life with flowers

The American film "The Hours" intertwines the life stories of three women: In 1941, the British writer Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), a long-term mentally ill woman, wrote After finishing her last novel, she was on the verge of collapse. Out of love for her husband, she hurriedly threw herself into a river while she was still conscious. In the 1950s, a comfortable housewife (Julianne Moore) was fascinated by Woolf's novels. The novelist's experience of throwing into a river haunted her like a soul. At this time, she was pregnant with a second child. A child, on her husband's birthday, she found a hotel and tried to commit suicide. Towards the end of the film we learn that she would later become the third heroine - the mother of an editor's former lover in 2000. The editor, played by Meryl Streep, is shopping for flowers for the party that night, and invites estranged lover Richard to attend. The writer Richard is also the housewife's little boy, a once well-behaved and sensitive child, but now has AIDS. He was frail, hysterical, and cynical. Just when the female editor picked him up for the banquet, he broke through the window in front of his old lover, chasing the sun.

Woolf's stream-of-consciousness novel "Mrs. Dalloway" is framed by a day in the life of Mrs. Congressman, who goes out to buy flowers for an upcoming banquet one summer morning, until just before the banquet is over. Here comes the news of the death of a strange young man who had participated in the European War by jumping off a building and committing suicide. The works are interspersed with a lot of memories, conflicts between characters, collisions in the depths of the soul, life and death, rationality and madness, and the shadows and shadows are mixed together. The film applies this basic plot and continuously transforms time and space, which makes the artistic effect more confusing.

It is worth noting that this film full of death atmosphere is not expressed in dark tones. The cheerful female editor in the film chose a large number of carnations and lilies, which symbolize vigorous vitality, to increase the atmosphere of the banquet. Like Mrs. Dalloway, many times I sincerely praised: what a lovely morning. Richard committed suicide on such a sunny afternoon with fresh air and flowers and trees. Through the flashback lens, we see the birthday cake that Richard and his mother made for his father in childhood. It is covered with blue-purple flowers, and a few small yellow flowers are dotted in it. It is weird and mysterious. A large cluster of yellow roses in a vase faced each other in the distance. The cake was repeatedly watched in close-up, it was scorched by the dazed housewife, and it was reproduced again, the blue cake lying quietly in the middle of the dining table, as if to send a message to the audience: female The owner's intentions have been decided. On the other side, bright roses seem to be calling the hostess.

In the film, characters from different time and space are closely stacked together. Little Richard's mother often has a copy of "Mrs. Dalloway" by her pillow. She often dreams that she is drifting away like Woolf, so beautiful. Like a hibiscus out of water. The plot corresponds to a detail in the novel: when the banquet was about to end, Mrs. Dalloway heard the news of the unfamiliar young man's death. In an instant, she felt that she was the young man and fell heavily downstairs. That's how he blended together. After passing by the god of death, she felt the horror of life, and she was worried that she would not be able to finish this life. Perhaps due to Woolf's deranged nerves, this delusion or hallucination is naturally written into the novel, which the film captures precisely and manifests in another way.

The flowers that can be seen everywhere in the film seem to add a philosophical meaning to the film: life is like a flower, sometimes life is death, and sometimes death is life.

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