Of all the Korean movies I've seen, the one that I've never forgotten the most and always has emotions echoing in my heart is "Mints" directed by Lee Chang-dong. A backwards train took me back to the life of a man who was finally desperate. He opened his hands and cried in the wind desperately before he died: "I want to go back to the past."
I want to start with the movie itself and talk about why I like it.
· Film structure
The film adopts a unit-style flashback structure, from the outing of the male protagonist Jin Yonghao's suicide in 1999 to the 1979 when Jin Yonghao met Yin Shunren during the outing. There are six small units, telling different stories experienced by the same person in six time periods. Each segmented space-time unit is connected by a train running backwards along the railroad tracks. From the known despairing ending, the ordinary and insignificant life of Kim Yong-ho is laid out in an orderly manner. The literary meaning is strong and full of literary and artistic poetry. The story starts from the outing to the end of the outing, and the closed-loop story structure sets a confused, helpless and sad tone for the whole film from the very beginning. What kind of person is he? Why did he kill himself? What has he been through? With such doubts, the audience followed the film and pushed back step by step from the end of the story, revealing the male protagonist's once innocent but fleeting beautiful past. When our eyes returned to Lv Yingying's outing again, and when we saw the desperate man holding the camera and ignorantly taking the mint from the girl's hand like a first love, what filled our hearts would not be the emotion and yearning for a beautiful youth, but It's the pain and the urge to cry without tears coming from the bottom of my heart. From the perspective of the overall situation, the film's memory perspective is more like a reflection on history. It closely combines the fate of small individuals in the torrent of historical scars and contemporary torrents, taking us back to 20 years of social changes in South Korea, showing a bloody path of social change that destroys the individual.
film image
The item mint appears several times in the film. It was cold, fresh and tingling. When Jin Yonghao first met Yin Shunren, he took the mints from the girl’s hand; the box of mints from the girl who had been carefully collected was knocked over and trampled under the feet of every soldier when Jin Yonghao was serving; Throw him a mint; Jin Yonghao went to see Yin Shunren, who was about to pass away, and returned the box of mints to her. These mints went from being a symbol of ignorance and beauty at first to being trampled on, covered with a layer of guilt, and back to the yearning for purity and beauty that was suppressed by Jin Yonghao in the bottom of my heart, but at this time, things were already different. The bifurcated railroad tracks can no longer be gathered, and everything that has passed can no longer be made up. The emptiness and guilt in the male protagonist's heart can only be fermented with time, and the original taste has changed step by step like mints.
personal feelings
From elementary school to university, from ignorant, impulsive and fantasizing at that time to being at a loss at this time, I have also seen many things that are right and wrong and cannot be saved. A person who has a completely different life trajectory than before. Watching this movie broke my heart. The first thing I did after reading it was to open my diary, to review how I got here, and to reflect on why I am so confused right now. I used to be a dreamer, full of enthusiasm, showing off my skills on campus and bragging to others. But there are too many force majeures in life, family reasons, social reasons, or impulsive impulses at a decisive moment. The once fiery dream has now become something unspeakable to me. I avoided it, felt that I was not worthy of it, and paralyzed myself by doing things that I didn’t like at all, as if I could erase my former heartbeat and yearning. But is it really so? Is there really nothing more I can do to change my train track? Everyone has things they can't decide, just like Kim Yong-ho in the movie can't change that he accidentally shot an innocent girl, but are my messy things really that hard to avoid and accept? This film made me reflect on a lot of things. While being empathized by the faint sense of helplessness and despair created by the director, I couldn’t help but want to do something to change myself and let me climb out of the quagmire of reality. come out. Even a little struggle? Is it that hard to live peacefully with your past self? I don't want my life to lead to a heart-breaking tragic end like Kim Yong-ho, I also want to go back to the past and find my original self.
Furthermore, this film also made me begin to carefully judge the people around me. We can criticize a person at this time and hate his current behavior, but we can't make judgments about his past. What exactly changed him? I think that's what we need to think deeply about.
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