名不虚传，果然有牛逼之处！本片也再度证明，电影本质上还是拼创意和想法，跟有没有钱没太大关系，就像本片这样，让摄影师往副驾驶那一坐、把摄影机往车前面一放，一家三口当演员，一路开来一路聊，这种简单的形式不也能拍出蛮不简单、蛮好看的片子吗？如果你看过本片的简介和预告片，知道本片其实就是两大段一镜到底的夫妻车内聊天戏，但本片绝没有预想中的枯燥，而是一上来就用夫妻矛盾吸引观众的注意，并且在十多分钟的时候就把矛盾推向高潮。而且，即便有经验的观众不会被骗，知道夫妻俩这看似写实的撕逼，其实都是在演戏，但导演依然在设计上花了不少心思，除了夫妻表演这个“定量”，还有两三岁牙牙学语的小孩子这个“变量”，增加了一些随机表演的趣味，尤其是妻子问小孩“爸爸妈妈如果离婚了，你跟爸爸还是妈妈”的时候，如果小孩不回答“妈妈”，这个长镜头是不是就废了重拍了。此外，丈夫在一开始只闻其声不见其人，直到30分钟才露面，也算是形成了个吸引观众的小小悬念吧。在第一段长镜头的结尾还玩了个“打破第四堵墙”，消解了此前夫妻矛盾营造的“真实感”！哦，对了，这一段中丈夫还给妻子念了一首蛮浪漫、蛮深情的情诗，算是呼应了片名了吧？如果没有这首诗，就让人感觉片名莫名其妙了！整部影片的前后两大段长镜头，是以出片名作为分隔的，后面的长镜头继续用打破第四堵墙的方式消解夫妻俩玩“角色扮演游戏”的那种真实感，重复两遍的戏还形成一种荒诞喜感，这种重复和夫妻在演之外的交流和情绪发泄，也也进一步模糊了镜头前的虚实真相，让人忍不住怀疑夫妻俩在戏外真情实感的交流，是不是也是一种“演”，或者有“演”的成分在其中。直到最后，观众也许不再怀疑妻子是在演，但绝对会怀疑丈夫作为创作者和镜头掌控者，是否为了创作一直在消费妻子的情感，甚至是他在妻子面前坦诚并痛悔自己消费妻子情感之后，依然在暗搓搓地消费妻子的情感直到影片结束。总之，本片用看似简单的形式，给观众提供了绝不简单的多层次、多维度的观影体验，导演在伪纪录片的程式化台词设计和即兴表演之间，跟观众玩着虚实游戏，进行着创作探索和自我反思。

Close confinement provokes bitter conflict in Love Poem, a documentary hybrid where hell is other people. The second feature from director Xiaozhen Wang (2013’s Around That Water) relentlessly picks over the bones of his fraught relationship with his wife and reluctant accomplice Qing Shi for a film that constantly muddies what is real and what is staged. The result is an unsettling journey through a hall of cracked mirrors. Festival audiences could be drawn to the originality and challenge of a film that is as intriguing as it is exhausting.

This overwrought therapy session feels very real.We then question whether any of it can be taken at face value

Love Poem initially seems to have taken inspiration from a combination of Noah Baumbach and Jafar Panahi, but without the Sondheim song. Xiaozhen Wang and his wife Qing Shi collect their young daughter Xiaoshuo and drive out of the city to visit an elderly relative. Xiaozhen drives and a fixed camera gazes on the back seat where Qing sits with their child. The journey has barely begun when the adults start giving each other hell. Over the next uninterrupted twenty minutes, they taunt each other to the point of a divorce.

Age-old grievances are aired, blows are struck and words are spoken that might be the cause of regret. Qing is increasingly angry as she vents her resentment of her passive/aggressive husband’s many failings. He is lazy, irresponsible, has never changed a nappy in his life or lifted a finger to try and improve their prospects and build a better life for the family. She also turns increasingly violent. Over the course of the film she repeatedly slaps him, spits in his eye, gouges his face and furiously kicks the back of his seat. Her physical violence is matched by his emotional cruelty.

This overwrought therapy session feels very real. Emotions run high and the viewer is completely swept into a marriage that cannot possibly survive. You even fret over the fate of a greedy daughter who is going to be awfully sick after her endless consumption of seaweed snacks and lollipops.

