Written by Yang Shiyang) Compared with director Meng Ji’s famous predecessors "April Three Weeks and Two Days" or "Beyond the Mountain", this "Graduation Exam", which won the best director in Cannes, is much gentler, especially It was the end, there was no tragic death, everything ended faintly in the ambiguous chat. Compared with the direct and visible cruelty, this may be a deeper helplessness.
This story and the complex emotions emanating from many of its lines will be very subtle to Chinese audiences. Compared with Mengji's previous masterpieces, the story of "Graduation Exam" is familiar and lacks drama. Romeo is a doctor in a small city, and his wish is to let his daughter Eliza go abroad to study after the age of 18. All as long as the grades of her daughter's graduation examination are needed, she can get a scholarship from a top foreign university. But the day before the exam, her daughter was accidentally attacked by a gangster on the street. The restlessness made it difficult for her to face the exam with a normal mentality. Faced with such a sudden change, my father began to want to use some gray methods that he originally hated to solve the problem.
"Graduation Exam" is full of anxious conversations and father's restless behavior, turning around in the most common scenes, the bedrooms and kitchens of the middle class in the small Romanian towns, the deserted roads and factories outside, this is Romeo's growth. And the place of struggle, but now, he is determined to let his daughter leave here. His "expulsion" of his daughter was out of the strongest love. He said to his daughter, "After the revolution, your mother and I decided to return to our country to live. Now we have paid the price. Change this country and we stay here. That's enough, you still have to leave." What kind of society and environment made the father so decisively want to push the only child into the distance? Those calm scenes are telling people that there are no wars and conflicts, no resources are exhausted, people study, go to work, and feel calm, but there is always something inexplicable hanging over their heads, such as mental decline, faint despair, inexplicable. A sense of deprivation and unfairness, in other words, lack of dignity in a seemingly normal and peaceful life.
As a doctor with Western life experience and a well-educated, no one can experience this unspeakable pain more than Romeo. He understands that his daughter Eliza can only exhaust himself by staying here, not Change the surroundings. He himself is an example. Back then, he returned to China because of a certain enthusiasm to promote change, but now he is frozen in despair. This despair is beyond words. He has a large home, a private car, and a decent career, but there is something lingering there.
The most wonderful thing about this movie is that Mengji used the dialogue between the father and the daughter and the secret psychological contest to express a torture-in a place full of hypocrisy, can he live honestly? The character of his father is complicated and ambiguous. He is an honest man, disdainful of dealing with the powerful and never gains improper gains, but he has a secret lover. What's more meaningful is that he has been emphasizing that he has never deceived his lover. He has informed the other party of his wife and daughter and situation, which he thinks is also a kind of honesty and magnanimity. The image of the father and the society he lives in are mirror images of each other and isomorphic with each other. He feels that he is not in the same fashion, but in fact no one can be spared. The hypocrisy is wrapped around everyone like a fog, and we will always invent it subconsciously. A set of interpretation system to argue for his hypocrisy. Everyone is a perpetrator, and everyone is a victim. If things go on like this, we will have no idea who created this misty hypocrisy. Who is responsible, who can only bear it, and who can solve it? When this becomes an unsolvable proposition, all people can do is to abandon themselves or escape from here.
And then another layer of torture came. On our way to a clean and dignified life, if we need to pave the way with lies, how should we choose? Romeo must build a relationship with the rich and powerful, and must involve himself in one after another, one after another. This is something he has always avoided and disdain, but this is the only way to get his daughter out of here. What's more cruel is that he not only sacrifices himself, but also sacrifices his daughter, and requires her daughter to match the test papers with false results in order to achieve the goal, which is contrary to the values he has always taught his daughter. He sent his daughter abroad because he wanted the child to avoid all this, but now he must be contaminated with all of this before he can escape from it. Is there anything more absurd and cruel than this?
Romeo’s glass was broken time and time again, a mystery. Until one day, his lover's child habitually threw a stone at the little friend. This formed a kind of hint, maybe he did it, maybe it wasn’t, it’s more like a metaphor, some people become the target of the public, some people ambush in secret, you don’t know where the cold arrow came from, and you don’t know who it will be. hurt.
The characters in this story are sympathetic. Romeo’s wife, who once also had a dream in her heart, is now reduced to a boring job in the library, and she almost stays at home when she is sick all day long; his mother stays in old memories; his daughter. Romance, optimistic and simple; Romeo is lonely and helpless, stirring soberness and stubbornness in his heart, but has been assimilated by hypocrisy, and he thinks he is still persisting and rebelling.
At the graduation ceremony, Romeo took commemorative photos of his daughter and classmates. Will the young smiling faces blocked in the photos become indifferent faces after many years? I no longer believe that any changes can be made, I just want to escape as soon as possible.
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