While Mr. Hello Tree is set in the 1980s and 1990s, it still has a strong practical significance. In the midst of urbanization into the city, more and more young people are choosing to go out and work in the big cities. Yet this group of modern urbanites cannot find a sense of identity and belonging in the city. On the one hand, they live in the city and enjoy all the most advanced civilization: bars, cinemas, dance halls and other entertainment venues; subways and other convenient transportation facilities; they go to concerts and international exhibitions; they go in and out of high-class shopping malls to buy expensive luxuries; they have more choices and opportunities to fight for their lives here; they travel late at night through the illuminated streets ... ...On the other hand, they are very small to the city, "who am I", "what am I to the city", when they face their own heart and ponder over such questions, they can't help but feel a great sense of emptiness and loss in their hearts. sense of emptiness, a sense of loss.
We are all nobodies, we are all "Mr. Tree".
The symbolism of the tree
In the movie, Wang plays a character called "Tree" but omits his name, and he often sits in a tree after going mad. Because of the 1980s elder brother committed hooliganism, the father was ashamed of the shame, the elder brother of Mr. Tree hanged by mistake). Tree, however, is not an arbitrarily taken name, but a deliberate move by the writers and director.
How can the little man get out of the dilemma of lack of identity in the advancing flood of the times?
Stills from "hello! Mr. Tree"
Director Han Jie once said in an interview, "Actually, our family is like a tree. There are a lot of relationships in the film, but all of this is changing in the wave of modernization, the family tree is being uprooted, and the traditional relationships have changed. The father, a symbolic symbol of authority in those times, has been interfering with Tree's life, and the cruelty of his father's approach to his brother has become a huge shadow on Tree's spirit."
Trees, by nature, are y rooted and dependent on the earth, drawing nutrients from the soil before they can thrive and flourish. However, for Mr. Tree, the soil he grows up attached to contains ingredients of the traditional ethical and moral system: the father is the pyramid, and patriarchal authority is irreversible. From Mr. Tree's fragmentary memories and fantasies of his father, we can see that Mr. Tree's father is very strict and holds the traditional ethical concepts in his heart: the father is on top, the son is on the bottom, and the father has absolute dominance over the son. The tree that grows in such a "soil" is bound to be unhealthy and easily destroyed. The tree, like a leaf of floating weeds, floats in this world. Therefore, a large part of Mr. Tree's tragedy is attributed to his family.
Like Mr. Tree, people in the real world, in the fast-paced urban life, in the process of migrating from the countryside to the city, the soil on which our survival is based may also be crumbling, redundant, barren and unsound. Therefore, people who grow up and live in such an environment can easily lose themselves in the process of chasing. When walking numbly in it, people are like floating in mid-air, with their feet not on the ground, and therefore unable to find the value and meaning of life.