells her daughter to kneel down for her father. The father punched himself: you don't deserve to kneel. I killed Yu Xiaoqin. Why did I marry you? Mother cried: I killed Yu Xiaoqin, and I killed Tao Lan. The police took Tao Lan away 17 years later Early in the morning of New Year's Eve, the prison warden announced to the women prisoners the list of those who would be allowed to go home for New Year's Eve this year. According to China's prison law, for prisoners who have performed well in prison during their long sentences, they are allowed to go home for New Year's Eve in the first two or three years of their release in order to allow them to adapt to society. Among the prisoners who were allowed to go home for New Year's Eve this year was Tao Lan. This is the first time she is going home after serving 17 years in prison, and she will be released in one more year.
Chen Jie, a young policewoman at the prison, is also happy today because this is the first time she has spent New Year's Eve with her family in the three years she has been a prison police officer. At the Chengguan station, where many prisoners' families were waiting after being notified by the prison, no one came to pick up Taolan. She felt that her family might not welcome her. It just so happened that Chen Jie was passing by on her way home, so she decided to send Tao Lan home first before returning to her own home.
After 17 years in prison, Tao Lan has become completely unaccustomed to the feel of the city now. Both of Tao Lan's parents had aged significantly. The 3 of them, father, mother and Taolan, look at each other and look back at each other avoiding the eyes, not knowing what to say. The mother wanted to make affectionate gestures to her daughter, but was in the way of the father restrained himself. Father went into the inner room alone and closed the door. Mother followed in a panic and saw her father lying on the bed, the same as the night Yu Xiaoqin died 17 years ago. Mother pulled Tao Lan to her father's side, and Tao Lan knelt down. The father advised Tao Lan to get up, said do not kneel, have been in prison "kneeling" for 17 years. He let Tao Lan mother and daughter out, said he wanted to be quiet for a while. Finally, the father finally out of the house, he did not want to let the family immersed in pain. A family of three hugged together. Emotionally delicate
"Home for New Year's Eve" earned director Zhang Yuan the best director award at the 56th Venice Film Festival, the first time a mainland Chinese director has won the top directing prize. The film, which marks director Zhang Yuan's return to mainstream filmmaking after many years, focuses on family conflicts and emotional contradictions, depicting an emotional bridging process with an almost cold approach. The film's style is simple, condensed, and atmospheric, maintaining Zhang Yuan's usual "directness" but also full of rich and delicate emotions.
Lifelike
The film starts off very lifelike, with a pair of men and women returning from a vegetable market (farmer's market?). A man and a woman returning from the vegetable market (farmer's market?), a broken 2.8 car, navy blue sleeves, very popular and commonplace attire.
The discordant family atmosphere begins to unfold in the daily chores of cooking or stir-frying, who pans the rice and who slices the meat, and whether to let the children study or do the housework. The drama does not explicitly state that this is a reunited family, but through the implied attitudes of the man and the woman towards the two children, it is clear to the audience which is closer and which is farther away.
Zhang Yuan, a man who is not aesthetically pleasing, tells the story of the New Year's homecoming realistically and objectively, with his eyes as the lens that conceals the care and love he puts inside and lets us find it. With his unique keen eye, Zhang Yuan captures the values, cultural psychology and its intricate contradictions of Chinese society in a specific historical period. His movies don't make you cry out loud or laugh out loud; he never gives you the opportunity for such emotional catharsis, and never offers you a false sense of satisfaction. However, every detail in the movie seems to tug at your heartstrings inadvertently. Through the five-dollar bill, it reflects the real human nature of those "little people", which is too real to be seen.
The conflict over five dollars may seem absurd, but in such a family it is actually very rationalized. The quarrel scene is wonderful, it seems to be a quarrel between husband and wife, but in fact it is a quarrel to defend their respective daughters; it is a quarrel about the inner world of the self, dissatisfaction with each other and too long to tolerate. Downplaying the expression of the eldest daughter, Blue, and focusing on the portrayal of the youngest daughter is very helpful to the audience to go deeper into the heart of the characters, an inner quiet, a straight beat of the snare drum. Then see the youngest daughter quickly tucked the money under her sister's pillow, a pass action, associated with the previous secretly pick up the five dollars of caution, I can not help but admire the director of the ingenuity of the momentum and the meticulous observation of life. Afterwards, the man seems to feel that the defense of the heart, and very contented and even generous to coax the woman and blue, after watching the smile, as if it is really so.
