Two Buddha Masterpieces: “The Bold, the Corrupt, and the
Beautiful” (血觀音) and “The Great Buddha+”(大佛普拉斯)
Two Buddha movies which were released in 2017 in Taiwan brought darkness, opposite, and bloodiness. Ironically, Buddha should be the symbol of hope, peace, and blessing. Both directors utilize Buddha as the core sign of the movies and successfully grab people’s eyes, which is an unfamiliar topic in Taiwan’s film market. Different from most people’s understanding, in these two films, the Buddhas both represent the corruption and cruelty of human nature and the society. Although these two movies have similar topics, there are several differences regarding social classes, meanings, scenes, languages, and lines.
The biggest and the most obvious difference is the social class of the main characters between the two films. The former is considering women in the higher social status; on the other hand, the latter is from men in lower social class. In The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful, the three main characters are all female and form a family of three generations. Each of them has their own goals. They can use any method, power, relationship to achieve their goals no matter how ruthless things can be. The film was constructed based on the three family members’ stories. In contrast, in The Great Buddha+, the two male characters have no target in life. In fact, these two people do nothing in the movie. The Great Buddha+ concisely manifests people’s every day in lower class, which are filled with boredom, aimlessness, and hopelessness. In short, in both movies, the perspectives and the positions are entirely contrary.
Another difference is meaning of using Buddha as the topic. The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful is actually not the direct translation of the Chinese film title. Its Chinese title means the bloody
Guanyin, which intends to indicate that the characters in the film look good-natured just like
Guanyin’s face; but they are totally opposite to the friendly appearance, especially the fema-
-le lord of the family. She can always show her kindest face, which makes her enemies not
able to tell she is the leader of the event. Nevertheless, The Great Buddha+ uses Buddha in a
different way. In the movie, there is a Buddha statue for a religious ceremony. Due to some
reasons, one man killed a woman and put her into the statue, it is actually hollow for reduc-
-ing costs. Then, in the ceremony, to everyone’s astonishment, the woman wakes up and
begins to strike inside the statue. The director wants to convey that this Buddha is the epito-
-me of the real society, which means that exterior can be beautiful, but the interior can be rotten, sordid, and depraved. Hence, these two movies adopt the image of Buddha to portray the similar world in very different fashions.
When it come to the scenes, both possess its own specialty. The scene in The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful is colorful, but in a dark way as its poster shows. On the contrary, in The Great Buddha+, what audiences can see are all black and white, except the video from car recorder of the boss, which set down all the dirty, nasty, and outrageous jobs he did. This attribute also matches with a line in The Great Buddha+, “有錢人的世界才是彩 色的 [only the life of the rich is colorful]”. Therefore, we can explain that in The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful the colorfulness in dark means the higher class, and they seem delightful but merciless. In both films, Color means a lot and the directors make good use of it to demonstrate how lives are in higher and lower social classes.
Language is a vital characteristic in both movies. The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful includes a lot of languages in it such as Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Cantonese, since the actors are from different countries. The director maintains the true voice of the actors instead of using dubbing. When viewers hear different languages, they can perceive the diversity of the movie, the differences of the characters, and also the social situation of Taiwan after 1949. However, all the characters in The Great Buddha+ speak Taiwanese, for the director wants to focus on Taiwan’s issues. Throughout the movie, the director acts as a narrator speaking in Taiwanese, which makes the audiences get a sense of Taiwan’s language culture. Accordingly, both of two make rich use of languages to an exceptional extent.
Finally, the techniques used in these two movies are distinct. The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful has numerous brilliant metaphors. For instance, describe what happened in that scene
first. Mrs. Tang said, “就算妳真出得了海，但你上得了岸嗎 [even though you can head
out to sea, can you go ashore?]” This quote is in fact the description of the real situa-
-tion then, but the deep meaning is that “even though you can escape, can you still
survive?” After the words, Mrs. Tang ignited the dynamite on the ship and slayed
her daughter. Nonetheless, similes show up in The Great Buddha+ like the line that
depicts the life of the rich. By doing so, the director successively allows the audiences to appreciate the film in a smooth way without complex thinking. These subtle differences make both of them distinct in some ways.
Using Buddha as a topic or profanation as core is extremely strange and enchanting in Taiwan. But, both of the films, The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful and The Great Buddha+ depict it well. All in all, these two movies display different fascinations upon social classes, meanings, scenes, languages, and lines. Each of them makes themselves unique and irreplaceable. Yet, there are still more dissimilarities and details in both movies for viewers to explore and to experience the issues that the directors are eager to illustrate. As a result, these two masterpieces are the works that you cannot miss.
Sources of the book or the film (copy and paste the links below)
https://gimy.co/eps/3837-2-1.html
https://www.flickr.com/photos/elmowu/35700491872/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/210895195035016121/
https://kknews.cc/zh-tw/entertainment/9g9p9ej.html
https://movies.yahoo.com.tw/movieinfo_photos.html/id=7036
References
黃信堯, 華文創股份有限公司、甜蜜生活製作有限公司(2017)
https://gimy.co/eps/3837-2-1.html
楊雅喆, 中環國際娛樂事業股份有限公司、原子映象有限公司、高雄人、喆學影像製作有限公司(2017)
