Aiden Chambers wrote "Dance On My Grave" when he was nearly 50 years old, and François Ou Jong shot "85 Years of Summer" when he was 52 years old. Two middle-aged men who have been weather-beaten The youth-themed works created by people are destined to no longer be juvenile mentality, and are more or less contaminated with later regrets and sentiments that can only be obtained after experience.
In the midsummer of '85, corresponding to the waves, sailing boats, shades, motorcycles, beaches, sunshine, bright and happy; Dance On My Grave, corresponding to graves, death, corpses, unruly, fragile, rebellious, gloomy and crazy.
This is the first half and second half of the movie.
In the movie, Alex read a poem written by Verlaine to Rimbaud, and David tacitly followed up the next few sentences. Both of them have been appreciated by the same literary teacher, and they both know the well-known poets Verlaine and Rimbaud. This coincidence is also quite "made in heaven".
Just use two poems by Rimbaud and Verlaine respectively to highlight the atmosphere of the first half and the second half.
Rimbaud "At the age of seventeen, we have no scruples"
We don't take it seriously, when we were seventeen. ——A wonderful evening, to his lemonade and beer, to his noisy coffee shop with lights! ——Let's take a stroll under the green linden tree on the promenade. The linden smells fragrant on a good night in June! The air is so gentle sometimes that makes us close our eyelids; the wind with all sorts of sounds,-the city is not far away,-the aroma of grapevines and the aroma of beer...
The first half is like this poem, romantic, happy and beautiful. When going to sea, the heroes rescued the beauty and met by chance. Then we went to the market in the sunny weather, rode a motorcycle in the sunset, went to the amusement park for a night tour, and lay lazily. Reading together...It's like another Call Me By Your Name.
But things are not simple.
Speaking of adolescence, Ou Rong once shared this with reporters, “Adolescence is an incubation period of sorrow, a period of disillusionment. We find that love is not what we thought. The authority of parents and what they say may not be. It’s true. So it’s a period when everything starts to split. It’s very violent, because before that, we were still in the idealization of children.”
Cruelty and tenderness coexist, comedy and tragedy coexist, this is reality.
David and Alex have completely opposite attitudes towards feelings. David, who needs to constantly change his partners to maintain a sense of freshness, just treats this as a summer love song. Once the passion and curiosity fade, the relationship should end. His love style is like a storm, and then quickly disappears. Be decisive, associate if you like, separate if you don't feel it. What he likes is not another person, but a relationship with others.
But after a storm passes, there will always be a piece of wreckage.
Alex is taking this relationship seriously, and "willingly be his prisoner." He took all the promises made while passion was still present. In the original book, Alex is a "weird" teenager. Only David is willing to be nice to him, willing to help him cut his hair, choose clothes, and go for a ride with him. When someone who has never been treated like this meets someone A person who is extremely gentle on his own will surely fall into the trap with all his heart and soul. This is very dangerous. Once his feelings are overturned, he will make some terrible actions.
Each of us got rid of our past in some way-this is the only thing that matters.
Verlaine "Green"
Let my head rest on the young chest, your most recent kiss still leaves a mark on him; Let it perch in the tranquility after the fierce storm, let me sleep for a while, since you have to take a nap. You see, we have to learn to forgive everything... You see, we have to learn to forgive everything, because then we will be the happiest, although there are sad moments in life, at least we will cry together.
...
Let's be two children,
Two young children,
Don't fall in love with anything,
There is only surprise at everything.
Quietly walked under the pure elm tree, pale
I don't know if I have been forgiven.
Whether making a movie or writing, there is the emotional projection of the creator himself in the work.
From the first short film "The Troubles of Young Victor" directed by Ou Rong in 1993, to the 19th film "The Midsummer of 1985", most of his films show entanglements and juvenile thoughts, and almost never Lack of LGBT elements.
Ou Rong said in an interview that David’s sudden death can be seen as a metaphor for the AIDS outbreak in the 1980s, which prevented countless gay groups from finding an outlet for love. This was also discussed in "Summer Sling Skirt". Before finding the right way to vent, Alex disguised as a girl to see David’s body. He even lay on David’s body and kissed him madly regardless of other people’s gaze, and went to dig David’s grave late at night. Listen to the music he played for him on his grave ("First Love").
Alex faced everyone's misunderstanding about his behavior of dancing on the grave, without explaining or apologizing. He knew that people outside the story could not understand this seemingly strange behavior, so he said nothing.
Under the teacher's suggestion, he chose to use writing as an outlet to vent his turbulent emotions, which became a way for him to redeem himself. Alex said that in his writing, he felt that the incredible things he had done had become the behavior of the characters in the book. Indirectly killing David was not himself, but a character. Is this projection also reflected in creators in the real world?
It is reasonable to doubt whether François Ou Jong is also using the method of film creation to reshape his youth in his memories? When talking about youth-themed films in an interview with "Flower Rong Moon Appearance", he said, “There are many youth-themed films in France and even in the world, which make me feel very idealized and beautiful, but my own memories of adolescence are painful and painful. It's difficult. So I want to use a more mature way and experience to re-discuss this topic from a distance and in another way."
The result of the movie is that Alex got his own forgiveness through this way of writing and projecting, and bid farewell to the crazy and paranoid youth of the past, and turned into a man who dared to invite other boys to go out on the beach. It's a teenager.
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