"Cemetery Crossing" is a typical British film. The story is very simple, but it is the favorite subject of British films: restless youth and blue-collar class, real confusion and future choices. The story takes place in Reading, England, a town very close to London, where the most famous Prudential insurance headquarters in the UK is located. The protagonist in the play is an employee of the insurance company, but Prudential is not mentioned. The cemetery intersection in the title of the film is the lower-level residential area in this town. The three boys in the film live here. There are also some bourgeois in suits and leather shoes in the play who also started and moved out from here.
Living in this area, of course, can only be engaged in blue-collar jobs. Some people are very accustomed to living and working here. They feel like a duck to water here and feel that this kind of life is the real life. For example, Bruce and Snooker in the movie are like this, and their elders have also lived here for many years. But some people want to go out from here, to see the wider world, to have lived a life different from their predecessors, to obtain a more honorable identity and a better quality of life. Freddie, the protagonist in the film, is such a person. In front of him is his current employer, the top executive of the insurance company. He also moved out of this block and was educated here. Now he lives in a mansion, goes in and out of Chinese cars, wears fragrant clothes, and is proud of the spring breeze. He became Freddie's role model.
Freddie went to work for an insurance company, took off his work clothes, put on a suit, and became an insurance salesman. It was indeed a completely different world from his previous life. Two different lives, in fact the same everywhere. Some people are content with living one kind of life, while others strive to enter another kind of life. This is just an attitude to life and a choice of life. In the film, these two lives are opposed to each other. In the eyes of the director, although the life at the cemetery intersection is rough and not high in quality, although the income is not much and the living environment is poor, it is real, and the flirting with each other is also a true expression of emotion. Compared with their upstream society, it is full of a kind of bourgeois hypocrisy, mutual dullness and artificiality, in stark contrast to the liveliness of the working class. Here, the class distinction is brought to the fore by the director, and poor Freddie is also hovering between these two walls, choosing.
Of course, Freddy's final decision turned out to be to take off his suit, because he also felt out of place in the class he was in, and he and his friends couldn't fit in. Here he meets again his former playmate Julie, the daughter of an insurance company executive and the girlfriend of his current boss. Julie is also faced with a choice, pursue a fresh and poor working-class life, or choose a rich and stale bourgeois life? Julie's hesitation was dispelled by her mother. Emily Watson's mother isn't much in the show, but she's a key figure. She should have come from Cemetery Crossing like her husband, but she has been unable to adjust to the present life and appreciate the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Her life was dull, her husband had nothing to say to her, and he didn't even thank her for his service. The daughter's boyfriend is also copying his husband's way. She encouraged her daughter to break away from her existing life and follow Freddy to the world.
Here, the taste of life forms a correspondence with the character and class of the individual. Blue-collar workers are associated with simplicity, vitality, and family affection, forming a positive image of the proletariat; while white-collar workers form natural partners with hypocrisy, dullness, and ruthlessness, exuding the prudent charm of the bourgeoisie. The fresh human nature was extracted and turned into a class nature with group characteristics. It seems that people's feelings and habits, people's morality and conduct, have undergone tremendous changes with the difference of people's status and occupation. This identity determines all human behavior, reminiscent of China's classism in previous years. Every character in the film is labeled with class, and the uniqueness as a specific individual disappears behind this mask.
Nearly thirty years ago, the famous French director Louis Bunuel made a film called "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In this film, Buñuel mocks the film's six main characters to the fullest, criticizing the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. In Cemetery Crossing, Ricky Gervais' critique is less sharp, turning mockery into comparison, but the essence is still a complete denial of the bourgeois way of life. However, is this kind of prudence and this kind of conformity of the bourgeoisie really so abhorrent? Of course, it is also a good state to be simple and natural, revealing true feelings, and intimacy between people, but do we have to deny the other kind of life that is opposite to it? If there is no so-called hypocrisy, no so-called pretentiousness, no yearning and pursuit for a better quality of life, and no clear definition of the relationship between people, perhaps human beings are still like animals, still on the vast prairie. run.
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