Pain is born from ideal and reality, struggle and compromise, sobriety and ignorance. With a puritan fanaticism and forbearance, my sister exiled herself again and again, pursuing her ideals at the expense of compromise and abandonment. Homemade parachutes are flying in the streets of Anyang town, showing us an idealist's realistic choice with heartbreaking publicity (peacock); Qinghong, a girl of 19 years old, stumbled along the mountain road in a remote town in brick red high heels, with her father Lao Wu's cold eyes behind her. In the new wave of reform, Lao Wu's once heroic dream of youth has been severely tortured, so the "happiness" of the next generation is a promise, and the will to "return to the city" has risen indomitable, becoming the overriding truth and equally indomitable. However, Liu Xiaoyun, a female middle school student aged 1983, did not forgive her ignorance of stealing forbidden fruit. Even after 10 years, she became the master of the fairy tale troupe, Hua Dan, still unable to get rid of the fate of being ridiculed and watched by the secular, and swallowed the bitter fruit in an embarrassing love relationship, and deeper pain lurked around her (beauty).
If we can go back and look at the films that were filmed in the 1980s and synchronized with the "times", we will once again be deeply moved by Mr. Foucault's famous saying: what matters is not the time to speak, but the time to speak. In the grand narrative of "history", the 1980s was once described as an exciting era, and she witnessed another youthful imagination of an ancient nation. When the old cloth was taken out, everything was so vibrant and prosperous ... but these movies tell us that there is deep sadness and pain behind the excitement and prosperity.
When Gu Changwei and Wang Xiaoshuai touched the memory of "youth" and presented the cracks and pains of that era in a way different from the mainstream ideology, did they get a more authentic 1980s? Perhaps, such inquiry itself needs to be explored. A generation has a generation's memory, and "memory" is also changing the past. "Memory is not a denial of forgetting, but a form of forgetting." What we remember is always what we want to remember. Here, perhaps what we need to ask more is the strong desire to return to the 1980s presented to these filmmakers. What did the 1980s mean to them? What kind of passion and impulse prompted them to go back to the past and collectively review and stare at the 1980s?