Take pictures of things you can't see, tell you what you want to say but haven't said, show you a life you haven't analyzed, and give you back your stories in a kaleidoscope. ——This movie has such a simple but not simple function. Each of us strives to play the leading role in our own life, but in your life all kinds of supporting roles and even dragon tricks are the protagonists of another world. Spread out like this one by one, it constitutes the chaos of this world.
The rhythm of the film is Ozu-style, but the emotional penetration is Chinese-style dense. Family, friendship, and love are interlocked, and the seemingly scattered characters are firmly locked together and strung together into a story. Starting from the most important happy event in Chinese people's life - marriage, the movie arranges everyone to gather at the wedding banquet and then return to their respective lives. The tree-shaped narrative structure has a clear trunk and clear veins, and the rest is leaves and blossoms on each branch.
The men and women of this family have their own troubles, and in order not to make these details seem too discrete, the film deliberately makes them intersect when telling these stories. The father talked about his two children to his old lover, how his younger son was like himself, and how he didn't want his beloved daughter to fall in love with someone and leave him. The daughter blamed herself for what happened to her mother-in-law, and the mother found the emptiness of life because she talked to herself in the face of her comatose mother-in-law every day. The bland details are so close to life, those faces magnified on the screen, those inadvertent gestures, throwing emotional capsules one after another as the film plays, there is always a moment of surprise and sigh.
However, the bland narrative doesn't paint the film too pale. There are some suspense and unexpected events that make people sweat from time to time for the way the plot goes. I think some people must be worried about whether the mother-in-law will wake up, whether the father will reunite with the old lover, whether the daughter will end up with her friend's lover, whether the lost brother-in-law will be left behind and die of gas poisoning in the bathroom, The son falls into the pool from time to time and never gets up... When everything has an answer and all the plots that have been foreshadowed have developed, it is time for the curtain to fall.
Corresponding to the beginning, the film ends with a funeral. So as if closing the net, Lin Lin always gathered together again. We saw this family sitting in the mother-in-law's mourning hall with no expressions on their faces. But because of the stories that have happened imprinted in our minds, we seem to be able to understand and read their silent lines - hesitant, perhaps more helpless. There is no comedy ending, and naturally it is not a tragedy. Children are always symbols of ideals and hope.
Change yourself little by little, then change others, and thus change the world. Perhaps that's what the good vision of the film expresses. Maybe after more than 100 minutes, walking out of the theater, our world will be slightly different.
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