Another Year, as the name describes, is a year of time. A couple of moments of life experienced by a couple during the year. Looking closely, another year has one more "and" or "other" than a year, implying that this is an ordinary, popular, and even somewhat helpless year with the passage of time. Tom, an engineering geologist, and Gerri, a counselor, are an elderly couple. They have a great relationship, fun and joyful, yet peaceful, warm, and dependable, and they have a 30-year-old lawyer son, Joe. The year revolves around their lives. This year's slice of life revolves around three people. Tom's old classmate, Ken, Tom's brother Ronnie, and Mary, Gerri's colleague who has the largest share in the world.
It seemed that apart from the Tom family, everyone else's life seemed sad and depressing. Ken is sad. Ronnie bluntly didn't know what was going on, and seemed to have never recovered from his wife's death. Mary was extremely rich with Lesley Manville's performance.
Joe is normal, nothing special to say. Joe's later girlfriend, Katie is an atmospheric girl, with characteristics but very common, they are willing to express their friendliness to people, they are happy and confident, even if their friendliness to people is often just out of politeness, such classmates are also ordinary The easiest classmate in a relationship.
Tom and Gerri have a lot in common. But if you look closely, there are subtle differences in their personalities. Gerri added a layer of protection and assertiveness to the sense of security they both shared. In fact, this is an inevitable trait for professionals who deal with a lot of emotions, such as psychological counseling. For example, doctors in hospitals who often face extreme emotions, because they are always facing patients who are in pain or need help or helpless or grief, they are easily emotionally fatigued and suffer from so-called emotional burnout. To put it simply, if a person is constantly in an environment that stimulates his own emotions such as sympathy, sadness, etc., he will become so tired that his emotional level to similar events is elevated, giving people a feeling of indifference, or emotional involuntary. Engaged in psychological counseling is even more serious. On the one hand, they need to establish an emotional connection with the object to help them. On the other hand, most of the people who come for psychological counseling are people who gather negative emotions and sometimes can't control their unreasonable venting, which makes the psychological Counselors tend to be in a very difficult psychological position, especially when dealing with uncooperative clients. Therefore, psychological counseling often pays attention to maintaining a good position, that is, not showing too indifference and not letting the object affect their psychological state too much.
For a technician, even Tom, who is often an expert, appears to be more natural and unpretentious. He is not very composed like her wife. The so-called urban mansion, although the urban mansion does not necessarily indicate a bad idea, just It's just that it's not easy to express your emotions, especially negative emotions. For me, sometimes it's better to express negative emotions appropriately than to be isolated and composed with a condescending connotation. So Tom makes me feel better.
Mary is a poor classmate. In fact, like Ken, she pity herself, but sometimes she needs to show a state of self-improvement without direct emotional support. After repeated disillusionment, her state became desperate. She felt that she might just die of old age and didn't care that she loved her. The desire to seek intimacy is so strong that she can no longer feel that others do not appreciate it. Sometimes Joe's politeness can make her feel hopeful and then hopeless. The scene where Joe's girlfriend meets everyone (including Mary) for the first time is full of tension. Disappointment, resentment towards Joe, disgust transferred to Katie, and self-abasement at being relatively young and getting Joe's affection made her constantly express hostility toward Katie. And it soured her relationship with Mary, leaving her feeling even more lonely for the next few months. She even had a crush on Ronnie, who seemed like a good listener just because she had nothing to say.
If the English word nuance is not so clear, then this film tells people clearly what nuances are, those subtleties about expressions, feelings, and intentions, which can even make people feel bored when they carefully understand and study them.
The film has been dubbed by some critics so-called humane work, loosely speaking about a common paradox in human relationships. For those who have a good experience and have normal emotional support, they appear to be secure, they are able to trust others, they are independent, and they belong to the so-called secure type. Such people are confident and optimistic in social relationships, and both men and women will be more attractive and thus easily enter into intimate relationships. For those who have not experienced such a good experience and do not have a stable support environment, they behave as needy or desperate, which probably means a little eager to gain other people's feelings in Chinese, and at the same time they are also insecure about their existing feelings. suspicious. These qualities make it easier for them to stay away from what they want. Those who are not particularly in need are more accessible, and those who are in desperate need are more likely to stay away. This kind of helpless human nature is probably the long feature of Mary's helplessness and no sense of direction at the end of the movie, or what the whole movie wants to express.
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