The plot of the movie is simple. A single old man, like Don Juan, has received an anonymous pink letter claiming to be one of his ex-girlfriends. The letter said that after she broke up with him, she gave birth to his son. Although he did not talk to his son about him, the son still left home to find his father. I wrote a letter because I thought I should tell him. The old man wanted to ignore it, but his enthusiastic detective writer insisted he should make the trip to find out, even finding out their current addresses based on a list of ex-girlfriends he provided. So, the old man was pushed on a journey of search. Pink is a clue to the journey, because the first anonymous letter is pink, and neighbors think that pink must have a special meaning, so be sure to pay special attention to pink things. It sounds ridiculous, but isn't the clues used to solve cases in detective films just like things that you don't understand at first (such as the strange characters left by the murderer)? As the plot progresses, a series of things with unknown meanings build connections and are endowed with meanings, and the truth will come out. Isn't that what stories are all about? Yes, if this movie is really a detective genre, then it should be. However, this is a Jarmusch movie. Therefore, although various pink things kept appearing in the search journey, and in certain passages in the middle, the old man strung these pink things together like a slideshow in his sleep, as if there was a connection and meaning behind it, but Until the end of the movie, we still don't know what pink means. Of course not. Life is not a detective type movie. You can find the truth by relying on all kinds of clues. Those clues can be accidental with no meaning, they can have meaning and are meant to be discovered but we just don't, or they can have meaning but aren't meant to be discovered. So, at the end of the movie, the old man does not know whether he has a son or not, and if so, which ex is the mother of his son. However, the most interesting part of the movie is that although we know that most of the movies are deconstructing detective genre films, we still follow the old man to guess the meaning of those pink things, guess which ex gave birth to his son, and the young man we met on the street. Whether a man is looking for his own son. There are three levels to the journey of finding a movie. 1. Neighbors' exploration of the whole incident. Here, we can think that the neighbor is the creator of those detective genre films (in the movie, his career is set to be a detective novel writer). Second, the old man's search journey. This is the heart of the movie. Usually in genre narratives, the protagonist has his own purpose, but in this film , the old man was pushed on the journey by the neighbors - which shows that the so-called meanings of the genre narratives we see are all given by the author (the neighbor). Third, our (audience) search journey. Because we have digested too many typed narratives, we firmly caught the bait thrown by the author (neighbor), and unconsciously tried to solve the mystery in the process of looking for the old man (character). Brilliant. It is precisely with these three levels of the search journey that Jarmusch has completed the perfect deconstruction of the detective genre in the movie, and our greatest pleasure in watching movies is to feel the dissolution of the meaning in the genre narrative in this deconstruction. (As soon as you try to guess or decipher, the movie kindly reminds you: hey, stop guessing, there is no answer).
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