Film Review ｜ Feeling the Blending of Reality and Drama from Three Battalions

Original title: Comment on People’s Art: Feel the blending of reality and drama from it.

The recently released film "Three Battalions" can be said to be a "strong topic" film from any angle. The script is unconventional, all the actors are acting online, and it is inextricably linked with the real society. Once it was released, it triggered discussion among the audience and won a good box office.

The film is adapted from the documentary literature "Please tell the director that the tasks of the three brigades have been completed", which tells the story that the three brigades led by Cheng Bing, the captain of the Criminal Investigation Brigade, caused one of the suspects to die unexpectedly in the process of handling a vicious case, was sentenced to prison, and still insisted on tracking the fugitive suspects as ordinary people after being released from prison.

The "big case" in the theme of police and bandits is actually a way to express the complexity and multi-dimension of society. The core of the film is to show people’s different choices in the face of fate change and the direction of social spirit and values in the current context by shaping characters. Specifically, it can be manifested from three perspectives: time, space and people.

In the film, from the beginning of the third brigade as a model of the police force that has repeatedly solved major cases, it shouldered the investigation work of the case, to the death of the suspect in prison due to negligent injury, and then to the long road of chasing the murderer 12 years after he was released from prison. The identity of each role in the third brigade has changed significantly at different times. Before they went to prison, they were high-spirited policemen. After they got out of prison, everyone had different identities: Cai Bin sold wenwan, Ma Zhenkun ran a food stall with his wife, Liao Jian did insurance business, Xu Yizhou became dog trainer, and Cheng Bing tried different jobs such as air-conditioning repairman and water delivery man in the pursuit of the murderer. Their life is characterized by time, which has undergone tremendous changes, but they have been trying to seek and confirm their inner identity. The subtle changes in time have successively constructed the narrative of their identity’s confusion period, exploration period and symbiosis period, and guided them to correct their identity by using their mutual feelings.

In the end, Xu gave up the pursuit because of love, Ma Zhenkun because of his wife, Liao Jian because of his children, and Cai Bin because of stomach cancer. Only Cheng Bing went to his temples with obsession. In this process, the film also uses space to convey this narrative of identity. From the Guangdong crime in 2002 to Tongren, Guizhou in 2013, the space of chasing the murderer has changed over 10,000 kilometers in seven provinces in 12 years, which not only shows the exploration of identity by the three brigades, but also mixes the images of ordinary people and heroes, reshaping a symbiotic identity, and finally urges Cheng Bing to understand the hiding place of the suspect’s alias on the road of exploring his own identity. At the end of the story, the film didn’t pay too much attention to Cheng Bing’s realistic destination after his long pursuit of murder, but gave the audience a strong impact in the form of blank space.

The reason why the police film can be widely popular lies in the blending of reality and drama, in addition to reflecting the fierce struggle between police and bandits. The social spirit and values that the audience can feel in the narrative construction of time, space and characters can experience similar identity and emotional resonance. Through the superposition of commercial types and realistic themes, domestic films can go deeper into social changes and internal conflicts, reflect on the public’s recognition value to society, and at the same time promote social progress and development through mutual influence, reflecting the advantages of "strong topic" films in traffic-driven ability and narrative communication.

At present, in the film and television industry, realistic themes still have great potential to be developed. In the process of mixing realistic themes with commercial films, in addition to the fusion of genre narration, there are still some aspects to be surpassed, such as stylization of style, typology of characters, image atlas and profundity of problems. The practice of "Three Battalions" is worth thinking about. (Author: Xie Yang)