MovieChat Forums > Qiu Ju da guan si (1993) Discussion > Are people really so nice?

Are people really so nice?


Let me preface this comment by saying this: No, I am not a Chinese dude on some propaganda mission.

This movie was really well made, with very natural performances. But it also made me think if people were really this good to each other in real life. If this is true, what good is our materialistic urban life, where people are so hateful and fake?

Maybe it's just the Chinese people that are so amiable - where I grew up (no, not in China), I can't even imagine being on talking-terms with someone whom I am indulging in litigation with. Or the director of a big city agency actually caring about the problems of the common citizen.

Maybe the story/screenplay was highly fictionalized - people aren't really that nice to each other. Although, makes me wish it were true as it is.

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Yes, nowadays people of Chinese big city are hateful and fake indeed. But in countrysides especially the countrysides that are very poor, people are still very honest and simple and be good to each other.
And the film was shot in the early 90s, people in China were good yet then. I think seldom filmmakers will let this kind of story happen in present time.

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Yes, nowadays people of Chinese big city are hateful and fake indeed.

The way I see it, this is precisely the point the director was trying to make. For example, the glamorous actress Gong Li was implausibly cast as a rebellious and "justice-seeking" farmer prone to histrionics. Her relatively silent, loyal sister, played by an "authentic" farmer, was a far more credible character. I suspect Gong Li was deliberately miscast to illustrate the danger of trying the export big-city norms to the countryside.

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I'm surprised you would say this movie portrays rural people being good to each other, given the assault that prefaces the opening and provides the central conflict.

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The amiability between people in the Chinese countryside is obviously overstated in this film. Yes Chinese village people are nice to each other but not that much.I have been to some very poor chinese countrysides. People there were really nice. Much nicer than urban people. But being on talking-terms with someone who you are having a lawsuit with is still unimaginable.

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No. Zhang Yimou seems to have been motivated by Confucian nostalgia. By the end of the film he leads us to believe that cold legalism is not the answer to grievance and that the heroine did unnecessary and profound damage to local ties and deeply rooted ways of life. The idealized, sentimental portrait of life in rural China only reinforces the director's message: that society should be founded on human feeling, not law.

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