Chapter 23 Life and Movies in a Bowl of Ramen: Dandelion, 1985

Life and Movies in a Bowl of Ramen: Dandelion, 1985 "Dandelion" uses Western genre films (as well as collages and parodies) to express Eastern people's concept of food and life (praise or ridicule), which is more or less modern. The affinity and sense of humor of "Dandelion" are just like the looks of the hero and heroine.It is different from those old classic movies, it is a comedy that everyone can accept.This also makes it difficult to re-evaluate and analyze it. If you over-point out some of its internality or exaggerate its genius, it will undoubtedly destroy its natural and vivid interest.Director Itami Shisan's self-evaluation is only: "My films are interesting and entertaining, because without audiences, there is no film!"

1. After acting in such films as Nagisa Oshima's "Nikko Haruka", Morita Yoshimitsu's "Family Game", Shinoda Masahiro's "Setouchi Inland Sea Boys Field Team" and Ichikawa Kun's "Snow", etc., as an "intellectual director" The son of Itami Mansaku, Itami Thirteen made his first film "Funeral" at the age of 50 (1983).His debut novel satirizes the absurdity of inheriting traditional rituals in modern Japanese society. "Dandelion" also has a lot of such "rituals", but much milder.For example, the famous opening, about the ritual of ramen, is complicated and funny.It not only presents the restraint of traditional rituals on food taste, but also speaks of solemnity and appreciation.Later, "Dandelion" also mentioned the burden of "ceremony", such as the scene where the etiquette teacher in the restaurant teaches female students how to eat Western food.

At the end of the "Ramen Ceremony", the old man said "I will meet you soon" before eating pork. That was the time when Itami Juan was in the joy of life, and he could not forget death.Death is mentioned several times in the lighthearted film "Dandelion".If the main body of this drama is about new life (the Dandelion played by Miyamoto Nobuko), then the subsidiary part is about death (including the gang leader played by Yakusho Koji).Before the subtitles of this film, the three are linked together: film, food, and death. Yakusho Koji said, "The moment before death is like a movie." Before watching, you must prepare delicious food and keep quiet .

The main line of "Dandelion" parodied the model of western movies, describing the rescue of a pair of orphans and widows by two truck drivers.Many people can see that this is an imitation of the classic western film "Shane", in which the wandering cowboy protects a mother and child, and then leaves.When the two drivers enter Dandelion's noodle restaurant for the first time, the scene is very similar to the outlandish cowboy breaking into a small town bar in a western movie (Itami made the hero Yamazaki Nuo wear his abrupt cowboy hat from beginning to end, and also in the shower. No exception).Then the fights, the duels, the men's rapprochement, the cooperative scenes, and some of the action scenes are actually all from Westerns.The most interesting thing is that in the last scene, Dandelion's storefront has a successful new start, and the men who help her are leaving. If the cars and bicycles they drive are turned into horses, it will be a real Western movie ending. "Dandelion" just replaced the desert scene with a few large city panoramas full of overpasses.

2. The structure of "Dandelion" is collage.In fact, if you think of it as a road movie, it is also very interesting. On the one hand, it is a road movie that "stands still", and on the other hand, it is a "road movie" that advances aimlessly on the road of radioactive plots. piece".Between the five parts of the main line, Itami Thirteen embedded several food-related episodes.The transition between the episode and the main line mostly adopts the method of overlapping scenes, but it is not rigid to this.I will bring these passages together because they touch on everything about food—food and society, and family, and personal proclivities, and life, and its various connections with the body.I prefer to regard these episodes as the main part of "Dandelion", and its main line is only regarded as a "thread" connecting these parts.

The section "Restaurant" consists of three parts.The first subsection uses the details of ordering dishes to point out the gap between identity and gourmet ability; the second subsection uses the details of eating appearance to point out that the scruples about etiquette undoubtedly hurt the pleasure of eating.Itami Thirteen uses exaggerated sound effects (which are used throughout the film) to tell the audience that they must maintain their manners in front of food, just like they cannot make pleasant noises during sex.The last section is a play between Yakusho Koji and his lover, vividly expressing the relationship between food and sex.

The second section may be called "Temptation" and also includes three subsections.In the first section, Yakusho Koji and his lover roll "hot kisses" in each other's mouths with raw eggs, and then imitate the orgasm.Then jump to the scene where Koji Yakusho eats oysters by the sea. This scene has a mysterious poetic flavor, talking about some inexplicable connection between food and fresh love.The second subsection is a story about a dental patient who cannot taste Cantonese breakfast, and a child (obviously a slander) who cannot resist the temptation of ice cream with the words "I only eat natural food" written by his mother hanging around his neck.The third subsection is about an old man who couldn't resist the temptation of tempura when faced with food, and almost choked to death while swallowing.