It gradually becomes apparent that all is not as it first appears. The blistering fury that Qing Shi unleashes may have some basis in reality but it is being channelled at the behest of her husband for the film that he is masterminding. We then question whether any of it can be taken at face value.

Xiaozhen increasingly goes out of his way flag up that this is a version of their life. There is a discussion about acting and doubts as to whether they may be exploiting relatives for an emotional pay-off. Xiaozhen laments: “I went too far to make this film.”

At the halfway mark, a title appears saying this is A Film By Xiaozhen Wang. Breaking that fourth wall and drawing attention to the artifice becomes an increasing element of the process. In the second half, the couple meets on a freezing cold night that happens to be Qing’s birthday. Xiaozhen is in the driver’s seat and Qing is a passenger. A fixed camera attached to the car is positioned to let us see both of them as they enact another scenario in which Xiaozhen is debating the impact on his girlfriend - played by Qing - of telling her that his current partner may be pregnant.

We are now presented with a more reasonable couple. When concentration lapses, they decide to repeat the whole sequence again. Their difficuties and weariness seep into the film as it starts to lose momentum. Can we really invest in any of this when none of it may be real? Does the end justify the means of their George and Martha-style play acting? You feel as if the warring couple may well deserve each other and start to sympathise with a tearful Qing’s desire for it all to end. The final irony comes when Xiaozhen dedicates the film to “my dear wife”.

Does filming oneself and one’s own partner acting as non-professional actors equal documentary filming? Does exhibiting the process of fiction-making, or the making-of of fiction, equal non-fiction cinema? What if the non-professional acting finally gets an influence of your daily non-acting? Is reality also the result of our exercises in fictionalising reality? If two non-professional actors say that they stop acting when the camera continues to record, did they “really” stop acting? Is any exhibited making-of of a film, even the making-of of the making-of of the film, potentially fictional? Would the fictionality of the making-of be more real than the reality of the fiction which the making-of refers to? What if a dying man or a two year-old child participate in an explicitly staged fiction? Can they be prepared enough, manipulated enough, in order to not bring some non-fictional reality into fiction? If the explicitly staged fiction displays the drama of a non-professional actress being manipulated by the rules of acting, does this mean that the non-professional actress is less manipulated, in reality, because she accepts being manipulated in order to express through her acting how bad it would be to be a manipulated non-professional actress? Does a meta-cinematic reflection rise when we realise that the ethical questions discussed in the drama coincide with the classical ethical questions of documentary filmmaking, like the question of filming and, in a way, seeking for suffering? If the pact between the non-professional actors would be to perform their own real life, would the non-scripted moments of improvisation go beyond the limit of their acting domain and show an effective non-fiction? Which should be the position of the spectator when, the explicit ambiguity between fiction and non-fiction notwithstanding, the highly credible dialogues make us suspend our disbeliefs? Should we resist the suspension of disbelief only because the realistic dialogue of a couple stops at once with the couple revealing their acting? When the non-professional actors, a couple themselves, start then to behave as if in their acting performances, should their previous dialogues be taken as even more credible or even more staged?

All these questions arose in me during the viewing of Xiaozhen Wang’s two-hours long Love Poem. Even if the film is not devoid of genuinely dramatic moments, which we experience when we surrender to the cinematic suspension of disbelief, its main filmic experience coincides with our own intellectual inquiry on fiction and non-fiction. The climax of the interlocking layers of fiction and non-fiction comes in the last scene of the film, where the filmmaker takes the initiative to stop the camera, but this scene will confirm the impossibility of attempting to disentangle fiction and non-fiction. Then music will appear. Yes, Love Poem is mainly intellectual cinema, and I cannot but immediately add: so what? For in speaking of “intellectual cinema”, I already feel the pressure, today, of having to defend its legitimate existence against the anti-intellectualism that seems to loom among film scholars and cinephiles… Cinema has told, tells, and will always tell the story of the reflection on its own dispositive and fundamental issues.

Text: Giuseppe Di Salvatore

First published: April 26, 2020

Love Poem | Film | Xiaozhen Wang | CHN-Hong Kong-SAR 2020 | 114’ | Visions du Réel 2020, Burning Lights

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