"Times That Can't Go Back" Phoenix (2014)

In fact, thinking about the plot, I don’t understand it very well. The script did not spend much time explaining the ins and outs to the audience. To say that it sounds nice is to trust the audience and create an ambiguous space, but it may be confusing if you are not careful. Of course, there is a story like this: After the Second World War, the disfigured female singer returned to Germany with a different face and met a husband who no longer knew her, but he asked her to pretend to be his wife who he thought was dead to swindle property. In addition to paying tribute to the Ecstasy, the film can also obviously have political associations.

One suspense of the plot is whether the husband betrayed his wife. Was the wife sent to the concentration camp because of her husband’s leak? The heroine does not believe that her husband who loves her deeply will do such a thing, but the female friend who took care of her after the war resolutely distrusts this husband. This is almost a triangle relationship implied by lesbians.

I thought it would be some kind of big-time movie, but the plot is almost always a confrontation between two characters in several different secret rooms. The main focus is on how the heroine can retrieve her own identity and self-confidence after trauma ( The so-called phoenix metaphor), and to find the truth between her and her husband, a lot of details are placed on the confrontation between the male and female protagonists. How can she pretend to be herself in front of her husband? There is a lot of tension in this, but it also makes the story bigger than expected.

The most puzzling thing is that if her husband can't recognize her after changing her face, how can the heroine fake her identity to deceive her relatives and friends who survived the war? The actor insisted on recreating his past wife in the symbols of hairstyle and clothing, but did not explain how other unsuspecting people would recognize a new face? Because the whole thing about integers is a secret. I have been unable to figure out the logic during this period, which makes the plot very weird.

The final conclusion is of course the highlight. Regarding the revelation of identity, although there have been too many clues to recognize identity in common sense, the drama and aesthetics of this period are handled very well. It strongly makes people feel that the director is for this scene. Only then came up with the entire script, and in the end did not explain the clear opening ending (what happened after the two?), I wonder if it will make the audience confused? In fact, the Chinese title has done everything.

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