The third paragraph also has three subsections, telling three weird stories.The first section tells the story of an old lady who has a "food addiction" in the supermarket; the second section tells the story of a cheater and a thief at the dinner table.And the third section of the impressive moment is about a housewife cooking fried rice with the last bit of strength before she died, and the husband ordered the children to finish the rice "while it was hot" next to the mother's corpse.In fact, the plot of this section has implanted the meaning of food into the taste of life, that is, the food itself cannot touch people, but the emotion endowed by food moves us.

3. The main line of "Dandelion" is divided into five parts, and there is actually not much drama.One is that Nuo Yamazaki pointed out some mistakes in Dandelion's business, and then gave her physical training.The second is that they steal lessons everywhere and get the true meaning of food from beggars - only when life is free can you taste real food.What Itami Thirteen sighed here is that "since sliced ​​by machines, food has no soul." This is like losing heaven in the face of order and norms.So those beggars would rather live a life without status and abode.At the end of this part, the beggars sang to see them off, and when they sang "Time Flies", there was a faint sigh of death and parting.

The third part talks about Dandelion’s official start-up. The plot imitates that in western movies and samurai movies, heroes from all walks of life with their own specialties come together, as if they use the ramen shop as a stage to show their legends.The fourth part is the final test before the opening of Dandelion. Her exaggerated expression contains expectations, excitement, and anxiety. This has completely put the value of her life in a bowl of noodles.The words "substance, vitality, and depth" used by several men to describe the face of dandelion may seem absurd or exaggerated at first glance.But when you think about it carefully, food should of course have its "substance, vitality, and depth". It is not only based on the craftsman and emotion of the maker, but also based on the taste, taste, and thoughts of the taster (how to appreciate this story) The same goes for movies).

