There are two things that deeply touched me in this film:
1. Nostalgia
60 years ago, the Irish girl Eliza left her hometown at the right age and went to New York thousands of miles away to seek happiness . With a new environment and a new life, she faced all kinds of difficulties, but what defeated her at first was the nostalgia like wine.
Sixteen years ago, a peasant's child left the picturesque village to study. The school is a boarding system, with dormitories on the ground floor and foundations below the ground. The autumn rain in the south is continuous, and the bed is always soaked with moisture, making it difficult to fall asleep. Many nights he watched the raindrops fluttering in the lights outside the window, imagining that when he was not at home, all day long, he wondered if the grandmother who cooked food for him would have nothing to do? When you're bored, do you always pick on your mother's housework, and then the sound of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law arguing is always heard in the house? Without his little chess friend, would the old chess idiot who is not as good as he is better than the next would always lose to the masters and feel annoyed every day? Without him, a greedy eater, would the neighbors who always cook a little more cooking often ask if other people's pigs are short of leftovers? After thinking more, he realized that the pillow was wet.
So when I saw Eliza locked herself in the room and cried uncontrollably when she saw the letters sent from thousands of miles away, my nose was sore. Although the feeling of homesickness is far away from me, I still remember that feeling like drinking alcohol, with strong stamina and hard to stop.
2. Letting go of
missing your hometown is different from missing a girl. Missing a girl will make you uneasy, because the girl is elusive, but the hometown is not, it is there, but you can't set foot on the journey back for various reasons. Just like me - oh, the farmer's kid above is me - after junior high school, you need to go to high school, after high school, you need to go to college, after college, you need to find a job. This is a road of no return. I will go back to my hometown in the backcountry.
In the film, Eliza successfully resolves her nostalgia with busy work, night school and love, while I could only digest myself in the endless sea of boring questions. I don't have the slightest liking for the closed school that implements white terror and high-pressure policies, so I look forward to every holiday and buy the earliest bus every time. I remember the first time I went home, I went to the station with a few friends on the same road, but got lost on the street in the early morning because I didn’t recognize the way. When the morning light appeared, we were all panicked. Fortunately, the alleys in the ancient city seemed to be far away, but they were actually separated by a wall. We passed through a narrow path, and the station appeared in front of us. We cheered, and the aunt next to me, who was drowsy-eyed and flushed, almost threw the toilet away.
When I got to high school, I gradually stopped thinking about home, because the so-called homesickness is actually nothing more than thinking about the man and the dog one by one for several times. I was so emotional in my youth, but once I grow up and become rational, I know this. It's good to think about something once in a while.
Four years of college and life after graduation have made me more determined not to return to my hometown. Not only my hometown in the countryside, but also the small county town where I went to middle school is no longer in my eyes, because life there is the same and there are many rules. There, the end of life is to become a closed and stubborn old man.
So in fact, overcoming nostalgia is very simple, just ask yourself: would you like to live there for decades? That's it. The word hometown has now slowly degenerated into only one word - home, which means the parents and the house they live in and all the old things in the house. As for the others, it is optional.
So it made me happy to see Eliza retort at the snarky old groceries and then resolutely set out on her way back to New York, because for me, my hometown shouldn't be the same. That backward and closed hometown, even if it once had beautiful scenery and simple folk customs, has long been suffocated by the influence of social atmosphere and the scourge of the grass-roots government.
3. To sum up,
nostalgia used to be like wine, dripping into sorrow, turning into tears of lovesickness, but now is not the time to hold hands and look at tears, poetry and wine take advantage of the years, and now is the time to hurry up. The choice of the heroine is also my choice, so I think this is a good film, and I recommend it to all young friends who are homesick or have been homesick.
The film is fresh and elegant as a whole, and the plot is not well developed. According to the original party, it has the charm of a novel. Saoirse Ronan conquered me with her tepid and meticulous performance, and I believe she can also conquer the Oscar judges, becoming another post-90s Oscar best actress after Jennifer Lawrence.
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