1. Antonia witnessed the death of her mother. Antonia took her daughter Danny Ella back to the village where she was born. The elderly mother lay on the bed and exhausted her last strength to curse, perhaps cursing the thief or her husband. She presents a typical female image full of resentment tormented by heterosexual marriages. In China, the same is true of sister-in-law Xianglin. When she saw Antonia, her first sentence was "You are late, you are always like this", which is very harsh and merciless. Correspondingly, she is dissatisfied with her life.
Antonia did not show too much emotion, but said to her daughter, "She has always been like this." The first time I watched this movie, I mistakenly thought it was bad for the mother-daughter relationship, so Antonia was indifferent. After watching it again, I had a new experience. Antonia was not so indifferent, but rather calm. This kind of bystander observes the dying mother, and then calmly bid her farewell.
The mother-daughter relationship is an important issue of feminism. The mother who is deeply resentful and unable to extricate herself constantly confides her despair to her daughter. The daughter can't bear to reject her mother and constantly accepts negative emotions. She constantly pays emotional labor. Finally, she finds herself unable to change her mother. Continued sinking can only make herself fall into this horror. Circulation, so decisively cut to find another way out. A story like this alone can be made into a movie, but "The Antonia Family" only uses a few shots to complete the narrative. It is no wonder that this movie has too much to say, and it has to be simple and neat. Throughout the whole movie, a shot and a line may be an elaboration of a social issue.
2. Danny Ella saw her grandmother cheating on her corpse. Only Daniela had hallucinations in the church, seeing her grandmother sitting up from the coffin and singing happily, reflecting her rebelliousness, imaginativeness, and disdain for theocracy from the side. From behind, she engaged in art and found herself gay. Look, this experience is one of the few manifestations of her personality.
3.-"I need a wife, my son needs a mother"
-"But I don't need your son, and I don't need a husband"
-"Don't you need a husband?"
-"What do you want him to do?"
Farmer Buss asked Antonia to marry him and got such a response. From then on, he brought food and five sons to Antonia's yard to have dinner and dance every weekend. This date did not have further results until more than ten years later.
The film does not explain how Antonia gave birth to a daughter or whether she has experienced marriage, but we can see her views on marriage only from this conversation. Farmer Buss (man) brings food (resources), Antonia (woman) cooks food for everyone (housework, parenting, sex, emotional labor, etc.), which is taken for granted in traditional marriages, but when Antonia ( If the woman refuses to enter the marriage, the farmer Buss (man) has to be careful about the relationship between them. He and his sons are guests at Antonia’s house, so they must abide by her rules, that is, treat them equally and kindly. everyone.
4. Didi smiled after putting on new glasses in the church. A mentally handicapped person from another farm in the same village, Didi, was bullied by her father and brother for a long time. She was touched and humiliated in public. Later, she was even sexually assaulted by her brother. Her glasses were broken and the pieces were cut. Took her hand. Fortunately, she was rescued by Danny Ella and brought back to Antonia's house. They fitted her with new glasses, and Didi happily went to church with the new glasses.
(In reality, confronting rapists may not go so smoothly. If the opponent is hurt by a fork like in the movie, the opponent may not be so easy to give up and may resort to revenge and harassment. However, the film skips these and directly presents a victory. Scenery, another way of saying it is that even in the most conservative villages, incest is disgusting. Villagers will despise incest even if they don’t condemn rapists.)
Didi's recovery so fast, I have to say that it is related to her mental disability. Although this has brought her a lot of inconvenience and discriminated against her, it also prevented her from "slut humiliation" and "virtuousness". These scourges of pseudo-moral shackles even made her have a different understanding of pain than ordinary people. Didi is in sharp contrast with the later Tracy (a girl with high IQ).
(To be continued)
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