The reset button will never be in your hands.
There must be a reason why this film left such an impression on me at that age. Although I was young at the time, I was also called a film and television enthusiast, and now that I have finally evolved into a film and television fan, I want to understand, It turned out that when I was young, I had never seen any film made like this.
This is the first Russian film I've ever seen. At that time, I didn't understand the discourse environment of Russia very well, and I wouldn't make any connection between the film and the political situation in Russia at that time. But it taught me a solid lesson just in the senses. The film runs through the oppressive blue-gray from the beginning to the end, and cuts in with the extremely low angle of view at the beginning, so that as far as you can see, it fills the gloomy sky and the distant horizon, and the macro painting of empty cold tone Quality, long poetic shots, low but powerful background music. Andrei accurately used the picture to express the heavy and distant temperament of the reckless Russia to the world. It is on this level that people chanted: Andrei Sagintsev learns from the old tower; Tarkovsky's soul is possessed; the dignity of Russian cinema "returns". So much expected, such a remarkable Virgo took home a golden lion for him.
Interestingly, the intention of this film that I understood when I was young has become the best image of it in my heart. Behind the film are huge political appeals and religious metaphors. After the director's second work "Exile Love", I am more certain of this. I can't go into details about religion. I don't like the Orthodox Church very much. It's not because of anything else. I really just think the Orthodox Church is really ugly. Almost completely copied the onions of Islam, shoddy things, always repelling. Second, I think the director's political demands are low-level and uninteresting, no matter how wonderful his name is, no matter how gorgeous he wears. I respect this film simply because of his shooting technique and aesthetic standards, and the most outward meaning that I first grasped.
That is patriarchy and paternal love.
Dad, two simple continuous and identical words, this word means dominance and power for every growing boy. A representative of the adult world, a symbol of male power. How much of our development and existence is the interweaving of the memory and genes of the previous generation. In the back of our father, we trace the outline of our future self. But the image of father is just a word that has been ignored for more than ten years for Andre and Ivan in the film. The strong and resolute men in the black and white photos let them know that there is a father they have never known in this world. They are unfamiliar with the tone of the word father, and have lived in their mother's soft and warm arms since childhood.
At the beginning of the film, Ivan, Andrei and their friends are playing high-altitude diving. In their eyes, this is a men's ceremony, which symbolizes a boy's spiritual coming-of-age ceremony. Ivan was shivering and didn't dare to jump like his brother and the others. The camera was pushed from the bottom to the top, showing Ivan's fearful and worried expression from a head-up perspective. The height between the water surface and the platform was something Ivan could never break through. growth retardation. At the end of the film, the camera is from top to bottom, looking down at the father who has turned into a corpse from Ivan's perspective. The film finally stimulated the G-spot during the long foreplay. Ivan walked off the high platform calmly, and his brother had no face. With an expression on their faces, they dragged their father's body onto the boat, left the island in the direction they came from, and sailed to the sea in the way their father taught them. When the father's body was submerged by the deep blue lake water, the father also fell forever like a meteor, and a hard power began to grow in their bodies. The two teenagers finally shouted out this touching word from the bottom of their hearts: PA PA... At this moment, Ivan and Andre really felt the majesty of the word father Strength, in fact, in the process of Ivan rushing to the tower to avoid his father, he has psychologically shattered the shackles of the shackles. This is the only way for him to become a man, and this carrier of heavy fatherly love has also paid his inevitable price and repaid all his guilt and debt to the family.
Jehovah created the world in seven days. The father in the film took seven days to shape the boy into a man. The mother’s love for the child is like the milk they turned into flesh and blood. It is an unconditional giving. Make trouble, it's all yours. Just like at the beginning of the film, Ivan curled up on the high platform and said angrily to his mother: "I will die on it, I swear I will die on it." The mother hugged him with open arms, comforted him, and told him today's Only mother knows. Mother's love is always open to accommodate you as long as you need it. But father's love is harsh and conditional. Many times, for teenagers, father is even a hostile existence. This consciousness is deeply implanted in the hearts of boys when they compete for the same breast. Wan looks jealous when he sees his father's thick and lush arms. Father means rules and constraints, just like the cold color quality of this film, father's face is cold and makes people feel no warmth. He asks you to say "Dad", he tells you you have 3 minutes to eat your bread, he tells you how to drive a broken car out of the mud, he looks at the pretty woman's ass in your face, he It will also teach you how to fight with people. He will push you a real world full of authority, obedience, violence and obscene, telling you how a man should live in this world and protect his territory, but He only had seven days, and during these seven days he stood idly by in the face of his son's suffering, and seriously played the ruthless bastard. And seven days ago, the younger son couldn't accept this kind of intimacy conversation at all, and he wouldn't be willing to call out a father. The eldest son believes that the world should be peaceful, and he does not dare to punish the person who has just beaten him. These are romantic and idealized from the care of motherhood. In order to make up for his 12-year absence of identity, his father hopes to make up for it in a short time. Time to tell the sons what is the real world and what is the suffering you will experience eventually, but this too intensive and intense indoctrination has brewed father-son confrontation again and again, and the two sons can't bear the world of their ideal mature man In the middle, there are actually so many cold branches. Like they can't take their dream fishing trip, the road will be covered with mud and thorns. In the reluctance of the motherhood and the fear of the patriarchal world, the youngest son Ivan completely collapsed. He held a dagger and yelled at his father to kill him, and then threw off the dagger and cried that he was going to commit suicide, crazy. Climbing up the high platform that he had only dared to look up to the day before, his father shouted his name from behind and followed him up, but Ivan locked himself on it and prevented his father from coming up. Screaming on the dead wood with his hands
Going back to the scene where the two sons saw their father for the first time in the film, the father was lying on the bed horizontally and vertically, dignified and majestic. It is almost the same gesture as when his father sank to the bottom of the lake. This intention comes from Mantegna's oil painting during the Renaissance: "The Dead Christ". As the camera looks down and focuses on my father's face, I always get the feeling that he will open his eyes again, like Christ's resurrection, and continue what was abruptly stopped. However, the lake water still unstoppably flowed through his hair, burying all his feelings and expectations for his son at the bottom of the lake.
The director did not explain what would happen after the two sons drove the car home along the rut they came from, just like in this film he did not explain his father's occupation, and did not explain why his father came to a remote island to dig a mysterious mystery. The box did not explain who my father was on the phone with. In our past experience, when these inexplicable details that were not explained are intertwined, it will always be a reasonable or unexpected ending, but just like the film is cold. Lie strokes, like the tough tone of the father, this answer, the director did not provide us unconditionally. This unanswered film naturally brings rich interpretations, not to mention that this is a film called "The Return" released in 2003 about a father who has been away from home for 12 years. Upheaval in Eastern Europe. The story of growing up as a man who rebelled against his father, the political metaphor of the coercion and disintegration of the old power, and the trauma of the Russian nation's national spirit, all of them are reasonable, and I am willing to believe them, but this time I did not have too much What to think about, because I clearly feel that this excellent film no longer needs any other interpretation to superfluous.
To grow is to break free from the old shell, grow new flesh and blood, sew up old wounds, and inject new blood. It is slow and urgent, but it never stops. No one can replace this process, but it can only be experienced personally.
Of the film and television works that focus on the father-son relationship (I insist that this is a film about fatherly love) this is the best one I have seen, followed by Tim Burton's "Return" in the same year as "Return". "Big Fish", in that film there is a father who loves to tell a story, because my father told that story so many times that he also became a story. At the end of that film, on a lake shrouded in a dreamy blue mist, a large fish leaps out of the water, full of life and infinite freedom.
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