The story of "Dandelion" ends with the reopening of the ramen shop, the customers enter, and the protagonist exits.Before the end of this "substantial" main line, another "empty" "gangster film sub-line" also ended.A follow-up shot, a few off-screen gunshots, the gangster Yakusho Koji lying in a pool of (exaggerated) blood, and his last words are a serious description of the deliciousness of potatoes in the stomach of wild boars.It seems that this is just a banter, but Itami XIII magically echoes it to the first scene before the subtitles, mixing poetry and pathos, and a fatalistic complex with death. The final credits of the film appear in the image of a young mother breastfeeding her child-after the film ends, everything returns to the beginning of food and life. "Are there directors for these films?": The Colguer Trilogy, 1985/1992/1994 Because a university institution asked me to lecture on Iranian cinema, I took the opportunity to watch some of Abbas' old films myself before "selling" his films to some university students.In fact, I haven’t watched Abbas for several years. His popularity among “art film fans” seems to have gradually declined after 2000. With his minimalist works such as “Ten” and “Five”, only the Audiences who have a very deep understanding of film language or life experience can accept it.Perhaps it is a misnomer: Abbas' films have evolved into "poems of the gaze," freed from the labors of narrative and mise-en-scène.But I am not a very good comprehender in film language or life experience, so I chose to go back and watch, including his first short film "Bread and Alley", as well as "Homework" and "Close-up".The latter touched me very much. The film method that breaks through fiction and records, as well as the brilliance of humanity outside the film, are extremely rare in the movie-watching experience.The most helpful thing for me in this "concentrated movie watching" is the "Kogel Trilogy" - "Where Is My Friend's Home", "Life Continues", "Under the Olive Tree", which made me realize again How Abbas self-questioned, deconstructed and thought about the form of "movie". Abbas originally chose Kogal, a village in northern Iran, as the filming location for "Where is My Friend's Home" (1985) for the simple reason that the residents there have almost never watched TV and movies, which is conducive to creating realistic Reality for realistic performances.The story of this movie is very simple: A Mo, a second-grade student, ran for a whole evening to return his classmate's homework, but he still couldn't find his classmate's home.Such a story can easily be misunderstood as "plain", but the foreshadowing and suspense used by Abbas in the film are almost one after another. , Nine places, each time is more exciting, and the audience is disappointed again and again, and finally ends with a scene of the teacher checking homework that echoes the first scene and is poetic.From this film, we can find that Abbas is very good at grasping melodrama, and in this "simple but complex" story, he inserted many realities in Iran, patriarchal traditions, The status quo of education, and the simple psychology of children.Abbas quoted Godard as saying: The reality is that no good movies are made.In Abbas' films, it is the respect for reality, not the reproduction of reality.This film gave him a comprehensive concept of the use of non-professional actors, and he even believed that the director should be eliminated.When he returned to China one time, a staff member at the airport recognized him and said to his colleagues, "Look, this is the director of Where is My Friend's Home".But his colleague asked back: "Is there a director for this movie?" Abbas thought this was the highest praise for him. In 1990, a strong earthquake occurred in Kegail, the loss caused by the Tangshan earthquake in history was second only to my country, 50,000 people died, 20,000 of them were children, because "Where is my friend's home" was once popular in Iran For a while, all the media were discussing whether the children in the movie were safe or not.This prompted Abbas to film Life Goes On (1992).Abbas said that I chose Kogel for the last movie, but this time Kogel chose me.This "choice" later manifested not only as humanitarianism in the film, but also as a reflection on the film itself.What we can see is that Abbas keeps making "confessions" about the fictional elements of his last film-the family didn't live here, the old man didn't have a hunchback, and so on.Many reporters later asked Abbas whether "Life Continues" was considered a documentary, and Abbas flatly said, "No part of it is recorded!" For this reason, he even wanted to invite the most famous actors to play in the next film.Like "Where is My Friend's Home" (failed to find a classmate's home), this film did not complete the plot's preset result in the end: the two children who performed in the previous film were not found.Abbas doesn't care about this, he thinks that life is always more important than movies, he doesn't have to find those two children, he has already found the vitality of his compatriots to face the future.It is said that many TV colleagues accused Abbas of not filming the people who unfortunately died in the earthquake. Abbas' response was "I didn't go to watch death, I went to discover life."After I finished showing the film, some students asked if there was a scene in the film where the film director finds a baby in the woods, "a metaphor for new life".In my opinion, Abbas does not need metaphors, and everything he wants to say is filmed for the audience. Abbas has an amusing account of why he returned to Kogel again for Under the Olive Tree (1994): If you're going to dig for treasure, you've got to dig in one place.What Abbas wants to explore this time is some thinking between fiction and record, reality and fantasy. "Under the Olive Tree" tells how "Life Continues" was made.In a sense, it is a reconstruction of "Life Continues", taking four minutes of the previous film and putting it in this film for "decomposition" - around this scene, telling the story of the film. Inside, outside, the story before and after the camera.Abbas often said he was more interested in what happened behind the camera.And that four-minute scene—a dialogue between the bridegroom, the bride, and the director upstairs and downstairs the day after the earthquake—is the best text to explain reality and fantasy: "Upstairs" (outside of the film) expresses Reality, while "downstairs" (in front of the camera) is fantasy.When Abbas explained the reality of dreams, he said that "dreams are very close to reality". If there is no reality, there will be no dreams, just like the window of a room without a window.In order to confess the contradiction between reality and fiction, the title of "Under the Olive Tree" is written on the board of "Under the Olive Tree", not the "correct" "Life Continues".This is the "mistake" that Abbas insists on, and it is also the intertwined relationship between "dream and reality" that he believes.This movie about movies has an onion-like structure, including "this film, the film within the film, and the