On the rainy night of arresting the prisoner, Kim Yong-ho came to Gunsan, a remote town.
He joked with police colleagues in the car, "Here is my first love".
Colleagues laughed at him, "You talk to every woman about your first love."
Jin Yonghao smiled and did not answer. That night, when he was passing by an unfamiliar path, he saw a girl listening to the rain sitting lonely at the door. He approached and approached, two lonely hearts quietly approached, and love took root in the moment of the rainy night, but it is a pity that the seeds The kernel always carries the loneliness of the past.
That night, the woman asked Kim Yong-ho to treat her as her first love and call her by her lover's name.
They lay naked together, looking at each other's soul through their flesh.
With his back to the woman, Kim Yong-ho suddenly burst into tears. The memory was packed with time, and he couldn't move. He could only keep calling his beloved's name: Yoon Soon-in! Yoon Soon In! Yoon Soon In!
The woman was moved by his affection, and she began to play this temporary role seriously: "It's okay, I just want you to live well, and I'll be satisfied."
Yin Shunren, the name of Jin Yonghao's first love, 20 Over the years, this name is no longer a simple name reference, but a representation of his innocent past.
This name has witnessed his changes in the past 20 years, from a kind person to a violent executioner, from a simple guy to a very secular villain in Fucheng, from awe of love to wanton promiscuity.
That rainy night in 1987 was the last time he opened his heart, revealing the softest part of his heart. The old wound began to ache, but he missed the opportunity to heal again. Someone tore the scabbed scar for him, and he still had no choice but to let it go. Bleeding ceaselessly.
This is the middle segment of South Korean director Lee Chang-dong's second feature film "Mints," and it is the last chance for the hero Kim Yong-ho in its story to get redemption.
After the night, he roared the last words in the face of the speeding train, the dream of "I want to go back" declared a complete failure, and the tragic future became a foregone conclusion.
Lee Changdong, the most poetic Korean director, his works are not many, but they are all classics.
In 2007, he used "Miryang" to send the heroine Jeon Do-yeon to the throne of Cannes actress.
In 2002, his most prestigious film "Oasis" gained a high reputation in Cannes, establishing the status of Moon Suli and Xue Gengqiu as the best actress in South Korea.
However, Fat Brother's favorite work is the "Mint Candy" he sent in 1999.
Dong Yue, the director of the recently released and highly rated domestic film "Blizzard is Coming", said that "Mint" has inspired him a lot. It can be seen that Dong Yue has a full understanding of "Mint" when constructing the story. Learn from.
The main theme of "Mints" is the powerless resistance of ordinary people under the giant wheel of the times, and the ups and downs of small people who have been crushed mentally and physically.
How a kind person becomes disgusting, why his originally innocent heart gradually weathered into a tarnished diamond, and how the symbolic mints changed from love to disgust, and even fear.
The film uses flashbacks, from 1999 to 1979, and echoes the ending of the film with two class reunions, showing us the 20-year life of the hero Kim Yong-ho.
Time is definitely the most important narrative line in "Mints".
Regarding "Mints", Li Changdong said that he wanted to remind young people to think about "what time means". He thinks audiences who are particularly obsessed with "Mints" must be good people, maybe they want to keep some fragile dream alive, not crush it.
But for Li Cangdong himself, those things have long since been shattered.
"Probably because they are in their 20s and they are much older than them."
In the film, from the very beginning of the story, the male protagonist, Kim Yong-ho, appears in a crazy, violent, and capricious manner. He slapped the party between his classmates, and at the height of his emotions, he roared wildly in the face of the oncoming train: "I want to go back to the past"!
Immediately, the film cuts back to a few months ago. It turned out that Jin Yonghao went bankrupt, divorced, bought a pistol with his last savings, and was ready to commit suicide.
Just when he gave up all hope of life, a strange man found him and told him that someone wanted to see him for the last time, and this person was his first love - Yin Shunren.
