The first half is secular, and the second half is nothing.
The film’s demarcation point is the Christmas that happens to be the midpoint. Before that, the heroine Michaela lived an ordinary life in the world. In addition to the obvious bleak tone, like every youth movie, there is a relationship with Parents’ conflicts include playing with their girlfriends and acquaintance with their first love. Michaela's dance at the 19th branch reminds me of the swing dance that Vincent and Mia danced in Jack Rabbit Slim's in "Pulp Fiction", so I don't need to say more about it.
The heroine once took a one-year absence from school due to epilepsy. She started to get better and finally got what she wished to leave a serious and dull Christian family to go to college. It seems that everything is getting better and everything is full of hope. However, life is always like this, people are so short-sighted, they always think "at least I am good now", the past is over, the future is still in the future, as long as my current state is good...at least Michaela is like this, she I once thought that nightmares are in the past, and occasional pains are just fewer and fewer retrospectives. However, everything started to take a turn for the worse after the school holiday and Christmas-it turned out that the nightmare didn’t end, it just paused, and now it’s pressed again. Jin Jian doubled everything on Michaela, who thought he had escaped the pain.
She tried so hard to be strong, she made friends and fell in love, she worked hard to write a thesis to become a top student, all of which was to stay in college-to stay in the life she wanted, or to put it more bluntly , In order not to return to the past she feared. However, all the struggles are in vain. It turns out that the whole film is just about "a girl who struggles with all her strength and her own destiny, but after struggling with all her strength, there is still nowhere to escape the destruction process."
Some people commented on the lengthy and slow pace of the film. I was surprised at the evaluation that was completely contrary to my feelings, but just like Schopenhauer said that his book was written for a certain future thinker. Movies are not made for everyone. There are always people who resonate with certain movies. I feel that this film was filmed for me. It touched one of my painful feet so deeply. The same is true for me, I am struggling, I am struggling, but I never hold any hope for myself, because I Knowing that it will eventually be self-destructive. However, life is not a movie after all. You can't save time by dragging the progress bar to the end just because you know the ending. There is no time to save other than life itself.
The conflict between Michaela and her mother intensified. She escaped from the church on Christmas Eve. She began to be unable to bear the prayers of others and began to believe that there was a devil in her body. When she held the necklace in her hand and screamed "Lass mich", I saw the familiar shadow again. In my opinion, "epilepsy" is just an excuse for the movie. What the movie describes is actually an unnamed pain-even Michaela herself suffers for some reason. Why can't he touch the rose necklace given by her mother? Unable to get close to the cross, she thought she was ill and turned to the doctor for help, but finally came to the conclusion that medicine could not save her. She thought that she was possessed by the devil and turned to the priest for help. The priest said you have to pray, and God wants you to bear it. After all this, you will get better. She tried to convince herself that this was the same kind of ordeal that a certain saint had to go through before gaining the Tao. When people fall into despair, no matter how ridiculous lies can become beliefs, this is the straw that saves lives-it's just straw...
At 59 points, she went to dance again, but this time the dance was completely different from the last time, the last time was beautiful-please forgive me for using such a general adjective, 19 points of dance, her personality is gentle, Looking at a high place away from the camera, his eyes were full of hope, and the 59-minute dance was so frantic that none of the shots could see her face clearly, and the decadence and erosion lingered. Her boyfriend’s previous appreciation and subsequent anxiety also showed this point-from here, people in the real world finally began to feel that she was crazy. The plot then jumped to that her parents and two priests who had been in contact with her suddenly appeared in her school together, and began to raise direct contradictions between health and disease, and disease and the devil. She became more and more afraid of losing her present. Life, and fear is the best catalyst for hysteria. Immediately after school started, she stood in front of the full-length mirror and dressed herself, but in the eyes of the viewers, there was weird everywhere-she was thin and pale, with prominent ribs, she combed her hair and put on a shirt. She seemed satisfied and went out. See classmates. But her hair was actually messy, and the first button of her shirt was buttoned in the wrong place...
She seemed to be really crazy-or being possessed by the devil, she became irritable and hideous. She hid in the kitchen and smashed things. When her father opened the door, she laughed wickedly, so she had to listen to the priest's words and began to pray. She was like a beast, yelling at him like a devil, scaring her father at a loss. And we know that all the hysteria is because of fear. It is better to say that she is becoming more irritable and rude than that she is becoming more vulnerable and sensitive and fearful.
Everyone wanted to help her-in their own way, her father had been under pressure to support her to go to school, and her friend Hanna kept persuading her to go to the doctor. The priest said "Pray! Pray!" from beginning to end. When she was finally hysterical, the stern mother was the most able to endure her violent rage, feeding her, bathing her, and cleaning up the mess she had created amidst her curses. "All her efforts with amazing perseverance under extremely terrible pressure are regarded as proof of abnormal behavior." Because others didn't know what kind of pain she was enduring, what a terrible devil she faced alone. Their help is to make her take another step and take another step on the road of self-destruction.
At the end of the film, Hanna talks with Michaela: "What will happen in the future?" "Until he stays away from me." "Don't do this, it will not be far away from you, because it has never been in your body. Your body is only yourself, yourself "She is right, but she is also wrong. There is indeed no "it" in Michaela's body, but there is indeed a devil, and that devil is herself. But she didn’t realize that on the road of self-destruction, only she could save herself. She chose to give the redemption to others, so her ending was doomed. The last long section was all through the windshield on the way back. Her smiling face and the bleak black branches reflecting on the glass remind me of Manson's "The nobodies". From a religious point of view, the artistic conception and meaning are so compatible with this movie. When Michaela chose to abandon herself, she also unloaded the burden of fate, and after that, there was nothing but nothing in her life.
Self-destruction and self-salvation. This is all I have seen.
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