The 29-minute-long "La Jetee" is almost entirely still, like a black-and-white slideshow from an elementary school class, with the narration taking me into the film. The smiling face of a woman in peacetime, the death of a man, bombed Paris, I almost thought I was watching a war documentary; the film cuts to the adult male protagonist, a prisoner chosen as an experimental subject, He's going to help the perverted scientist into the past and the future - war documentary turned science fiction.
Then he saw that the man was at ease in the past, he met the woman on the dike that year, he went in and out of her world freely, talked with her, laughed with her, he was sure that she was the woman he had been looking for... ..and the man was rejected when he entered the future...his mission was done, his death had come, he chose to go back to the past, to find the smiling woman's face, he excitedly turned towards her Run away, but come to the end of life. It turned out that the death of a man he saw on the embankment in his childhood turned out to be his own death.
This isn't a sci-fi movie or a romance, and the director seems to be talking about death, memory, and childhood.
None of us know how we are going to die, and such questions may only be answered by the dead, the dead who can't speak. Perhaps what we see before we die is the deepest childhood memory.
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