Milan Kundera talks about eternal reincarnation at the beginning of his famous "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." In his book, he writes: "Think of what we have experienced, and think of them repeating themselves as they were yesterday, and even repeating itself endlessly! What does this crazy fantasy mean?"
Yes, it is It means that the sins of the past will be repeatedly imposed on us like a dream, or even the simple concept of our view of history will be completely subverted. The Rainstorm is about to show the lingering violence and death, hovering in the hazy sky, rolling back and forth in the barren wasteland, circling in the deep sea of hatred, in which these extremely negative factors should face their end. For a moment, it was absurd to get a chance to return to zero and repeat it. Here, what is terrible is not death and violence itself, it only happens once and has an end, and the survivors gain short-term forgetfulness and extravagant hope for the next moment in the rest; what is truly terrible is the eternal experience under the violent surroundings. Reincarnation, even if it is as thin as a millimeter and as light as a feather, can be magnified arbitrarily in an instant, becoming a heavy burden on the bent arm.
"Heavy Rain is Coming" creates a seemingly Sisyphus-esque reincarnation through superb narrative arrangement, which we are accustomed to call a "circular narrative". The focus of the film is on the continuous ethnic conflict in Macedonia, the Palestinian Peninsula. A circular narrative is a metaphor, a metaphor for a never-ending fight, a never-ending nightmare. Disputes in the region are still in the press from time to time to this day, and in turn, the film's predictions have been confirmed.
"Heavy Rain is Coming" consists of three stories: "language", "face" and "photo". The first story is about the encounter between a young priest and a Muslim girl. It happened in Macedonia. Just like a priest who could not shelter the peace it deserved, the girl finally fell under the gun of her own brother. . The protagonist of the second story is a female photographer in London, who was eventually swallowed up by inexplicable violence before she could prevent it. The third story tells the story of a successful photographer who returned to his hometown of Macedonia, but was regarded as an alienated alien, and finally intervened in the dispute between the two factions and fell under the gun of a black hole. The three stories share the same destination by different paths, and being shot and falling to the ground is the common destination of the three stories. At the end of the film, we just woke up like a dream and found that under the action of intricate causal chains, in the chronological arrangement, the end of the third story is the beginning of the first story. It seems to draw a circle appropriately, creating a closed self-contained space. The huge shocking force it burst out was like a torrential rain, pouring down after a long time.
Looking at a circle is not a circle
, but the circular narrative of the film is actually walking into a dead end, because time is irreversible, the dead cannot be resurrected, and the surroundings and reality that have been forged cannot be restored to their untouched original appearance. This "circle" cannot be repeated again and again. According to the traceable sequence on the timeline, the opening/ending of the film is neither the beginning nor the end of the series of events that take place, but a beautiful intermediate dividing/connecting point. There is an outline in the film, which is called: Time does not pass, and the circle is not round. Looking back, I found that this is exactly the condensed portrayal of the film's narrative structure, a genius idea. The 90-minute length of the film can be regarded as a line, but the film's beginning and end are unmistakably telling the audience that this is a point, that time does not pass. The same end-to-end implies that the film is supposed to be a circle, when in fact it isn't, it's a cut and scrambled line for the circle to be out of circle.
In fact, only when we put aside the constraints of physical time and space, leave aside the interference of normal logic, and devote ourselves to the look and feel that the film strives to create, can we be deeply convinced. The postmodern technique completely subverts the previous movie viewing experience, and the director is superb, transcending the boundaries of the screen, and radiating to our viewing behavior as audiences. In the end, I was surprised to see whether it was a circle or a circle.
Just like "Pulp Fiction" in the same year, which framed the robbery in a fast food restaurant, the same can be labeled as postmodern, but the effect they strive to achieve is diametrically opposite. "Pulp Fiction" should reveal a deep sense of powerlessness, because the director has already informed the audience of Vincent's "ending" in advance. Vincent had been shot by the boxer in the future or for the audience, and now it seems pointless to turn his head to tell his previous encounter, and death is waiting for him unmistakably. And what about him? All he did was step in the direction that death beckoned. But the genius Quentin Tarantino injects an air of hilarity through deconstruction. When all the conventions become vulgar in the name of vulgarity, when the hands of the ruffian Kun become fragmented, in my opinion, all the sighs about survival will probably disappear. On the contrary, the end to end of "Heavy Rain is Coming" is undoubtedly an attempt to deepen the meaning of tragedy. As mentioned above, there is nothing more tragic than the endless ravages of violence and death. So this is still the "whole" in the sense of modernism, but the "whole" itself is very different.
View more about Before the Rain reviews