The sister rushed out to chase her sister, chasing her down several alleyways. The sister walks quickly, meaning that the heart is not yet calm, still things nervous, fluttering. But the camera has been very steady, very simple, like very calmly watching everything happen. The conflict between the sisters always feels like there's not enough tension, and before it stands out, the sister has already collapsed, which is rather stifling.
Seventeen years later, Blue was allowed to leave prison to visit her family. The moment when the policewoman locked eyes with Blue was handled too ambiguously and somewhat deliberately, in my personal opinion. It's even reminiscent of the two women's line of sight in "A Dream in the Garden". The policewoman takes Blue back to Blue's house, walking all the way, tired of watching and experiencing Blue's heart bumping along the way. The policewoman seems to play a redemptive figure in every moment of Blue's confusion, sadness, and wandering. But this kind of redemption is very kind, in the cold winter is even more warm. The ice in Blue's heart thawed, and the three dumplings brought them closer together.
When the old father opened the door, he froze --- he opened the iron door with his own key --- he closed the door with his own hand, which is actually an ambush for his psychological change afterward, from non-acceptance to acceptance to forgetting the past. The old mother, on the other hand, is a far cry from the woman portrayed in the opening credits. Guilt, on the other hand, can change a person's disposition. When entering the door the light has been an uncertain white, depressing. When the policewoman leaves at the end, the lighting is already more refreshing. Zhao Jiping's movie soundtracks are always just right, and that last bit of music slowly floated out, a hint of it, warmth mixed with so much sadness, trying to tell the story of these years, these people's lives, their moods.
Born from life
"Home for New Year's Eve" is such a heavy movie that Zhang Yuan's efforts to tell the story as plainly as possible have made the audience afraid to face that bleak life while gripping their hearts, and thus suffered an unprecedented failure at the box office. But from an artistic point of view, this should be a successful movie, at least, it shows a kind of creation from life, revealing the true path of human nature.
Finally, it's necessary to tell you the ending, because only at the end can the audience breathe a sigh of relief: 17 years later, Tao Lan kneels in front of her father, just as she did on the night Xiao Qin died 17 years ago. This time, the father did not scold her again, he advised Tao Lan to get up, said do not kneel, have been in prison "kneeling" for 17 years.
The movie is not beautiful, but it is exquisite. Because of Zhang Yuan's meticulousness.
Documentary style
From Zhang Yuan's works, we can see that he is a director who favors documentary style. He says, "Documentary is a very important form of movie in the beginning. The age of technology has made people gradually forget this. Documentary means that one can see directly what is changing, disappearing or growing in life. The most important thing for an artist is to keep his reality. His latest documentary is called "Crazy English", which is about Li Yang, who traveled around China and led millions of people to shout English sentences. There is not a single voice-over in the whole movie, and the camera does all the talking. To quote Zhang Yuan, there are many criteria for the best movies, but they all have one thing in common, which is that they are the most idealistic, artistic, creative and exploratory.
Katerina Deneuve, a renowned French film performer and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, presented Zhang Yuan with a trophy consisting of five bronze figures symbolizing the unity and peace of the peoples of the five continents. More than 1,000 people from delegations to UNESCO, the film industry and the press attended the award ceremony and watched the movie. Feature film
Home for the New Year is the recent work of Zhang Yuan, China's first truly independent filmmaker. The movie, which is Zhang Yuan's first feature film after he regained his filmmaking credentials, not only took home four trophies at the Venice Film Festival, but also passed the official censorship in China in an unprecedented move. The director, who has 10 years of experience in the film industry, has finally been able to face the domestic audience head-on.
Low and sluggish
The film's narrative is smooth and fluent, and the rough improvisation and low and sluggish style of his old works have been swept away. The story progresses without moving, the direction is clear and crisp, and the plot is concise and gripping. Zhang Yuan seems to be very calm, the movie can not see any romanticism or fickleness, some parts of the design is very exquisite and ingenious, but let a person feel the natural simplicity, no exaggeration. The ending is touching, with years of repressed emotions and remorse slowly unfolding bit by bit. Such a happy ending could easily turn into a melodrama with its sensationalism, yet Zhang Yuan controls it just right, as accurate as real life. One of the reasons why Home for New Year's Eve was not as well received by critics, especially independent critics, as previous films such as East Palace, West Palace and Beijing Bastards, is that Zhang Yuan's cold and harsh aura is missing from the movie, and instead there is a tendency to return to the "normal". As a result, this work is often regarded as a turning point in Zhang Yuan's transition from the underground to the mainstream, and his "emergence from the surface of history".
