Please forget my fate.
——Henry Purcell
1. Yasujiro Ozu
To the core of "the elegance of the hedgehog", there is a long road, which is "Ozu". In this film, "Ozu" is not only the protagonist of the movie Ozu Gelang, but also the famous Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu.
Watching Yasujiro Ozu's film "Sisters of Zongfang" with Gerang was the warmest and sweetest episode in Honey's life. In Honey's words in the novel, "this is beyond time in the long river of time". The appearance of Ozu's films is not accidental: nothing shows the "ordinary beauty" of life more than Ozu's films.
Ozu's films are always concerned with the "eternal" trivial matters of daily life such as weddings, funerals, birth, old age, sickness and death, and the characters always have a serene dignity in their behavior, even appearing restrained; in terms of form, the low-angle shots are always quiet and restrained, and the composition Always balanced and rigorous.
That is to say, the orderly order of ordinary (everyday) life itself has always occupied a prominent place in Ozu's films - and it is everyone's profound experience of this order that keeps Ozu's old-fashioned style from becoming boring and contrived. .
Yet again this order seems to "exist to be broken" (Donald Ritchie, Ozu). For example, in "Sisters of Zongfang", the father and Setsuko are chatting on the tatami, and the sitting figures, the outline of the Japanese sliding door and the floor form a rigorous composition; they calmly talk about the sunshine and moss they see while visiting the temple , a beautiful view of camellias.
However, what collided with all this serenity was that Setsuko already knew that his father's time was short and that death was consuming the beauty in front of him. During the discussion, she suddenly lowered her head and wanted to cry. Her emotions and movements impact the order on the surface, and they appear more real and moving because of the order.
If the "ordinary beauty" of Ozu's films is that it always touches the real dynamism of life under the strict (ordinary) surface order of life and expresses it implicitly and restrainedly, then "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" is also the same Tells a story about the order of everyday life and the subversive power within it.
2.
How do you understand this order of daily life, Honey?
In "The Elegance of the Hedgehog", there is such a scene: the newly dressed Honey and Grand go out to dinner together, and meet the wife in the building at the door of the apartment, she does not recognize Honey at all. "Because they've never seen you," says Grande.
The character of this order is that it determines what we "see" in our daily lives. There is no mere look, and in each look, our identities, interests, classes, and even our entire past and culture are "always already" at work. "Prejudice" is part of life and one of the signs of this order.
It is almost natural that the wife of the upper class of Paris greets the downstairs porter (the abstract, functional side) every day, but does not see the nature of "this" under the identity of the porter. This order exists even in seemingly close family relationships: the parents don't know Paloma, they see only a familiar but eccentric, withdrawn child who, like most families, arranges her against her nature. life.
Because of this order, Honey is contradictory and divisive: she uses it to both disguise and cover herself up—to fit herself into the typical image of an old, ugly, grumpy concierge (to cater to someone else's "prejudice" ), yet disgusted with this order and mired in loneliness.
So, we saw that the TV in the living room was on, but Honey was in the spiritual secret room constructed by books. If the spiritual needs of a low-level character cannot be met in daily life (social interaction games under normal order), then she can only seek relief in books and art, and be alone and elegant in a no-man's land. Yasujiro Ozu was one of her consolations: "a genius who freed me from the shackles of my biological destiny".
Honey only longed for one thing: to hope that others would let her live her life peacefully. When the film portrays Honey, it is a pity that it does not touch upon the traumatic core of the novel—the unexpected death of her wise and beautiful sister, which made her decide not to let her intelligence and grace join the normal social game. .
3.
What does the mundane daily life order of Paloma mean to the 11-year-old Paloma? is death.
Baroma, who steals one or two antidepressants a week from her mother's pillbox, is determined to take her own life on her 12th birthday. The desperation of this child born in the upper class of Paris stems from the fact that she knew very early that the end of her life was a goldfish bowl. "People believe that chasing after the stars will pay off, but in the end, like a goldfish in a fishbowl, it's like a goldfish in a fishbowl."
Baroma felt unable to rebel against the order of life that determined her destiny. Before committing suicide, she was able to do one meaningful thing, just make a movie that revealed how absurd life is. Included in her astutely captured "movie" are details of life: Mom refuses the concierge to enter her house - as if there really is a line between her and the concierge, etc.
The so-called absurd, basically, is that we impose order on the "naive" life, but in the end we regard this order as the only real thing. “In fact, if life is absurd, then great success, no matter how great the value, is no better than failure.” Baroma realized that the ready-made order for measuring value is fundamentally absurd.
The fact that a naturally intelligent 11-year-old girl is so sensitive to the absurdity of life and undertakes Camus-style suicidal thinking is to a certain extent the result of the idealized innocence of the story's original author, French philosophy professor Miuriel Barbery.
Paloma decides to die (suicide) to avoid becoming a prisoner of the existing order of life. The ultimate concern of this story, however, is whether it is really impossible to become what you are not "destined", or rather, beyond order?
4.
The appearance of Ozugarang Ozugarang changed the "destiny" of Honey and Baroma: one was prepared to endure the suffering of schizophrenia and live peacefully in the existing order of life; the other was prepared to reject this order with death.
Gran is an outsider, from another cultural realm. Whether or not out of Miurie Barbery's preference and misreading of Orient-Japanese culture, Grande easily transcended (overcame) the everyday in the high-end apartment (a microscopic Western cultural space) he moved to. order of life.
This elegant, easy-going outsider easily discerns the "hedgehog grace" of a porter. In a sense, Ozu Gerang and Ozu Yasujiro are not only close in name, but Gerang's eyes on the people around him are almost the incarnation of Ozu Yasujiro's classic fixed low-angle lens. What they have in common is: the same A kind of restraint, peace and transparency.
Ozugarang makes Honey finally become another person in "real" life, a person who matches her inner and outer spiritual world. However, this "miracle" is very short-lived, just like the accidental death of Mimura in "Sisters of Zongfang" between Setsuko and Tashiro, and the accidental death between Hani and Gelang.
When Honey died at the scene of a car accident, the director gave a subjective shot of Honey as if she was alive. Among them, the meaning of "sheng" not only means that Honey has finally completed the "resurrection" of her other self in the existing order of life, but also implies that the miracle of life will continue, to continue in Baroma.
This subtle life-and-death transition (the death of those who want to live and the life of those who want to die) has been rehearsed in the detail of the goldfish. Paloma flushed her goldfish down the toilet before committing suicide, but the goldfish miraculously "resurrected" in Honey's toilet.
After Honey died, Baroma, who got the goldfish back, decided to live because she saw through Honey and Ozu: it is possible to change the order (miracle), and love is possible. In other words, love itself is a force that changes order.
Love is an encounter-event that always transcends the established order and the self defined by that order. French philosopher Alain Badiou once proposed an "ethics of truth". Regarding love, he said: every encounter of love opens up the possibility of the impossible, and this possibility is the core principle of the ethics of truth - fighting against the truth is nothing but confirmation of death the ethics of survival.
For Honey, Ozu-Geul is a complete exception, and an unexpected encounter with him opens up possibilities beyond the logic and order that govern a given situation, breaking the routines and hallucinations of her daily life based on this order, making What is repressed is expressed and liberated.
For Baroma, living means that "miracles" are worth looking forward to, and that he can become a "miracle" for others, such as freeing his family from the vulgar life order of the upper class, and letting love be the transcendental order. The truth - events happen.
2010. 6. 13.
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