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When I first read "Love Letter", it was many years ago. At that time, I thought that this was a suspense movie.
Because there are too many similar mirroring relationships in this story-there are two Fujii trees in the movie, one male Fujii tree, and one female Fujii tree. There are two heroines in the movie, Fujii Ki and Hiroko, who look almost exactly the same. Later, when I checked the information, I found out that these two roles were originally played by the same person Miho Nakayama. The fate of Fujiiki and her father are extremely similar, and both of them are critically ill due to the flu. Even the plot of Grandpa carrying their father and daughter to the hospital is exactly the same.
These similar and counterpoint plots can easily confuse people who are watching a movie for the first time in various details. Later, when I re-watched "The Love Letter", I discovered that so many delicate mirror relationships actually serve the theme of the film's love of expression.
"Love Letter" is not just a simple pure love movie. What Shunji Iwai explored with this movie is actually the multi-faceted nature of love, which contains not only the beauty of love, but also the betrayal, deceitful and gloomy side of love. At the same time, it is not only about love, but also death and reappearance.
At the beginning of the film, the heroine Bo Zi dressed in black is lying motionless in the snow.
One second, two seconds, three seconds, we began to wonder if she was not breathing. Suddenly, she began to gasp. In these few short seconds, at least two themes of this movie have been pointed out.
One is the theme of life and death. Following the scene is the commemoration of the third anniversary of Fujii's death. Fujii is Hiroko's fiancé. He slept in this snow-capped mountain three years ago because of a mountaineering accident. In this scene, Hiroko is simulating the scene where Fujii Tree loses his breath in the snow. Why simulate the feeling of death? Because she wants to feel what her lover once felt. Bozi can't forget the tree, even if he has been dead for three years.
So another theme also emerged, a love that cannot be forgotten.
The story of the entire "Love Letter" actually originated from Hiroko who could not forget Fujii. She could not accept the premature death of her fiancé. So she found an address in Shu's junior high school graduating book that he had lived in at the time, but was now abandoned, and sent a letter to that address. She believed that this letter was sent to heaven. In Bozi's heart, she actually hopes to convince herself that the tree is really dead through this letter that cannot receive a reply.
But unexpectedly, she actually received a reply. Through the shift of the camera, we found that the reply was a girl with the same name and surname as Fujii Shu. It turned out that Bozi copied the address of the person with the same name in the graduation book by mistake. This accident caused the female Fujiiki and Hiroko to start a long correspondence. Through this communication, a youthful secret was revealed.
In the letter, the female Fujii tree told Hiroko that she and the male Fujii tree were classmates in junior high school, and because they had the same name and surname, they caused many unspeakable misunderstandings and troubles.
But when the box of memory is opened, we find that in this coincidence of the same name and surname, there is more of an ambiguous sprout and beauty than pain and misunderstanding.
It looks like a fight caused by being teased, but it is actually the protection of the young tree against the young tree. The prank of putting a paper bag on the girl's head is a little revenge by the teenager because the girl misunderstood her own mind. Under the dim light of the parking shed, he immersed himself in proofreading the papers, just to be able to delay more time with her. Even every library card is actually a confession, but the girl tree has never found it.
Compared with the feelings of Shonokki to the Maiden, for the audience, the feelings of Fujiiki have always been very vague.
I personally tend to have a vague affection for the female Fujii tree towards the male Fujii tree. For example, she used to secretly look at the juvenile tree in the library many times; for example, after Shu transferred to another school, the students mischievously placed chrysanthemums on his table as a memorial service, and the young tree severely broke the vase when she saw it. And, when Shun Shuo made a special trip to find her, her smile might contain shyness and happiness that she didn't even notice.
However, due to the dullness of the girl tree and the shyness of the boy tree who did not dare to confess to her face, this hazy feeling finally faded out of the world of the girl Fujii tree in the long river of time. However, there seems to be a more important reason for the dust of this relationship.
This is about the most visually weird scene in the film-female Fujii Shu came to the hospital to see a doctor and fell asleep in the corridor.
In the dream, she dreamed of the scene of her father in the hospital before his death. In this section, Iwai Shunji and photographer Shinoda Nobuyuki used a Hitchcock zoom that appeared more frequently in many suspenseful and thrilling sections. The principle of Hitchcock zoom is that you have to change the focal length of the lens while the camera moves forward or backward. This is also called sliding zoom. The visual effect brought by this lens made us feel the kind of helplessness that the female Fujii tree felt at a moment, both frightened and at a loss, and feeling like everything is dreamlike. Note that the following two lenses are the focus here.
