One of my favorite movies in high school was Capote.
Philip Seymour Hoffman was an obscure second-rate actor who brought soul to this talented gay writer. Capote once said, "No one can play me," but he wouldn't be disappointed to see Hoffman.
To write "In Cold Blood," Capote spent years reaching out to Perry, a murderer who was as sensitive and vulnerable as he was. He could almost be said to have brutally deceived this young man who was sympathetic to him. After the interview, he stopped appealing for Perry and watched him go to the gallows. After the fame of "In Cold Blood", he also drank all day long and never wrote a book again.
"We were like brothers, except Perry left the back door and I walked through the front door."
For Capote, Perry was like a mirror. He didn't know if he was in love with Perry or if he was in love with himself. But Perry's death was like a verdict on his own destiny. If he hadn't been a writer, maybe he would have been a murderer.
I thought the life of a writer should be like this, with its ups and downs, its ups and downs; but Jane Campion apparently doesn't think so.
This autobiographical work tells the first half of the life of the famous New Zealand female writer Janet Frame. New Zealand in the last century was not like the "Middle-earth" in our minds today. It was always blue sky and white clouds, and the clear lake was like a mirror. It still bears the imprint of the colonial era, gloomy, oppressive, refined, forever shrouded in the fog of old London from across the Pacific.
And Janet did go through too much hardship. She watched her family die one after another, was misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, was coaxed into a mental hospital by a professor she admired, received eight years of treatment, and even nearly underwent a lobotomy.
This surgery, now infamous for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Shutter Island," was unimaginably popular in the 1940s. Many young children in Japan are sent by their parents for lobotomies simply because the parents think they are "bad". The sister of the famous US President John F. Kennedy also underwent this operation, and became a "wooden man" who would only be in a daze all day for the rest of her life. What is even more frightening is that before and after World War II, the US government collectively performed lobectomy on a group of veterans who suffered from post-war mental trauma. A considerable number of them suffer from serious sequelae that last a lifetime.
But that's why even Janet's mother agreed to perform this brutal operation on her daughter. She was left alone in the lunatic asylum, and it was her novel that saved her in the end. Janet was spared an award for her work days before the surgery. Sadly, and even more unfortunately, in the entire film, this seems to be the only time literature has a real "effect" on her. In addition, under the lens of Jane Campion, this girl looks too ordinary.
She used to have a big warm family with parents and three lively sisters, and her childhood was not without sunshine. But she always seemed so out of place among these young and beautiful girls. Because of her fluffy red hair, fat and clumsy. It's almost an innate inferiority complex and indecision.
She once had the opportunity to be a teacher, so that she would not worry about life, could easily find a man who would marry her, and would not be put in a lunatic asylum. But she couldn't say a word in front of the blackboard, and finally took off her beautiful little leather shoes and ran away from the podium.
She once had the opportunity to marry an honest but boring man. Although the other party is obviously not well educated, speaks vulgarly, and does not understand her creation at all, but at least he extended an olive branch to her. But she didn't stay in that small room in the suburbs of London.
She once had a delusional relationship in Spain with a mediocre, egotistical, bombastic but flirtatious American poet, even though she was in her late thirties. She was so happy that she didn't even want to write with a pen. If they do get married, maybe she will be willing to wash hands and make soup for each other and be an ordinary but happy housewife.
Love gave her unprecedented confidence. When she clumsily seduced her lover in the water like a mermaid, perhaps she didn't know she could be so beautiful, like the plump and white beauty in Titian's pen. But he eventually returned to the United States. She and Spain are just vacations.
Watching the film alone, I would hardly have realized that a girl as shy and awkward as Janet had such an impact on the history of New Zealand literature. Her low self-esteem, vulnerability, sensitivity, and introversion made me seem to see another myself through the movie screen. In the face of everyone being nervous and cramped, doing everything carefully, and having a rich heart but not having the courage to express, such clumsiness and embarrassment are the eternal problems faced by individuals when facing the world.
Naruse Mikio also once described an equally inferior and sensitive female writer in "The Wanderer". Gao Xiuzi, who played Lin Fumiko in the film, contributed a very amazing performance. Her shoulders are always hunched, the corners of her mouth are drooping, the nasolabial folds are deep, and her eyes are lazy and decadent like a grudge.
Lin Fumiko was born in poverty and has always lived on the line of food and clothing. For her, literature is also a godsend wealth. Besides, she, like the other heroines of Naruse, is a dodder that cannot leave a man. So she lingered around one man after another, and was forced to live alone because she was constantly betrayed. Every turning point in her life stemmed from the departure of the man around her. Unlike other Japanese women who are gentle and reserved, her eyes are always full of unwilling hostility.
In Naruse's patriarchal world, she's a downright underdog, but she's also someone chosen by talent. There was a fire burning in her heart, but that was all.
Luckily we have Jane Campion. Although she once said that "feminism is a heavy label," she is without a doubt a true female director. In her story, every choice faced by young writer Janet, career, love, safety, adventure, seems to be the same dilemma we face at the same moment. And she chooses to go against the tradition every time, like a combination of contradictions, sensitive and introverted, but never timid; not shy to resist the world and pursue freedom, but she is unable to express herself bravely, and can only keep fleeing.
Whether it is "Piano Lesson", "Bright Star" or this "Angel at the Table with Me", her heroine is always a woman who is self-enclosed. No matter what background they came from, what life they had, even if they were accompanied by a gentle lover like Keats, they were always alone.
It's just that of all these lonely girls, Janet is destined to be the loneliest, and perhaps the unluckiest. Because she is a real genius.
Talent is like an inalienable instinct. Even though she was born into an ordinary family, even though she had never been encouraged or guided by anyone, even if she had been locked up in an insane asylum for eight years, the instinct to create remained in her bones and blood.
But what had this talent ever brought her? If she hadn't been so sensitive, autistic, and obsessed with writing, maybe she could have been like the sisters, early with the boys in town, and then have children; of course, she wouldn't be mistaken for schizophrenia. . If she knew what a lonely life the gift of literature would bring her, would she still appreciate accepting this gift?
We will never know the answer. It seems that I don't know if the parallel world really exists, whether she who chooses to get married and have children and spend time in ordinary and trivial days will turn to be a free female writer. Because parallel worlds don't exist. It's like standing on opposite ends of the scale. Artists have to be selfish, they can only hear the voices clearly if they go deep enough into their own hearts. If you want to live in your own world, you will have no time to listen to another person's voice, and you will not be able to change yourself in order to accept others.
This is how things are fair in the world, and everyone has to make a choice. What they have lost is only a possibility of life. Although this possibility happens to represent "universal happiness" and represents the choice of most people, it is not more important than other possibilities. It's just that it did exist, and they chose another path.
Can we be alone and happy? The answer is yes, and only yes. There may be thousands of endings for everyone, but now there is only one. Now that you have chosen this path, there is no way to go back.
Because one cannot serve two gods at the same time.
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