- Commentary on the movie "Confession"
In this revenge-themed film, the director tells us a cruel fable in an extremely personal style, in which every person waiting for redemption The soul eventually slipped to hell. On the surface, it seems that there are various reasons that lead them to destruction, including family, character, public opinion, environment and so on. . But if the deepest and most essential reason is extracted from these seemingly chaotic reasons, it is actually only one - that is the communication gap between people.
In a high school classroom, in his speech announcing his resignation to the students, Moriguchi, the head teacher, also made public the murder of his daughter, and found the murderer in front of everyone - the top students in the class, Shuya and the humble. Naoki, Moriguchi would not report them, but she added the HIV virus to the milk the two drank (it was later confirmed to be false). The whole class fell into an uproar after learning of this. The two murderers who were exposed also reacted very differently. Shuya still went to school as usual, while Naoki hid at home and never stepped out of the house again. Moriguchi-sensei, who resigned, was in control of the situation behind the scenes. She first used the new head teacher to easily drive Naoki, who had fallen into a collapse, into madness, and finally killed her mother who had been with him by mistake. Later, she used the squad leader Mizuki to learn about the softest part of Shuya, who seemed to be invulnerable - his biological mother. So Moriguchi designed Shuya, who was going to use a bomb to kill himself and the school, and killed his mother by pressing the button on the day of the scheduled explosion. Shuya, who learned the truth, collapsed to the ground. In his painful tears, Moriguchi walked up to him. In front of him, he also declared his revenge to all the teachers and students of the school.
The dark color palette sets the tone for the film's dark desperation, a film that stirs extreme emotions from start to finish, and is at the same time highly demagogic. The director almost let high-speed flash, beautiful slow motion and psychedelic music "flood" throughout the film, and at the same time used a large number of character "confessions" to make the audience have a strong sense of substitution for the characters. Moreover, the director keeps distorting and destroying beautiful things, from the small notes of Shuya that were neat but scribbled, to the death of Moriguchi's daughter, and to the last scene of Shuya's repentance, which is the most deeply inked. Almost every minute of the film is covered in the passages of the film. Whenever a beautiful thing or emotion appears, it is accompanied by the cruelest ending, which produces strong contrasts and contrasts, making the audience feel uncomfortable, pity, There was even a sense of anger and absurdity. The director used such tricks throughout the film to drag the audience into a cold, false and desperate world. Here, all the true feelings have vanished into nothing, making people sigh.
In terms of structure, the director adopted a method of narration after the "Classroom" paragraph at the beginning of the film, allowing "Mizuki", "Shimomura", "Shuya", "Naoki" and others outside Moriguchi to use their own "confession" ” method, using narration to combine personal feelings with the advancement of the plot. The director did not use the traditional chapter-style method but used such a novel method to collage the entire film, because the narration of each character is closely related. For example, as the monitor, Mizuki accompanied the new teacher to visit Naoki, fell in love with Shuya and died, and Shimomura and Naoki were originally mother-son relationship. In fact, the technique of "confession" is still used for the development of the plot in the film. From each person's one-sided understanding of things and different evaluations of others, the thoughts and thoughts of each character are completely exposed to the audience. In front of the eyes, so that the logic of each person's behavior is fully understood by the audience. In addition, the director also uses a lot of flashbacks, as each character thinks and says, what happens in the film is recreated, perfected, and finally the truth of the matter surfaced. They deceived and misunderstood each other. The film constantly used this technique, and constantly used each person's rhetoric to create small suspense, and as the plot developed, the audience's impression of each person was constantly overturned. For example, Shuya and Naoki kill Moriguchi's daughter: Shuya is proud of killing his teacher's daughter, but later we learn from Naoki that the real murderer was him, not Shuya. At this time, the scene of Shuya and Mizuki's sweet kiss was interspersed, which made the audience's view of Shuya suddenly change, but in fact, this was just the director's trick to tease the audience, but this method did make the audience fall into the film's creation. In the context, this also further strengthens the sense of substitution of the film.
In terms of character setting, the director gave each character in the film a distinct personality or symbolized it. For example, the cold-faced girl who stood on the moral high ground and bombarded Moriguchi and Mizuki with condemnation. Just two lines Bringing this character's ugly personality to life. Of course, the roles and psychology of the five protagonists who confess in the film are also colorfully set. Under their cold or disdainful appearance, there is actually a heart that needs to be cared for: the cowardly Naoki closed his door at home Going out, he tortured himself and his mother every day. He thought that home was his fortress, but he didn't know that his mother was the real support in his heart. However, his mother, who was unknown, stabbed the knife into his body in desperation, causing Naoki, who had lost the last line of defense, to know what to do and fell into complete madness. And under the seemingly complicated and cold-blooded appearance, everything Xiuya did was actually terrifyingly simple—in order to gain the approval of his mother. Finally, at the climax of the film: in the surreal scene accompanied by lightning bolts and strong music, Shuya is in the hallucination as if he saw the scene where the mother he had just killed was holding a picture of him crying, and the audience was the first to cry. Once under the close-up camera, I saw the most essential side of this boy from Xiuya's blank expression and his deep and empty eyes.
In this utilitarian society, the relationship between people tends to be indifferent, people's suppressed emotions cannot be released, they become more and more lonely, and they yearn more and more for warmth. But sadly, the collisions of real emotions are always distorted and mutated due to various reasons, and eventually die out. Everyone in the film suffers from being misunderstood by others, and everyone who cares about them cannot understand them or even harm them, and those who are misunderstood are all looking for their own solutions, but the result is It's all cruel, and the form shown in the film is exaggerated, but we have actually experienced a lot of such things. Moriguchi and her daughter's family happiness was forcibly torn into yin and yang, and the misunderstanding between Naoki and her mother led to a complete tragedy. Because the shadow of childhood continued to pursue the approval of his mother, he finally broke down and cried in the infinite pain of personally killing his mother. . Mr. Moriguchi couldn't let the students who were a dozen years younger than her feel her feelings, so she induced her students to kill the person they cared about the most: her own mother. After all, the power of words is limited. Personal experience is worth a thousand words. Only two people who have been hurt in the same way can understand each other's feelings.
We all fantasize about finding another self in this world, but such a thing will never happen, so friction, collision and misunderstanding will occur constantly in the communication between people. Only by beating with the same experience can we run in and understand each other. We are constantly looking for the love of others who have the same experience, and we are constantly being misunderstood and hurt by others. Perhaps in this too sad world, only we can understand the softest confession in our hearts.
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