In this dream related to the death of her father, the moment she opened the door, she connected a montage of youth-the girl tree opened the door and found that the boy tree stood outside the door.
This seemingly weird scene actually involves the deepest wound in the female Fujii tree's heart.
She was seriously ill but never wanted to come to the hospital. What she was afraid of was the memory of her father's death. She was always unwilling to face the death of her father, so she sealed the memories of that period in her mind, and sealed together with them, there was also this youthful memory. In the classic scene in the film, the boy Shu who is about to transfer school came to the door of Girl Shu's house to give her a book. The time that happened was shortly after the death of Girl Shu's father.
The death of my father, and this dim relationship between the two Fujii trees, occurred at the same stage of adolescence, and they were closely linked together. Therefore, we have seen this scene where the real and the false are mixed.
In her dream, the female tree remembered the memory of her father's death in the hospital. In reality, the nurse yelled her name and pushed her to wake up. In an instant, the death of her father and the name Fujii Shu were superimposed on each other, Kaifeng had this youthful memory hidden in her heart.
The final regret of this love, on the one hand, is due to the slowness of the female tree, and on the other hand, it may also be because of her deliberate self-enclosure. It was not until the end of the film, when she saw the postcard, that she finally confirmed and accepted the love.
At this point, the context of the story is actually quite clear. The love between the two Fujii trees is the bright line of "Love Letter". The dark line of "Love Letter" is Bozi's love.
When Hiroko saw a female Fujii tree who looked almost exactly the same as herself, she was sensitive and realized that maybe she was just a substitute. There are also some controversies about whether Bozi is a substitute. Some viewers think that Fujii is not cold. The alternatives were only Bozi's own opinion, but perhaps the similarity was just an opportunity. Later, the male tree still fell in love with Bozi. However, I am more inclined to think that in this story, Fujii's love for Hiroko should be relatively weak. There is a plot in the film that can more powerfully testify to this conjecture. When Bozi and Qiuye went to visit their old friends, they sang a song—"My love has gone with the south wind."
This song is "Blue Coral Reef" by Seiko Matsuda. My friend said that this was the last song the tree sang before it died. They also wondered that the tree didn't like the singer, why did he sing such a song before he died? At this time, Bo Zi's face immediately turned gloomy. With a female instinct, she immediately understood the ambiguity in the lyrics.
In the opening captions, the film specifically emphasized that Otaru is a northern city far from Kobe. The south wind in the lyrics is the wind from south to north, that is, the wind blowing from Kobe to Otaru. This song is also the song of Fujii Ki Junior High School. The song called "Sentimental Coral Reef" was inspired by an American movie that was about the love story of a pair of inexperienced boys and girls. All these coincidences may mean that, before Fujii was dying, he missed his first love.
After Bozi realized this, he told the story of the marriage proposal. It seems to be just a joke, but for Bozi, this is another heartbreak. Because she was at this time, she finally understood that Fujii Shu didn't propose to marry him, maybe it was not just because of shyness.
If you look closely at Miho Nakayama’s performance, you will find that there is a deep tingling hidden in her seemingly relaxed expression. These emotional details are quite cryptic. In this seemingly pure and beautiful pure love film, Bozi’s relationship actually constitutes a very cruel emotional dark line. It is precisely because of all the previous emotional paving that the scene near the end of the film can constitute such a strong emotional impact.
On this side, it was Bozi shouting to the mountains in the snow. She finally yelled out the letter that should have been sent to heaven. This period of continuous shouting was her final surrender and relief after she knew the truth.
On the other side, the female tree who learned that Fujii was dead was lying on the hospital bed and muttering to herself. She was reading the letter Hiroko sent him, which was also her inner monologue at the moment. Because she had just learned that the male tree had died the day before. These murmurs of her originated from the huge impact the tree's death brought to her, and even more from the fact that when she was about to confirm her love, she discovered that the person had already passed away. This relationship that is about to be proven is actually a relationship that can never be fulfilled.
In this airborne conversation, Shunji Iwai completed the most exquisite mirroring relationship and also completed an emotional transmission.
Hiroshi finally let go of her nostalgia for Fujii, but this nostalgia was passed on to another Fujii through this communication. She may become another Hiroshi for the rest of her life, and she will never forget this feeling.
Under the shell of a youth idol movie, Iwai Shunji tells a sad love story. It has the youthful and pure beauty of love, but it also has extremely realistic cruelty.
