The last show of the 2021 Shanghai International Film Festival, repainting "Mint". Only found out that the film was released on New Year's Day in 2000. Everyone is eagerly looking forward to the millennium that the whole world celebrates, but Jin Yonghao in Li Cangdong's camera wants to go back to the past.
The film recounts two decades of trauma in flashbacks as he opens his arms to face the passing train. He has been in the army, the police, and the economic crisis. Where is the good life? How many years ago (94)? More than ten years ago (87, 84)? Twenty years ago (80 years)?
At the end, back to the original picnic, everyone sat around and sang. Kim Yong-ho left the crowd alone, facing the quiet railroad tracks, when there was no train whizzing past. He looked at the wild flowers trembling slightly in front of him, then looked at the empty railroad tracks, and wept silently. Maybe at this moment, everything has already started to fall apart. That was 1979.
Twenty years later, everyone has long since cut off contact, looking for someone to use the radio, and not many people have reunited. In the past, everyone sat together and sang quietly. Now it's karaoke, and the crowd dances wildly. They don't want to hear Jin Yonghao's heartbreaking songs from the past, and they want to change to a lively modern dance song.
Can't help but wonder, where have they been in these 20 years? Isn't it also alive? Why is only Kim Yong Ho so depraved and miserable? Only he carried such a large set of keys with him. If he remembers the past so clearly? How could they forget so easily?
A few years ago, Jin Yonghao saw the young student who was brutally treated by him when he was a policeman again. Jin Yonghao asked him: Is your life good? These words came from the diary of the other party who was used as evidence in the past, and now he has not answered. It looked beautiful and peaceful, without the slightest trace of past conflict. But Jin Yonghao looked at his silent son, his expression was as hideous as his own, like a restless little beast. Could the violence be lurking somewhere?
The trains roared and hissed in the memory fragments, the trains that connected the fragments back to the past were quiet and soothing, the petals outside the window returned to the trees, and people walked slowly backwards, from the city to the countryside, from cars to bicycles, from cars to bicycles. The whistling train to the empty tracks...
Just like a mint candy being trampled to pieces, over the past 20 years, Jin Yonghao's innocent and kind self has been trampled to smithereens, getting more and more broken, and gradually disappearing into the wind... If it weren't for flashbacks, maybe there would not be such a powerful force, and life was originally Isn't it just an afterthought that can only be retroactive?
Staring at the poster of this film again, returning to the beginning is also the end of his life. When Jin Yonghao shouted that I want to go back, can his body stop the rolling train? Eventually the train was going to go forward, into the dark tunnel, and at the same time smash him to pieces.
Li Cangdong's poetry has a real cruelty, he probably likes green very much. In "Mints", you can also see the plastic greenhouse in "Burning", and the powerless prayer in "Miryang". Because of the re-screening of "Mint" at the Shanghai Film Festival this year, Li Cangdong also recorded a video to greet Chinese audiences. He said that he was curious about how young friends see this film about time, and wanted to invite fans to experience the meaning of time together.
Now think about it, a generation can only understand a generation, what is the reason behind it? Perhaps it is not the incompetence of later people's understanding, but the fact that people are too good at forgetting.
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