As a film directed by Susie Au in Hong Kong, it should be an experimental MV feature film, which was released simultaneously in Hong Kong and the Mainland on April 26th. The following are some impressions I got from the "VIP" environment of the cinema near the booking room.
1. Story
Susie Au is a novice as a film director, but he is very famous for shooting MV and advertising. It is precisely because of the accumulation of experience and reputation in those fields over the years that Susie Au has the ambition to take charge of the film guide. The story of Mingming revolves around a mysterious box. The story is not complicated, and there are not many side effects, and the burden of shaking is not brilliant. Mingming and NANA, who are played by Zhou Xun, are the two main threads of the story. Because both of them like Daniel Wu, the two main lines of the movie can meet in Daniel Wu, and finally the story contained in the mysterious box is explained. It turns out that Jeff Chang Shin-Che was transformed by Daniel Wu’s mother. The story seems a bit interesting, but it’s a pity that the director is overconfident in his own experience in filming MV. He not only transplanted a lot of special expression techniques of MV, but also treated a film as a multi-stage MV, which became overly dependent on technology and exposed the pallor of characterization. The film was impetuous and under-polished, and in order to accommodate the director’s need to show off his skills, he sacrificed the actor’s own play. Because the handling methods of MV are mostly implicit and surreal, in Mingming, the implication is treated as mysterious, while surrealism becomes a martial arts speculation. A good realistic story is packaged as a martial arts drama, which is neither fish nor fowl in itself. If it is for the sake of box office, it can only be lamented that when to cut the foot and fit the shoes will be exhausted, and in the end, painting a tiger will not be a dog. If it is the director’s personal will, then both the director and the screenwriter should go to cram school for movie scripts and broaden their horizons.The names of Mingming or NANA the Walking Man are not accurate enough, and even it is suspected that more videos have been taken, and the processing of contiguous names has become MV-like, because neither Mingming nor NANA constitutes the only protagonist and has no complete overwhelming weight, so it is not as appropriate as the farce caused by a box, haha!
2. Modeling & Clothing
Modeling and clothing are the highlights of Mingming, with cool tone, black outfit and smoky outfit to create cool Mingming, Leng Yan and aloof; Create a lovely NANA with warm colors and red costumes, which is naive and pure. The two are visually distinct, which is conducive to Zhou Xun’s play. As a result of the experience accumulated in MV shooting, I have mastered the use of costume and modeling, and it is obvious that NANA is successful, but Daniel Wu’s A D is more than a failure. The appearance of A D was expected to be quite high, with a wonderful tattoo wrapped in flowers and full of domineering. When the camera focuses on A D again, it becomes Daniel Wu with a beggar’s hairstyle, which weakens its deep temperament, and then the obscene stowaway dress is reminiscent of Daniel Wu’s dress in Night in Mong Kok. Coupled with the plot of beating up hooligans, the trace of copying the upgrade of Master Xing in Kung Fu and beating the axe gang out of the water is very heavy. Daniel Wu was destroyed by these patchwork memories, and there was no unified and profound image, so he lost the persuasiveness and charm of his characters.
3. Vision & Sound Effect
Visual effect is a symbolic way to reflect the director’s personal style, and it is also an intuitive window to show a film. Photographer-born directors pay more attention to picture composition, style or domineering, or aestheticism, or simplicity, and so on. Anyway, they deeply explore their inertia when they are photographers and form their own style. Susie Au is an experienced director of MV. He knows the eye catching function of visual effects well. He applies the fashionable and post-modernist style used in filming MV to Mingming. The split-lens treatment is very strong, and he likes to read the story only once in a while, or even dabble in it. The ultra-modern deconstruction is very impressive when interpreting Mingming. Obviously, the plot of breaking into Mao Ge’s lair alone and plundering 5 million yuan is very strong, and the constantly changing visual narrative points are really amazing. Unfortunately, the excitement is only a few minutes, and the story behind it is a bit boring.
4. Actors
The focus of this film is Zhou Xun VS Zhou Xun. In fact, the role weight of the film design and the role of the surrounding characters make Zhou Xun’s light cover everyone, which is just the same. On the other hand, the best actress in the last three Hong Kong Film Awards ceremonies was awarded to Zhang Ziyi, Zhou Xun and Gong Li respectively. It can be seen that mainland big-name actresses have successfully captured the Hong Kong film market, which actually reflects the embarrassment of Hong Kong film industry actresses who are young and yellow. Cecilia Cheung, who is full of aura, has switched to BB, while Lin Jiaxin, the boss, has not made progress. Others are old and tender, and most of them are affected by affectation, but few of them are admitted to the room. A deeper consideration is that co-productions need mainland actors to support their faces before they can freely jump into the broad market mind of the mainland. Under this balance, the faces of mainland actors will sway more and more in Hong Kong-made films. On the other hand, Zhou Xun’s performance is really remarkable. Two girls with the same appearance but completely different personalities and identities are not perfunctory, and the handling level of the roles is also very clear, with a strong sense of contrast, which is not superficial. This is worthy of recognition, and of course it is also related to the director’s efforts to shape and attach the greatest importance to these two roles.
Daniel Wu’s role feels marginalized, which is related to the director’s indecisiveness. At first, A D always showed people in profile, never giving a positive shot, and the repeated appearances of A D all came from Mingming or NANA’s mouth. When A D had to go out, Daniel Wu’s play was greatly limited due to the mysterious mentality of the director, which made him become a puzzling and mysterious man, and his confession was not strong enough, resulting in the dislocation of his role.
Yang Youning, who won the Golden Horse Best New Actor Award for "Seventeen-year-old Sky", plays Atu, whose role was originally designed as a punk with a crush, but Yang Youning made Atu both green and rustic. Jeff Chang Shin-Che’s Mao Ge is hard to comment on, only to say that he completed several gestures ordered by the director well and was not impressed.
In a word, Mingming was not successful as a film; For Susie Au, as Brother Fage said, the advertising slogan, "Success? I just got on the road! "