Despite this, it is not difficult to recognize the identity anxiety and dilemma of the sixth-generation directors in Home for New Year's Eve. What's more interesting is that, under a kind of random association, we find that the story told by the film is strikingly similar to Zhang Yuan's own experience and his situation in reality, and the setting of the characters and plots in the movie constitutes a response to the "underground," "mainstream," "censorship," and so on, in a number of ways. The characters and plot of the play are in many ways a metaphorical illustration of the key words "Zhang Yuan" such as "underground," "mainstream," and "censorship.
The "lead-in" is "Homecoming"
The main "lead-in" in the movie is undoubtedly "Homecoming".
The most important lead-in in the movie is undoubtedly "Homecoming". After 17 years in prison for manslaughter caused by a five-dollar bill, the heroine is allowed to return home on New Year's Eve to be with her family because of her good behavior. But due to the time lapse, it is clear that Tao Lan is now a little uncomfortable with the feel of the city under the sun. Thus, accompanied, or rather pulled, by another female prison guard, a not-so-easy journey back home began. Here, Zhang Yuan did not focus on the tragedy itself, but was more concerned about the journey home - more precisely, the journey to find home. And this is undoubtedly the emotional externalization of Zhang Yuan's own journey.
Women's Prison
After the tragedy, Tao Lan, through no fault of her own, arrives at another home in the social sense - a women's prison. It's an ideological family that relies on restrictions on liberty and a "there is truth in the world" kind of sermon and recitation of rules to rehabilitate those who have committed crimes. Those people are, in a sense, the ones who have done harm to the so-called order because they have violated the will of the state and have done what is forbidden by the rules of authority. And for them to regain their freedom, or just their limited freedom, they are dependent on outstandingly good behavior. And it is in such a situation that Tauran has the right to go home once, three years before the end of his sentence.
In fact, the prison is a brilliant metaphor for state film censorship, which maintains a certain officially sanctioned and supported paradigm through the coercive power to imprison forces that threaten or subvert mainstream discourse. If an underground banned film is a text that has violated a taboo, then its inevitable end is to be confined within the confines of a high wall and iron windows, and the conditions for unblocking it are either a change in the terms of the ban or an amnesty, or an unconditional acceptance and surrender to the official ideology. In this way, Tao Lan's journey home becomes, in a deeper sense, director Zhang Yuan's own journey home. The meaning of his English title "Seventeen Years" corresponds to the eight-year span between the release of Zhang Yuan's first film, "Mom," and the release of "Home for New Year's Eve" under the Xi'an Film Studio label in mainland China.
In retrospect, Tao Lan's emotional first home has a similar meaning. The movie opens with Tao Lan coming home late for dinner and being scolded by her mother. At this point, his father, Yu Zhenggao, and his daughter, Xiaoqin, add to each other's dishes as if nothing has happened. The mother then stops scolding and replaces her daughter at the dinner table, adding several chopsticks of scrambled eggs to her bowl. This scene shows us that the reorganized nuclear family actually consists of two parts: the father's side and Tao Lan's side. The father, as the embodiment of patriarchal power, is a true reflection of the dominant ideology and thus a symbol of the dominant popular culture. Tao Lan's late return at the customary mealtime is clearly offensive in some way.
In contrast to Xiaoqin, Tao Lan has no intention of studying, but only wants to work early, so she secretly assumes the role of a subversive or transgressor in the movie, which is synonymous with "underground cinema". In contrast, Xiaoqin is clearly a traditional submissive. Strangely enough, Xiaoqin's submission is a desperate attempt to escape from her family by going to college, which is actually a mainstream-sanctioned way of realizing her limited freedom. Here, the relationship between the mainstream/underground/public is skillfully placed in the presentation of family relationships. In her defense, Xiaoqin says, "The money was found under your pillow, and people will only believe that you took it, not me". The discriminatory status of the "underground" in the eyes of the "mainstream" and the lack of trust (or insolubility) between it and the "public" are thus stark. As a result, Tao Lan's imprisonment is actually caused by both her father/family (the mainstream) and Xiao Qin (the general public) **** together.
