The story of "Graduation Exam" takes place in Romania, which is located in the northeastern part of the Balkan Peninsula in Eastern Europe. The Orthodox countries in the Balkans have not experienced ideological emancipation revolutions such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment in Western European countries, and have failed to establish a tradition of individualism and liberalism. Most of these countries implemented autocratic monarchies after they became independent from the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and after World War II, except for Greece, they established communist regimes. The transition after the Cold War was also much more difficult than that of Central European countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Another significant difference between these countries and the Central European countries is the large number of ethnic groups and complex ethnic conflicts. In both Yugoslavia and Albania, violent turmoil broke out after the end of the Cold War. Since the two industrial revolutions did not catch up, and industrialization did not begin until after World War II, the economies of the Balkan countries generally fell behind. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States faced off against each other in a geese formation. The Soviet Union's power extended westward to East Germany and eastward to North Korea and China. Therefore, today, the countries of the Balkans are very similar to China in many respects.
In December 1989, a domestic revolution broke out, overthrowing the 25-year rule of Ceausescu's communist totalitarian regime. In 1991, the protagonist Romeo and his wife Magda returned to post-revolutionary Romania to start a new life. They were full of confidence that they could control their own lives, but the reality made them feel bad. Romeo becomes a well-known doctor, and Magda works as a librarian due to some conceptual problems.
Years etch, people reach middle age. A series of small incidents make Romeo, a young man in his 20s, into a middle-aged man in his 40s in a transitional chaotic society. He is conscientious and diligent, and maintains a family's life against the wind and rain. He is familiar with social rules and takes them for granted. He tries to maintain his own ideas and bottom line, but that young man with great ambitions has become exhausted from the grinding of life.
Romeo has always believed that her daughter Eliza could not face the chaotic living environment in Romania, nor the burden that life throws at her. He didn't want his children to face the life he faced again. He and his wife put all their hopes on their 20-year-old daughter, hoping that she can study in the UK and live there. However, his marriage with his wife Magda was in vain. Romeo was cheating on the outside, his daughter knew it well, and his wife was exhausted, powerless and unintentional.
The story begins with a stone breaking the glass of a family living in such a peaceful life, but the implication is more like an accident disrupting the orderly life. It cannot return to the original track and is destined to go to another chaos. After his daughter Alyssa was attacked on her way to school, Romeo, on the one hand, called the police and hoped that the killer would be punished. On the other hand, he needed to appease his daughter, and even under the pressure of his friends, he thought of paying bribes, and found the examiner through a patient who needed a liver transplant. He wants his daughter to cheat on exam papers to make sure she doesn't miss out. But it backfired, a series of disorder opened up, but the murderer who broke the life of Romeo's family was never found, people searched hard for the source of the accident, but found that it didn't exist at all, or its importance to everyone The meanings are different. The end result is a greater disarray of the individual's separation from the step-by-step order of life to accept what life has to offer.
Socrates said that an unexamined life has no value. So is the unexamined life worthwhile? Or do our lives stand up to rational scrutiny? Sartre said: People are a bunch of useless enthusiasm. Then life should be a bunch of trivial and useless passions. Under the lens of God's perspective, people seem to be able to approach a certain doctrine (the main meaning) more rationally. Then people will be happy. For example, Romeo should not cheat, then he will be happy. The daughter's accident may not happen, or a more reasonable assumption. In short, it will not tend to a meaningless negative existence - "the white land is really clean". But when life adds the rationality of all individuals together, it is a happy and rational state that can never be reached, and our life in a chaotic environment cannot withstand rational inspection.
When we can't find the meaning of life and can't adapt to our own life, it always seems very powerless to pin our hopes on children, because what you want to accomplish is your own life, and the child is the child's life. Live your life well.
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