The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
This is a unique Canadian film.
I haven't watched a Canadian film. I didn't expect the first one to be so wonderful. The fascinating music and sad footage slowly tells the pain in the character's heart. Literally translated, the title of the film means "sweet afterlife", which corresponds to the small town after the accident, which has a profound meaning, so that perhaps the meaning of the film can be better understood.
The main plot of the story is that lawyer Mitchell came to the town to investigate a school bus accident. But this is not a suspense film. The audience knew from the beginning that a school bus full of children in the town crashed into an ice lake one morning. There were only two survivors, the driver Dolores and the girl Nicole. There are three parallel lines interspersed in the story. One is Mitchell’s contact with adults in the town, the other is the activities of people in the town some time before the accident, and the other is Mitchell’s meeting with his daughter Zoe’s former friend Alison on the plane. Tell about your relationship with Zoe.
Zoe is an addict and has contracted AIDS again. Every time she called, she just asked Mitchell for money. Mitchell felt painfully that he had lost the child long ago. People in the town also lost their children, the difference is that the cause was an accident. It is not so much that Mitchell filed a lawsuit for the people in the town to earn 1/3 of the compensation, but that he is asking the society for compensation for the pain of losing his daughter on his own behalf.
During the investigation, Mitchell found that Dolores had no opinion, and he had to seek her husband’s advice no matter what she did. Although her husband in a wheelchair after a stroke was slurred; Billy was a Vietnam War veteran, and his wife died of cancer and stayed. The next pair of twin girls, he saw the twins riding the school bus down the road and sinking into the ice lake early that morning. Billy, who had suffered from the war and lost his wife, could not accept this cruel fact; the Lisa and his wife had nothing to do. Love, husband and wife quarrel constantly.
The omniscient film director even told the audience that Billy had committed adultery with Lisa, a married woman, and that Nicole had an incestuous relationship with his father. This capitalist town full of hotel owners, hippies, and rock music actually hides hidden secrets.
There are two highlights in the movie. One is Mitchell telling that when Zoe was 3 years old, he was bitten by a poisonous insect in a villa far from the hospital. The doctor asked him to prepare a knife on the phone, ready to cut her daughter when she was paralyzed. Trachea. This is a thrilling detail. Think about it, a father who is willing to stick a knife to his daughter's throat in order to save his daughter's life, but now he abandons him because his daughter has become an addict.
Another highlight is the director's magical pen-Ni can read Browning's poem "Harmelin's Piper in Flower". This children's book originally told an honest story: Hamelin suffered a rodent attack. The piper used the flute to lure the rodent into the river to drown, but he did not get the reward he deserved. So he used the flute to lure the children out of the village and kept them in the cave forever. The survivor had only one child with a crippled leg and mobility impairment.
Nicole's reading of this poem to Billy's twins the night before the accident became a metaphor. This arrangement, which is said to be absent from the original novel, adds a mysterious and intriguing color to the film. The use of this poem dilutes the original strong social problem smell of the film's subject matter, and it has no moral enlightenment in Browning's original poem. At the end of the story, survivor Nicole sits in a wheelchair, corresponding to the lame child in Browning's poem. The film asks everyone in the town, and attorney Mitchell: Is the pain today because of other reasons or because of yourself?
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