Contradictions
The movie makes no mention of Tao Lan's isolation, mental torture, loss of youth, and wear and tear on her personality in prison, which is Zhang Yuan's unpleasant extraction of her own displacement and wandering within and outside the system. Significantly, Tao Lan herself is ambivalent about the opportunity to "return home"; on the one hand, she longs to return home and be accepted by her father; on the other hand, she is fearful of the irreparable harm she has done to her father, and prefers to "go to prison! On the other hand, she is afraid of the irreparable harm she has done to her father and would rather "go to prison. Obviously, Zhang Yuan must feel the same way about the choice between "underground" and "order". Here, Li Bing, as the captain of the prison guards, and as the enforcer of the national will, actually becomes an important force in promoting, and even accomplishing, the return to the family. She urges Tao Lan to never be stubborn and to think of her parents and friends.
When Tao Lan still insisted, she pressured Tao Lan with the words "the state", "you forget how we educated you for so many years", "this is the power given to you by the state, do you want to live up to it? Do you want to let it down?" As a result, Tao Lan's journey home is always accompanied and guided by Li Bing, and we constantly hear the reflexive words "Yes, Captain". The power of the mainstream and the exhaustion of personal confrontation seem to be the reasons why the underground director eventually moved closer to the mainstream. One scene in the movie is highly symbolic: Tao Lan, while crossing a crowded road with traffic, displays childlike panic, hesitation and avoidance, and is dazedly in a situation with no place to hide.
Returning to himself
Zhang Yuan has been using "Home for New Year's Eve," a film based on the theme of searching for one's home and returning to it, to complete his return for some time. I Love You has been widely discussed by critics. Some media outlets have lamented that "the original image of the pioneering youth has become gradually blurred." It seems we can also see that the original self-centered Zhang Yuan, who wrote about the anxiety, confusion and tolerance in his youthful memories, is drifting away in the midst of popularized commercial demands. However, whether it is commercial or artistic, it is only a filmmaker's choice for his own work, and all we can do is to wish every talented director a good journey on the road of creation. Zhang Yuan's ten-year career has been full of ups and downs, but at the same time he has made a name for himself overseas. But his greatest frustration is that during these seven to eight years, his works have been rejected by the film market, leaving him in the "lonely" predicament of not being able to have a timely cultural dialog with the domestic audience.
Time has changed, and in the spring of 1998, Zhang Yuan was reinstated as a director by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT). Thus, after two years of hard work, Zhang Yuan surfaced and completed the documentary film Crazy English (November 5, 1999, won the first prize at the Milan International Documentary Film Festival in Italy), and the factual feature film Home for the New Year (September of the same year, won the Grand Prize for Best Director at the 56th Venice International Film Festival, as well as three awards including the Best Film Award from the Italian Film Critics). As the sixth generation of the flag-bearer role of Zhang Yuan, to actively embrace the reality of the times of humanistic passion, took a solid step, ushered in a legendary cultural triumph; at the same time, it also marks the sixth generation of Chinese new talent in the international space to open up a new piece of impressive artistic splendor.
Zhang Yuan said frankly: "The creative impulse to shoot 'Home for the New Year' was inspired by one of the moments when watching a feature documentary: several prisoners were released on parole, and their demeanor was different when they were with their relatives, but all of them clearly showed the kind of sincere trembling of the soul that is difficult to be captured by the art, which is unforgettable. " Subsequently, he and his wife Song Dai went deep into the prison interviews, has visited more than twenty murderous female inmates, among them there are as in the movie Taolan like accidentally killed their relatives. The accumulation of interviews, more evoked in his heart to this kind of prisoners of some kind of pity feelings and can not help themselves. He said, over the past ten years, he has been exploring the relationship between image and reality, with the exception of "East Palace, West Palace", which was artistically sculpted and close to aesthetic strokes; and this time, he suddenly gained a new sense of realization, and probed into the original flavor of the reality that he had never gotten before, i.e., the texture and depth of life. At the same time, this is more of a feeling. Zhang Yuan said, "Recently on the Chinese screen, there is too much romance, but also too much falsehood and vulgarity. The reality, what we need to face and answer, is too much. The silver screen, needs to find the true form of narration that talks to the audience from the heart." The 1999 film "Home for New Year's Eve" won the Best Director Award at the 56th Venice Film Festival
Best Film Award from the Society of Cinema Stage Artists
Best Film Award from the Italian Film Critics and the Best Film Award from the International Catholic Catholic Association's Organization for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts
Best Director Award at the Singapore International Film Festival
Best Director's Award at the Gigon International Film Festival in Spain.