The 12-year-old sister and the 5-year-old brother finally reached the border. They had gone through a long journey before that. They were eager to see the scenery in the mist, but their bodies could not accompany the soul to cross the border, because it was a desperate one. The end...
Angelopoulos was full of grievances peculiar to the Greeks. The ancient country with splendid civilization for thousands of years was quickly left behind by the Western world in the historical catastrophe. It was first bullied by the Romans and Turks, and then by the Germans in modern times. During World War II, the whole of Greece was devastated, and until now, they were insulted. The GDP per capita is still far behind Germany and Italy, becoming one of the few economically underdeveloped countries in the European Union. In the face of the cold reality, the original cultural superiority of the Greeks gradually disappeared. Some people who miss the good old days feel confused, sad, and desperate. Angelopoulos's works also more or less show this tendency.
But as a real artist, perhaps thinking about life is the indispensable content in their works.
"Father in Germany" is the goal that the two little guys are looking for in the film, but this goal is full of metaphors. In fact, it does not matter whether the father exists or not, nor does it matter whether Germany is really a place that can bring them happiness (although it was the place where Greeks in the 1980s most wanted to emigrate). The meaning of these two nouns is very broad: if you like, they can refer to anything that humans want to pursue in the journey of life. But no matter how difficult the journey is, the final result is already doomed: you can only reach that imaginary place in the fog, and people will never be able to find what he really wants-this is what Angelopoulos conveyed to me through images Despair!
In my opinion, the name of this film besides "Landscape in the Mist" has another name, which is "Border". Since the little girl and her brother got on the train alone, the two people kept on the border. The younger brother crossed the border for the first time working in a restaurant for food. The little girl was raped by a truck driver and crossed the border. The little girl fell in love with the young man who was about to perform military service and crossed the border. Later, the young man drove them to the beach. The coastline is another boundary, a boundary between land and sea. They saw a huge hand lifted by a helicopter. In my opinion, it was the hand of fate that came in from the sky, and its index finger pointing to the future had already been broken. It drifted away and disappeared. The boundary of the sky-in fact none of us knows where fate will take us! Finally, the siblings finally reached the national border, which is the border of the entire Greece, where they reached the end of despair. And this end is death that cannot be crossed. Death is the true end that each of us can reach.
Life is like crossing borders. When we were young, we crossed the borders of home and came to school; after college, we crossed the borders of cities; one day, we crossed the borders of the motherland to a strange country.
On another level, in order to grow, we cross the boundaries mentally. We continue to cross the boundaries of our emotions: feeling unprecedented ecstasy, despair and sadness; at the same time we cross the boundaries of the soul: encountering close friends and the love of life.
We constantly break and reshape our image, and try to cross the boundaries of our own thoughts. Decades later, if you look back, have you finally got what you really want? Have you found the "scenery in the fog"? Do you feel the absurdity and helplessness of life?
Maybe the truth of life is like this!
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