There are two clues in this movie, they are intertwined, procrastinating and biting each other. One clue is about the existence of God or the meaning of existence, and the other clue is about love. Let's call the first clue as topic A for the time being, and the second clue as topic B.
Theme A first appeared when a man suffering from depression and his wife came to seek help from the pastor. When faced with a believer in a crisis of faith, the pastor set the interview time after half an hour and was anxious about whether he Can only say some empty and meaningless words. This anxiety reveals that the pastor himself, like the help-seeker, has no real faith in God. According to his own words, what bothers him is "God's silence", which is the separation between God and human affairs.
However, the development of Theme A was interrupted. While waiting for the meeting with the man for help, the pastor’s lover Marta came to the pastor. Although the pastor rejected Marta in a blunt manner, the long letter left by Marta asked the pastor to Deeply shaken. This letter preliminarily presents the theme of B. Marta always loves the pastor and regards the love of the pastor as the sole purpose of her life. We all know the Christian concept of "God is love", but theme B is separated from theme A here. In other words, if love is the confirmation of the existence of God, then the pastor who seeks to confirm God has very stubbornly rejected the love from Marta. At the same time, Marta, who shows this kind of love, is a kind of love to God. Skeptical non-believers.
When the pastor had just finished reading the long letter and was shocked (and resisted) by Subject B, he was immediately interrupted by Subject A. A man desperate for the meaning of life came to visit, but facing this helper, the pastor pours out his own doubts about faith. Here, it is initially shown that the influence of theme B on theme A is actually the power of love displayed by Marta, which makes the pastor feel the fragility of his belief in God. The position of the helper and the rescuer was instantly reversed. The visiting anxious man was overwhelmed and walked out.
Immediately afterwards, Subject B reappeared, and Marta, who never gave up, wanted to follow the priest to another preaching place, but the priest still tried to refuse. At this moment of stalemate, Subject A suddenly returned in a powerful and extreme form, and someone came to announce the death of the man who asked for help. It can be said that the man seeking help committed suicide in a hopeless state of seeking help from the pastor. His death means the collapse of Subject A and the complete failure of the pastor's career.
What’s interesting is that while the priest rushed to the scene of the incident and helped guard the body, the film deliberately made the exaggerated sound of the stream drown out most of the dialogue between the characters, and the image of the priest was only treated from a perspective perspective. A blunt silhouette. Here, the synchronization between the image and the speech is cut off, and the previously extremely tense and urgent gaze is erased and delayed. However, this episode is the secret climax of the whole film. When guarding the corpse, the priest's inner world has undoubtedly undergone great changes.
This change then manifested itself through the pastor's explosion. The priest had always been reluctant to follow Marta, but at this moment it suddenly broke out and hurt Marta's sincerity with extremely direct language. Here we realize that in the climax of the image delay, what actually happened was the intrusion of theme A into theme B. To be precise, the pastor has always stiffly maintained a hollow belief in God on the one hand, and on the other hand bluntly rejected Marta’s love. The two coexisted in symbiosis, so when the fortress of God collapsed suddenly, then the priest He had to face the latter and took a crude form awkwardly.
However, although it is rude, it is facing after all. So when everything seemed to be over, the pastor miraculously, but seemed to turn around very naturally, and proactively sent out an invitation to go with Marta.
In the final scene of the movie, the priest and Marta are each under tremendous pressure. They all encountered sceptics mocking the meaning of religion. What the pastor heard was the loneliness of Jesus being abandoned by the crowd before his death, and what Marta heard was a mockery of the commandment that God is love. In other words, subject A is stripped of the pastor as a desperate nihility, and the possibility of a connection between subject B and subject A is discarded in front of Marta.
In the end, the sermon ritual with reconciliation should not be simply interpreted as a fusion of theme A and theme B, that is, the proof of the proposition that God is love. The pastor’s search for the existence of God and the meaning of life and Marta’s love for the pastor are one-way and hopeless. We should not think that we have solved the problem by directly assimilating the two. The pastor still presided over the sermon even after losing faith in God, while Marta became the only listener under the mocking of the religious meaning of the musicians. Here, the preaching ceremony is no longer used as a confirmation of the existence of God, but as a pure place.
A and B should really meet in the place of this ritual, although the result is full of unknowns.
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