"Falling Mountain": Feeling Romance and Cruelty in Beautiful Scenery and Thinking about Human Nature


Liu Xiaowei is in the rain.

    Director Feng Xiaoning’s new work was published after ten years’ polishing, which continued the core idea of harmony, showed passion and romance, worries and responsibilities, rich imagination and strong expression in the film, and presented a feast for the audience with increasingly mature audio-visual language and narrative methods. Singing the beautiful feelings of human beings and condemning the evil in human nature with poetic film audio-visual language forms the distinctive style of Falling Mountain.


Li Zheng plays a game with his master in Luojingshan

    Compared with the impressive "War Trilogy", "Falling Mountain" has almost no large-scale war scenes, but focuses on an isolated mountain village and tells the story of their treasure-winning with a group of invaders. Although the number of people is small, and a large number of gun battles are not produced with special effects, the killing and death in "Falling Mountain" show the bloodiness and cruelty of human nature as profoundly.

    Luojingshan describes a nation’s instinctive and primitive sacrifice and death. The spontaneity and sacredness of this kind of sacrifice and death embodies the eternal ethical and moral law of so-called national interests and national interests above all else. The helpless villagers silently protested against the invaders with guns, the bloody old monk took his own life without hesitation, and the heroine drowned herself in the lake to save her children when the crisis came, all of which concentrated on Feng Xiaoning’s understanding and thinking about death, irrationality and inhumanity of war.

    From the content, Luojing Mountain is a fictional character, plot and story in a real war environment. His story does not pursue completeness, logic and authenticity, but pays more attention to its implication, ideographic meaning and legend. As an important clue, the treasure in the story, that is, the true scriptures that Tang Priest lost after learning from the scriptures, makes the story more colorful with myths, fairy tales and fables. In the social background at that time, the love between the single mother and the mute in the film is romantic and can better reflect the theme of human nature.

    The film depicts the dumb, single mother and old monk in a true, objective and meticulous artistic image, and describes the war from their perspectives and situations, showing their different living conditions and rich spiritual world. Feng Xiaoning has done a remarkable job. It is one of Feng Xiaoning’s successes to dig out these little people and middle people who are not in the mainstream from the dust of history and accept the artistic representation of human nature in their true colors.

    Aestheticism is a remarkable artistic feature of Feng Xiaoning’s films. He is very particular about the color, picture and shape of the film and strives for perfection. "Falling Mountain" takes red and yellow warm colors as the basic colors, which makes each picture look more like a flowing oil painting. There is a scene in the film that left a deep impression on us. By the sunny river, the fallen leaves on the ground were dyed golden in the setting sun. In this picturesque scenery, the heroine is sewing clothes for the dumb, and the dumb and children are playing in the river not far away. The beauty of the scenery and the beauty of human nature are integrated into one. "The scenery is full of emotions, and the emotions are concrete and the scenery is the scene."

    This creative idea completely betrays the description of "typical environment" of into the badlands and the dark moon in the movies of War and Treasure Hunt. It is an artistic wisdom to contrast the beautiful natural environment with the bloody cruelty of the war itself, thus reflecting the extreme contradiction between human killing each other and the beauty of nature.

    In the way of photography, he also used a variety of shooting methods in addition to using a fixed position. There are not only panoramic large-scale performances, but also local detailed descriptions. The detailed descriptions are very real, the action scenes are vivid, and the fighting environment is very realistic. Coupled with the beautiful caves in Yinan, it is undoubtedly a pleasing visual feast.