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Going to see "Catch the Dolls" in hot Nanjing, braving the 30-degree heat, was the biggest mistake I made this summer.

It has been a long time since I watched a movie that made me feel so uncomfortable, as if I was sitting on pins and needles, like a thorn in my back, and like there was something stuck in my throat.

Even Shen Teng and Ma Li couldn't alleviate my feeling in the slightest.

I know what the movie wants to express. It is to satirize the Chinese-style chicken-and-egg education that starts from childhood, the self-satisfied education that forces children to endure hardship, the moral kidnapping-style guilt-and-suppression-style education, and the brutal interference and manipulation of children's lives.

I completely get the basics, and even agree with it, but the shell of the movie makes me feel physically uncomfortable.

A couple with a fortune of billions (I can't even imagine how much they have), in order to train their youngest son Ma Jiye to be the successor of the company, pretended to be poor for more than ten years. They even mobilized a lot of manpower and resources to turn the environment around their child into a Chinese version of "The Truman Show".

All the jokes are based on this deception, and all the horror is also based on this deception. Some people say that if you put yourself in Ma Jiye’s role, this will be a new Chinese horror film wrapped in comedy.

But sorry, I can't relate to the film. To me, the premise of this film is invalid. Before I could empathize with the horror that Ma Jiye experienced, I began to doubt the rationality of this premise. Before it could become a horror film, it was already a fantasy film.

It is already a fantasy that rich people pretend to be poor in order to raise their children. Instead of enjoying their wealth and glory, they insist on hiding in tube-shaped buildings to suffer. But this is not the most outrageous thing.

The most outrageous thing is that they can use millions of dollars in school selection fees to send their eldest son to a prestigious American university, and they can also turn half of the city into a Truman Show, but they have to use hard work to motivate their son to get into Peking University and Tsinghua University. What a magical and naive imagination.

As netizens said:

If the couple played by Shen Teng and Ma Li in the movie were really rich, then all the trouble in this movie would be unnecessary. Nowadays, only poor people would use the college entrance examination as a means to turn their lives around. Rich people never play this game from the beginning.

Poverty can limit our imagination, but it will not limit our judgment. The emperor uses a golden hoe to work in the fields, and the rich push their children to get into Peking University and Tsinghua University. Although poor, I understand the absurdity of this.

Therefore, throughout the entire movie-watching process, I was unable to empathize with the hard-earned education that Ma Jiye received. Watching Shen Teng and Ma Li with a group of "teachers" trying to hide their "tycoon" identities and using all their skills to act poor, just like in a movie, there was only one sentence in my mind:

Rich people have to work very hard to make their poverty look effortless.

However, the movie's jokes still worked, and I laughed foolishly several times. But every time I thought about how the people in the movie were just pretending to be poor, and that a single word of truth would end it, and how my poverty was real, and how I had worked hard for decades without seeing any change, I couldn't laugh anymore.

And when I thought that I, a poor person, had to pay money to see a group of rich people trying hard to play themselves in the movie, and they told me that poverty is good and that poverty can train people, I laughed out loud again.

Of course, some people will say, it’s just a movie, isn’t it tiring to think so much?

But the problem is, if this is a movie like "The Richest Man in Xihong City" that is completely free from the ground, it can form its own logic, but unfortunately it is not. "Catching Dolls" takes care of reality and tries to reflect and criticize reality in a deformed way, but the premise of this reaction and criticism is untenable. This internal conflict of the movie is the source of the awkwardness that many people feel when watching the movie.

In the movie, Ma Jiye desperately wants to get rid of his parents' control, and for this he does not hesitate to sacrifice the precious opportunity of the college entrance examination and find out the truth by luring the tiger away from the mountain. In his own view, this may be a heroic feat, and the movie also tries hard to exaggerate this heroic atmosphere, just like the final escape in "The Truman Show".

But the difference is that what Truman wants to escape from is a paradise where everything seems to be beautiful; but what he escapes to is an uncertain real world with an uncertain future. Such a choice can be regarded as a real problem.

What Ma Jiye wanted to escape from, was a depressing, miserable and false world; but what he discovered, was an unexpectedly wealthy family that belonged to him. He did not show a clear rejection, and this family fortune could completely become his last resort.

Resistance with a way out, no matter how tragic it is portrayed, will become embarrassing and powerless because of its falsity.

The lives of ordinary people like us are filled with poverty, suffering, and control, but we don’t have the escape route or the beautiful dream of our parents suddenly becoming billionaires.

—The End—

Author: Wei Chunliang

First published: Liangjian, ID: liangjian0624