Let’s talk about something related and unwilling to do. A few days later, after five years, I left my hometown and returned to university after my summer vacation. After I came back, I kept eating and drinking, full of chores, and completely forgot that my mother had told me to hang up and report safety before getting in the car. Later, my mother called me and I was speechless, and it was not easy to apologize.
So, when I was watching this movie today, I had a strange feeling, and I couldn't just say it was resonance. At the beginning of the movie, when his father was young, he took a crowded train to visit his parents in his hometown. He had a copy of Gogol's "Coat" in his hand. The old man on the opposite side told him that he wanted to go out and have a look. If there is an error in the plot compared with me, then only the disaster afterwards, the old man must have died in the train, and the young father took every day after his survival as a gift, and then he went to the United States to give himself His son was named Gogol, and died suddenly of a myocardial infarction in a hospital in another town at the age of fifty. The day before, his son Gogol took his American girlfriend to meet his parents, and then went to the beach house to have fun, and forgot the safe phone call from his mother.
Regarding the label of "immigrant film", the film connotation is always too narrow, so that it makes people uninterested. In fact, for everyone who has left their hometown, and for everyone who is under the impact of Western culture and values, he is a true immigrant in his heart. Generations of people age quickly, and we embrace the new world silently, involuntarily. When we get rid of the word immigration and watch an ordinary family in this movie for 30 years, we can experience the subtle emotional details in a calm and indifferent way. I haven't watched the first two works of Mira Nair, but I can imagine that she will not carry such heavy and deep literary popularity in the brushstrokes of the movie like Li Ang. Although she wants to express the contradictions and conflicts in some special cultural atmospheres, this is not what she is good at. For example, in the middle of the movie, there is a scene where a son takes his American girlfriend to meet his parents. The mother is still very concerned about the lover's holding hands, but the scene has been taken away, and the plot quickly returns to the theme of father and son. It seems that this is just to match the background of the immigrant family. It doesn't matter whether it exists or not. What is important? It was the shoes that the father wore when the mother and father met for the first time. It was the safe phone number that the son had forgotten to call his mother. It was the graduation gift—the Indian version of "Jacket."
Mira Nair's screenwriting energy is mainly used on the two lines of family affection and love. Whether it is her intention or not, this may be the inevitable end of a female director's film language. As a result, all the highlights of this movie made me forget the shit of immigrants and concentrate on the warm and complicated emotions in the family. The lens is clean and tidy, the editing is orderly, and the soundtrack is ingenious, very natural. But unfortunately, if I were Mira Nair, I would not waste half of the film talking about voiceovers that she is not good at. When the film has such a warm rhythm and texture like a woman’s skin, you have no way and no need to talk about those. "cultural conflict".
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