film within the film".But in addition to the structure, it also tells an interesting love story, which is the love between the two actors and actresses who play the groom and the bride.At the end, Abbas let them drift away in front of the camera, and let the heroine, who has always rejected the actor, turn around and say something to him halfway, implying their "reconciliation".But the reality is that in Iran, family status is still insurmountable, and dead parents also have absolute authority-the girl's parents once rejected a boy who "had no house" during his lifetime.Although Abbas expressed despair about their love, at the end, "inspired by the natural scenery", he changed the ending: this is the advantage of the movie, it can occasionally use dreams to intervene in reality. Returning to Film, Returning to Memory: Cinema Paradise, 1988 0. I once had the idea of ​​re-watching some of the 1990s movies that started my "serious" movie watching.I remember when I saw them, I was very moved or excited, but the feeling was very inaccurate.I rewatch them at the risk of losing my memory.Some things in memory are perfect, even though they are not real, but the result of re-examination is that I will lose that perfect experience, and then get a rational re-judgment.Ultimately, movies and memories can no longer be confused.Instead, what belongs to the movie belongs to the movie, and what belongs to the memory belongs to the memory. Therefore, on this retrospective video journey, I must go to "Paradise Cinema" as the first stop.That is a "complex movie" mixed with movies and memories. It is about movies and about memories.We know that the biggest feature of both movies and memories is "falseness", or in other words, it is believable.Without the intervention of others, we will automatically select the most touching passages in movies and memories. Cinema Paradise superimposes cinema on memory: a film about film, a film about memory; a memory about film, a memory about memory. But how to write about this movie now must be a cliché, and almost every frame of it has been lyricized. 1. Cinema As the title suggests, the story of this film grows in the cinema.This movie theater is called "Paradise", a pun intended.One is that in Italy, a Catholic country, the church once controlled people's entertainment. The only movie theater in this small town originally belonged to the church, and the priest had the right to decide the scope of watching and being watched; The most important daily life in the world, the cinema has become a spiritual paradise for people.This cinema is a public space that accommodates the joys, sorrows and joys of men, women and children in a town.This cinema is also a closed container, loaded with the memory of a man growing up.This public space has been remodeled and dilapidated, but this container has not been opened for thirty years.The viewer of this film is like someone watching from the outside of some terrarium. The story of the movie theater took place during World War II and the early post-war period. Naturally, there was unspeakable embarrassment and pain for the Italians at war. At this time, the movie theater acted as an asylum and a safe haven.The war does not seem to exist except for the newsreel on the screen, except for the photo of the boy's father at home.Instead, the entertainment brought by the movies filled the town.The protagonist Duoduo grew up in the cinema, where he learned to love and to be a human being. Of course, he mastered a professional skill - he was able to become a famous director after arriving in Rome.Yet the upshot of this growing up is that the old movie theater is blown up, and our hero sits in a state-of-the-art small auditorium watching his "pieces of childhood."He was moved, and we were also moved, but there was only one person sitting in the empty auditorium, somewhat lonely.It can also be said: the protagonists in "Paradise Cinema" are Duoduo and the old man Alfred, but it is time and space that control the audience, and the latter is easier to sigh and sigh. 2. Projector and screen "Paradise Cinema" shows some of the physical characteristics and mechanical principles of the film, light, film, projector.Movies have changed from silent to sound, from black and white to color; films have changed from flammable to non-flammable; projectors have changed from manual to automatic.The properties of the projector and the film show that even after the film is made, it can still be tampered with before it is shown.The projectionist is the "invisible person" in the movie theater, the most painful person. A movie has passed hundreds of times before his eyes, and what he says is the dialogue in the movie.He brought countless people the joy of "watching", at the cost of sacrificing his own eyes.The greatest achievement of the projectionist Alfredo is to hide some happiness--a piece about a kiss--and leave it to his most beloved child.This kind of private collection is not a piece of candy or a piece of cloth, but a few pieces of film, which can be preserved and projected.This shows that: film is both material and spiritual; it is illusory, but it is also real.Therefore, the joy and emotion brought by movies are often double.This is what "Paradise Cinema" makes us feel deeply. The screen is like a window. The town in "Cinema Paradiso" is closed, which is why Avedo asked his children to go to Rome, and not to come back if they fail.But the screen brings people out into the world, passion, love, fear, ecstasy—emotions that life lacks.With reverence, director Tonadore inserted the movies he loved in his memory into his own works.So we see Jean Renoir, Visconti, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart—their names, their images, their speeches, their posters.No matter how many times you watch "Cinema Paradiso", you will sigh that the movie is really a wonderful thing.Because here are mixed emotions of the characters, the director, and the audience about the film, and these are all projected onto the screen "in the film".The last time it was projected onto the screen was the most beautiful shot in the world - a kiss.In the era when the church controlled entertainment, these "kisses" were cut and hidden, and they only existed in people's imagination. Although "kiss scenes" are no longer rare, those "unseen" will never be seen is the best. 3. The screens of "Paradise Cinema" are full of literary and artistic atmosphere, bright and atmospheric, and at the most critical moment of the fate of the characters, director Tornatore always uses the most accurate camera positions, scheduling, and editing.His greatest means of mobilizing the audience's emotions is that at the happiest or saddest moment, he never blacks out or fades out, and always cuts directly to the opposite plot.For example, Alfred and Duoduo showed the "Plaza Movie" for people, and a sudden fire caused Alfred's eyes to be burned; another example is Duoduo waiting under the window of his lover for several months, but his lover appeared lightly at the most desperate moment.These most dramatic passages form the film's climax, ending in a series of "kiss scenes"!