Anyone who has seen the movie must remember that in the movie, Thomas likes to say the same sentence to different women, "Take off your clothes", which must make many men heart-broken. Bad, provocative, irresponsible in love, these negative descriptions seem to add a breath of anger to mediocre men. I think the reason why Ma Yuan interprets the prototype of this story is that the prodigal son turns back, in fact, it is also because he is just a man.
Gender inevitably brings blind spots. What we think we are watching is a movie, but we are actually watching ourselves. What I see is not the prodigal son turning back, but the woman in love, transformed into two heroines. I agree with Ma Yuan: Teresa's life is "heavy" relative to Thomas, while Sabina's life is "lighter" relative to Thomas. In fact, they are the same woman in love. When a man or love comes, they are sometimes light and sometimes heavy.
Teresa is particularly reckless in love with Thomas, she leaves and runs into his life, but dealing with love is a heavy business. She was in agony at the man's infidelity, and her determination to leave him was no match for Thomas' look of pain and pity when he came back all the way back and leaned against the door. Plus, the novel/movie casts her as a persistent documenter, taking pictures of parades, corpses during the Soviet invasion of the Czech Republic. In fact, people who are obsessed with recording themselves will probably not become too lighthearted.
Sabina is a dashing female artist and Thomas' sexual partner. She liked Thomas, and in fact, she liked her more in his eyes—the naked body in a black top hat. The pleasure of this uncommitted relationship was herself, which made her eager to leave the man who later divorced her because he "didn't like my hat" and because once put into life, love became heavy.
The two women met because of Thomas. Hehe, that's right, the word encounter wasn't just born for men and women. Teresa had an intuitive dream of Thomas and Sabina having sex and woke up crying. But she later took a camera to take nude photos of Sabina. Maybe two women who miss each other will meet sooner or later.
In this scene, Teresa was nervous at first, because she was filming the body that was once with her man, and the camera was more like an offensive weapon at this time. violated. Slowly, the emotions between them slowly began to ease, as if they were in love with each other after testing each other (I have to say, the woman who played Sabina is really charming). Later, Sabina got the camera and wanted to take a picture of Teresa. The two ended up laughing naked on the carpet together.
Ma Yuan felt that this passage had homosexual meaning. I don't think it is, it's just a delicate emotion between women and women who shared the same man. This feeling is a little less than a rival, a little more than a friend. Or a little more suspenseful, this may be the same woman, playing different roles in different loves.
I remember the feeling of interpreting a large section of the novel for a moment, I still remember it clearly, but the plot is not clear. At the end of the film, Thomas finds Teresa's nude photos of Sabina in a drawer while euthanizing their dog Karenin. He took a few glances and said nothing. At this time, according to Ma Yuan's interpretation, he had already returned to the countryside with Teresa and the prodigal son.
The silence of the two here is also very interesting. Thomas kept mum about having N women and the relationship between the two women. What about Teresa? Teresa was suffering from her husband's infidelity. She didn't understand why he could accept sex without love, so she tried it with an engineer. "The facts tell us that it doesn't work for Teresa." It sounds like Teresa is a dead-headed and infatuated woman, but that's not the point of the character. What she is silent about is actually Sabina in her body, just like Sabina intoxicated by the eyes of men, Teresa's liveliness on the dance floor is her "lightness", but she is not even close to herself. are not aware of it. And the scene in which she and Sabina took pictures of each other was when it was said that the same woman had "light" and "heavy" moments, which were just different roles reflected in love.
The novels I read a long time ago and the movies I watched in May are indeed rich texts that can be interpreted with many meanings. Sabina, who likes beauty and calmness, also sees her brainless side from Teresa, which I didn't notice when I read the novel.
View more about The Unbearable Lightness of Being reviews