Even if we take each piece of love alone and look at it, we will find that in every relationship, love is almost one-way without echo. The assistant loves Qiuye, but Qiuye loves Bozi, Bozi loves the tree, but the male tree loves the female tree, and the female Fujii tree at the center of the story is the last person in the film to know the relationship.
In "Love Letters", love is always about missing out. And Shunji Iwai has never been a director who can only make pure love movies. In his debut on the big screen, he has already shown us the complexity of love.
In his subsequent movies, we can see more different aspects of love. Whether it's "April Story", "Everything About Lily Zhou", "Swallowtail Butterfly" or "Flower and Alice", the love in these small fresh youth films is not just pure love, but full of various The multifaceted nature of this intricate love.
This may be exactly what Iwai Shunji wants to tell us-youth is of course beautiful, but it is not only beautiful, youth also contains cruel, painful and rough sides. In addition to love, "Love Letter" also contains a larger theme-life and death.
Iwai Shunji once mentioned that the creation of "Love Letter" refers to Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Forest". In the film, the three-person relationship between the two Fujii and Hiroko is actually an imitation of the triangular relationship in "Norwegian Forest". But the most important reference is still on the subject.
There is a famous saying in "Norway's Forest", "Death is not the opposite of life, but as a part of life." Death and reappearance are also the theme of "Love Letter". At the beginning of the film, at the commemorative meeting for the third anniversary of Fujii Shu's death, everyone showed no more concern for the tree's death. Father drank, mother pretended to be sick and went home. Friends took this opportunity to plan to explore. Only Bozi still could not forget the death of the tree. On the other side of the tree, the death of Fujiiki's father has long been forgotten by everyone.
The death of the body is not the end of death. Forgetting is the real death.
Fujii, played by Takashi Kashiwahara in "The Love Letter," seems to have died at the beginning of the film. But in fact, because of his death, two girls who looked so similar in this world got connected. And through their memories, the tree will always live in those beautiful memories in another way.
I want to insert a sentence here. Two girls who look exactly the same live in different places in the world. Such a setting originated from Kieslowski’s "Twin Flower". I don’t know if Shunji Iwai also referred to this. A famous movie.
Speaking of "The Love Letter", another death that appears in the film is the death of the father of the female Fujii. Many years ago, Nvshu's father died unfortunately because of the worsening flu.
Even if Grandpa struggled to carry him back to the hospital, it didn't help. Because of this incident, Nvshu's mother has always been grudges against her grandfather, and her grandfather has always been full of guilt. There is a small detail here. When Nvshu's mother said that she would not come to the hospital in time, her grandfather accurately stated that it only takes 38 minutes to get from home to the hospital. These 38 minutes may be the time he accurately calculated from the time he walked from home to the hospital after losing his son. These 38 minutes contained a father's full of guilt and heartbreak.
And when the female tree was about to repeat the fate of her father, the elderly grandfather chose the method of the year again, instead of passively waiting for the ambulance to arrive late, but braving the blizzard and actively carrying her to the hospital. This initiative and courage ultimately saved the tree's life. Here, in the setting of these two death plots, there is also an expression of Shunji Iwai implied.
Whether it is facing feelings or past guilt, passivity and avoidance are always easy for people to miss the good; and only by understanding the real bravery and real relief, the living can live better, and death can no longer become a scar. It is a memory of relief.
In the film, there is a plot in which the girl tree saw a dragonfly frozen in ice after her father passed away. She pointed to the dragonfly and asked her mother, "Dad is dead, isn't it?"
Perhaps what Iwai Shunji really wanted to say in this episode is, are they really dead, or are they living in this world in another way? This is really a very Japanese style of death aesthetics.
I cried when I first watched "Love Letter" many years ago. But the reason for crying at that time was very simple. It was just crying for such a beautiful love. Perhaps it was mixed with a kind of sadness that such a handsome character like Takashi Kashiwahara shouldn't just die like this. And now when I look at "Love Letters", there is a sense of complexity with mixed flavors. Although this story is mixed with extremely realistic and even cruel aspects, when I saw the director used parallel montages to create a scene that looked like Hiroko and Fujii in a dialogue in the air, I still felt a surge in my heart. Unspeakable moving.
At this moment, I am happy for Bozi's finally release, sad for the passing of the male tree, and mixed feelings for the female tree finally gaining love and losing love at the same time.
After many years, I finally learned that the touching of "Love Letter" is not in its purity, but precisely in that it captures every level of love.
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