Jin Yonghao came to the hospital bed tremblingly. Yin Shunren had a trachea inserted in her mouth to maintain her life. The doctor told her that she had fallen into a coma.
Kim Yong-ho took a bottle of mints and cried, hoping to get Yoon Soon-in's forgiveness. After speaking, he immediately pulled away and ran away.
Yin Shunren on the hospital bed had tears running from the corners of his eyes.
Undoubtedly, when the story progresses to this moment, the audience has been shrouded in a huge mystery. It is like a hook to hang the audience's curiosity -
what kind of past experience did Kim Yong Ho and Yoon Soon In have? What exactly made Kim Young-ho think of suicide? Why did Kim Yong Ho bring mints to see this first love?
"Mints" showed us the evil Kim Yong-ho at the very beginning, and through intentional flashback arrangements, it gave us a step-by-step, layer-by-step explanation of the reason why he became evil. At the end of the story, we saw the kindest The comparison of Jin Yonghao, before and after, is immediately filled with emotion.
In 1994, Jin Yonghao was in the early stage of his business. He was secular and indifferent, and he treated his wife and children violently. His wife cheated on his subordinates, and he possessed the young secretary.
Careers and families are crumbling.
In 1987, the final turning point of his life, he was a feared and violent police detective in the police station, using torture and fists to defeat the so-called "prisoners" one by one.
He turned a blind eye to his pregnant wife, and gradually fell in love with a strange woman in the town, because there was a shadow of his first love.
In 1984, when he had just joined the police station, he was ignorant and introverted. His future wife was eagerly pursuing him and loved him enough to be willing to give everything. And first love Yoon Soon-in came to him and said he had rough but kind hands.
Jin Yonghao unexpectedly rejected Yin Shunren's confession. For the first time, he put on his face and touched another woman's thigh and buttocks with his kind hand in front of Yin Shunren's face. .
That night, he got drunk and started to go mad. He went to bed with the woman who loved him, but he didn't. He folded his hands in bed and learned to pray for the first time.
In 1980, when he was young in the army, he was sent to carry out a repression mission. He accidentally shot and killed a female student who was returning home.
It turned out that the tragedy of his life, the fateful ending, left its mark at this moment.
In 1979, he looked at flowers carefree, had a picnic with his classmates, and sang aloud. Yin Shunren gave him his first mint, which he held in his mouth with a smile, hoping it would never melt.
This moment was short, but it was the most sunny and happy moment in his life. At that time, he was full of hope for the future.
After watching Mints, I discovered for the first time that flashbacks are such a sad structure.
When we saw the most tragic seed of fate in Jin Yonghao's life like a cocoon, the audience's heart lost the beat just like him. After that shot, we felt the faint pain when the heartbeat missed the beat together with the lost Jin Yonghao.
"Mints" almost takes the film's narrative to the extreme, and at the same time it closes the theme through ubiquitous metaphorical symbols, suggesting the connection between history and the fate of the characters.
Although it is divided into multiple chapters, under the superb artistic treatment of Li Cangdong, the characters and the story logic are connected in a number of details in a way that the form and spirit are not scattered.
You can find clues about the present from every past, and make the present a doomed tragedy.
Peppermint achieves this connection and metaphor through the symbolism of three aspects.
the integrity of the space.
This element is presented in the film in the way of division of the narrative structure in the middle. Characters are always in
different places but experience the same or are brought into an interconnected relationship.
The backward train, the train track, is a recurring symbol in the film.
Li Cangdong said without hesitation that his movie idol is Hou Hsiao-hsien, and in "In the Wind and Dust", the most eye-catching elements of the film are trains and rails. In "Blizzard", trains and rails have also become important symbols. symbol.
The forked rails symbolize that different choices will lead to completely different lives.
At the same time, the rails make people generate a one-dimensional, unreturnable fateful trend.
