Three policemen and an old-fashioned pistol confronted dozens of gun-bearing gangsters: Is this duel with huge power disparity really as it seems? Recently, the new film "The Wind Kill" directed by Zhang Qi has achieved great results at the Beijing International Film Festival. After being shortlisted for the main competition unit of the Temple of Heaven Award, she won the honors of Best Screenwriter and Best Supporting Actor.

  Although the awards were blessed, and producer Jiang Zhiqiang had previously praised the quality of the film as "completely beyond imagination", the box office performance of "The Wind Kill" was not ideal. As of May 7, the highest-rated work in this new domestic film during the May Day holiday received only 34.8 million yuan in box office, ranking only seventh among the nine movies of the same period. The situation of this domestic film with authorship in the market seems to be "trapped" like the setting in its story.

  When "isolated island" becomes the test site of human nature

  "The Wind Kill" sets the story in 1995, the Northwest Abandoned Town Buddy Cliff, the year before the complete ban on guns. The desperate situation of "one gun against dozens of guns" makes the film have the temperament of a western film and the rhythm of a Hong Kong police and gangster film. Director Zhang Qi revealed that he had a strong interest in "humanity explosion in extreme predicament", which was also his original intention of creating "The Great Wind Kill". "There are too many directions in the desert, which makes people trapped - what I want to explore is what we are trapped." This "isolated island" wrapped in yellow sand is not only a physically closed space, but also a metaphor for the spiritual dilemma of the people in the play. It seems that everyone is breathing hard in the cracks between survival instinct and moral conscience.

  The film impacts the senses through fierce scenes such as "wire binding" and "car door cut off", but stimulates the audience's imagination with the blank space of sound, editing and picture. In the night scene of Xia Ran confronting the bandits, the flashing firelights and howling bullets in the darkness are more psychologically oppressive than the intuitive flying of flesh and blood. Behind this "violent aesthetic" is the creator's calmness towards life and death. In Zhang Qi's view, "death is a proposition that must be directly looked at in life and movies."

  The "fight of trapped beasts" in human hearts

  Xia Ran, a policeman played by Bai Ke, is the lonely guardian of the desert and a "hidden beast" imprisoned by traumatic memories. "Dorjie was set as a 'no-existent person' during the filming. He was actually a comrade-in-arms who died in Xia Ran, and a medium for Xia Ran to imagine dialogue with the past." Xia Ran's dependence on his comrades was actually a self-deception that refused to face trauma. By "conversing with people who do not exist", Bai Ke stripped Xia Ran of his mind to fill his fear with his imagination. It was not until the end that when his comrades reminded him to let go that Xia Ran slowly completed the transformation from "trapped in the past" to "trying to heal himself".

  Li Hong is the most tragic character in the whole film. She seems to have the "right to choose", but in reality she becomes a prisoner of destiny. Regarding her ending, actor Lang Yueting analyzed: "'I can't walk' this line is not that I can't escape, but a kind of despair." When she found that her sister was dead, dying with the evil one became her only "choice" that she could take the initiative to control. This autonomy that bursts out in desperate situations makes the characters transcend the "evil girl" framework of traditional crime movies.

  In Lang Yueting's view, Li Hong's complexity lies in her contradictory identity wandering on the edge of black and white. She runs a food city and has a normal life, but she falls back into the abyss because of Beishan’s return. "She helped Xia Ran out of kindness and resistance to the existing survival order." What the audience saw was not the stereotyped characters and the simple "opposition between good and evil", but a woman pushed into the abyss by fate, struggling to retain the last trace of dignity in despair.

  From the closed space in the town of Manya to the psychological cage of the characters, "The Great Wind Kill" is wrapped in the violent appearance of care for the spiritual dilemma of modern people. Some people are trapped in the past, some are trapped in desire, and some are trapped in identity... This is a video thinking about "sleep and breaking the deadlock". When the gunfire on the screen gradually stops, the audience who walks out of the theater may at some point re-examine the "busy cliff town" in their lives and those "choices that have to be made".

  "Those days when blown by the wind tighten my heart late at night." At the end of the film, the melody of Pu Shu's "Listen to the Wind" sounded. This folk song, born in 2003, connects people's frenzy and relief with the wind as an image, just like the strong wind wrapped in yellow sand in the film, which not only blows away violence and calculations, but also burys those sad and obsessive things that "have no time to forget". (Intern reporter Zang Yunjie)

[Editor in charge: Susan]