No matter where the train takes Kim Yong-ho, he repeats himself into the trap of history every time. Because everything was already in 1980, when he fired a shot on the rails, it was decided that he could not turn around and could only go to the end of the tragedy.
While constructing the integrity of space, the story also maintains a high degree of integrity in time.
This element is reflected in the film with obvious time node prompts and flashback narrative techniques.
Time in the film appears in different forms, fickle and fleeting, depicting the desire to remember and reminisce through the wonderful resonance between simultaneous events.
Kim Yong-ho is always looking at his watch and clock, working hard before the final selected deadline, or missing the opportunity or making the wrong choice.
Jin Yonghao can't bear the unbearable lightness of the moment, and master the uncontrollable, but he still wants to retain the beauty and kindness of the past, and express the love language in his heart to his first love.
This flashback narrative method establishes a proposition through time:
between the present and the past, between yesterday, today and tomorrow, there is an insurmountable abyss.
The time that keeps going backwards has made the past that happened in Gwangju in 1980 a timeless existence.
Therefore, time loses its meaning.
At the end of the film, although the time is different, the party that is taking place in the same place makes Jin Yonghao feel like "yesterday reappears".
In this way, even if you go back to the past, it seems that you can't change the future.
Time and space fail at the same time at this moment, and the film endows the characters with a kind of "resistance majeure" like fate, and it seems that no one can escape its call.
Finally, the film also uses mints as the primary theme element, maintaining the symbolism of things in the unity of opposites.
The mint appears many times in the film, and
Kim Yong-ho takes it to meet his dying first love, Yoon Soon-in.
When he cheated on the female secretary, the other party fed him mints, but he was reluctant.
Moving forward, we found the reason. When we were in the army, when the officer's boots smashed the mint candy that Jin Yonghao smashed to the ground, we understood the meaning of the mint candy.
At the end of the film, at the happiest and purest moment of Kim Yong-ho, when Yoon Soon-in took out the mint, this meaning was finally revealed in full.
A symbol of purity and beauty, mint has a cleansing effect, but it will eventually melt and dissipate, and the fresh feeling it leaves will disappear without a trace.
Mints are Kim Yong-ho's last spiritual sustenance, the last position of goodwill, the brutal training of the troops, the accidental misfire of the repression incident, the violence of the police career, the breakdown of family love, and the sudden collapse of his career like a domino effect. beat down.
First mentally, and finally completed the physical destruction with Kim Yong-ho's railroad suicide.
He couldn't stop the oncoming train, and the history of moving forward was like the mint candies that were smashed by military boots.
Those mints are the love that Yoon Soon-in sends him by the way.
Those mints are also something Yin Shunren doesn't like the most, because in the factory, she has to pack more than 1,000 of them every day.
Watching beauty being torn apart, witnessing the degeneration of goodwill, watching good people turn evil, is the most cruel experience in life.
At the end of the film, Jin Yonghao was lying on the grass beside the stream at the moment of happiness. He faced the sun and couldn't open his eyes. He cried and shed tears.
Because this moment is too short, too happy.
He shed tears for "life is beautiful".
The classmates on the side sang happily, the lyrics wrote:
What should I do, you
can't leave me, really can't, please don't leave me, is there anything you can't tell me about your troubles
? , How can you be so ruthless
and unbelievable, you will leave
me, I don't believe it, you say goodbye to me...
In fact, no one will abandon anyone, no one will abandon anyone,
It's time that finally abandoned them all!
Looking at Jin Yonghao who was crying and listening to the lyrics, he always remembered the picture of him snuggling up naked with the woman he met in the small hotel on that rainy night.
He said: "The rain she's drenching, I'm drenching, and the rain I'm watching, she's watching too."
She said, "Tonight, treat me as your Yin Shunren."
He responded with mixed tears: "Yin Shunren, Yin Shunren, Yin Shunren..."
Before he died, he couldn't forget that first bite. The taste of mint.
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