"Smoking is like kissing, with emotion"
Father is a person who attaches great importance to feelings, so at the beginning of the movie, he smoked cigarettes for so long in Yantai.
In the empty and cramped room, only a corner of the dining table was exposed, suggesting the incompleteness of the family structure. The father walked from the foreground to the middle scene, and called Xiaokang in the room to eat, but no one responded. Father himself didn't start with the boiled dumplings, lit a cigarette, walked from the foreground to the background, came to the deepest part of the picture, moved the vegetation on the balcony, and smoked quietly in front of the world outside the house. This cigarette smokes very slowly, and the smoker naturally understands that people who have smoked for a long time will not drink cigarettes so slowly. At this moment, cigarettes are not a pastime, and they contain unspeakable thoughts. Like the human body leaking oxygen, life gradually withers.
People interact with the inanimate vegetation in the room, but not with their own children. This is the cruelty of life. The director uses a long shot to tell the story of loneliness and alienation. Father and son, relatives of flesh and blood, under the same space, still have an insurmountable distance. No interaction, no response, no contact.
No matter how slow you smoke a cigarette, there will always be a moment when it burns out. The transition at this moment, like the burning light of life, instantly extinguished and turned into ashes. The long shot finally stopped at the picture of my father smoking, without transition, in a hurried car, we watched Xiaokang holding the urn (ash of life) through the dim tunnel. A transition, yin and yang are separated. The father has passed away, and there is great sadness oncoming. The father and son have not said a word, but they have nothing to say.
Death throws away all possible reconciliation. All the living can do is repentance and remembrance.
"What Time Are You Over There" uses the first transition at the beginning to construct the entire world. In a world where the living and the dead coexist, the memory of the dead is separated by this transition. Before that, it belonged to the dead, and after that, the living continued to live. At the beginning, the proportion of life and death was almost the same, and people could not distinguish between life and death, until after countless transitions, the memories of the "dead" in life, the proportion of the whole film in the film is getting lower and lower, We woke up together with the protagonist and realized the truth that the deceased has passed away, because after the first opening of the film, the deceased has been permanently stagnant in this world.
Cai Mingliang said, "The first shot was taken so long to give the audience enough memories."
So this transition is not only a spatial transfer, but a transition from past memories to a future that can only be recalled.
The lens language of the entire film is concise and powerful, and the complexity of a single lens replaces the role of editing to a certain extent. In addition to creating tension with the full drama in the shots, the director also created great conflicts and oppositions in the arrangement of the relationship between characters and the environment. The time of life and death, the distance between Taipei and Paris, Christian belief and traditional Buddhist culture are all a collection of contradictions. However, all the elements in the film never directly intersect, and always exist in a lonely and independent attitude. The director uses a time element as an introduction and connects them together, so that each local change always triggers a series of overall reactions, creating an extremely dense amount of viewing information. This allows the film to have a large number of fixed long shots without causing the audience to feel visually fatigued.
- Mother
Xiaokang knew that his father had passed away.
So he slowed down all the clocks, in addition to trying to establish a connection with a woman who had a relationship, which was actually a sign of regret. Xiaokang wants to go back to the past, and he hopes that time can go back to the time when his father was still there.
The mother, however, has not accepted the fact that her husband left. She wrapped herself in darkness, sealed the family with waterproof tape, and warned Xiaokang not to kill. Maybe a certain cockroach was what her husband looked like after he was reincarnated. She knew that her husband was afraid of light, and even the electricity in the house was cut off. When Xiaokang was on the toilet, his mother handed him a candle.
But Xiaokang was afraid of the dark. After his father left, he contracted a strange disease and no longer dared to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He used bottles and plastic bags to help himself out.
Xiaokang didn't take his mother's words seriously. He killed the cockroaches that appeared in the house and threw the corpse into the fish tank. The moment the big fish ate the cockroach corpse, the mother looked back. I really admire the director's on-site scheduling.
The mother began to think that the 7-hour delay was the time when her husband was still on earth. Since then, the mother has cooperated with the 7 hours between Yin and Yang, eating dinner 7 hours slower, and having sex with her husband 7 hours slower. It seems that as long as it is slowed down by 7 hours, the home is still complete.
Ironically, when my father was alive, none of the family sat together for dinner. Today, the tableware and chopsticks on the dining table are finally neat and tidy, as if my father was still alive.
A mother's love, which she realizes in hindsight, is like a dish filled in a father's bowl but no one has tasted it.
The only time the family is in the same frame in the film. His mother slept in bed all night before waking up. After a one-night stand, Xiaokang lost a box of watches that he had slowed down. He wrapped his mother's clothes by the bed and lay down gently beside her. His father's photo was on the table by the bedside, and the candles had been extinguished. Last night, he should have seen his mother for the last time.
- Well-off
Xiaokang wanted to escape, so he went to the street to rent movie discs. Thinking that the woman is now in Paris, he rented the French movie "The Four Hundred Blows". I watched it over and over again in my bedroom by myself.
It seems that just by setting the time back 7 hours, I went from Taipei to France with you.
It seems that as long as I listen to the French dialogue and watch the story of Paris, I will walk with you on the streets of Paris.
When women go abroad, they insist on buying a well-off watch. There are two times on the watch, one is Taipei and the other is Paris.
A woman is someone who can't let go of the past and can't see the future clearly. Xiaokang sold her watch and became a person with neither past nor future.
Xiaokang entered the cinema with the clock he took down from the underground walkway. He felt that if the time was 7 hours slower, it was France. And the woman who bought his watch was his Paris. He held the clock in his arms and sat on the red chair of the cinema, as if he and the woman were hugging a date that couldn't feel body temperature at the same time.
"We watched the same movie at the same time, but you weren't by my side. What was on the screen was that I miss you so much."
Later, a gay took Xiaokang's bell. He asked in the toilet to have sex with Xiaokang, but Xiaokang refused. He looked at the minute hand that turned back and forth with the twitching of the man's lower body, and knew that many people were watching the same movie at the time just now.
- woman
Xiaokang was alone on the rooftop and drinking red wine. In the crowd of people in Paris, women drink coffee, eat dinner alone, and vomit while leaning on the solid red bathroom wall. They are just as small and fragile in the picture.
Within seconds of the woman leaving the cafe, the crowd seemed to notice her presence. After a few more seconds, everything was forgotten.
Xiaokang's car was driving on the city road, and there was a cake that a woman gave him when he was parting. The car radio said that a dog ran onto the road while the owner was not paying attention, and was not noticed by the driver, and died on the road. On the road alone, like a dog, it can die at any moment. And because people have no owners, they will not be reported as news like dogs. So people always go very plain, not like the dynamism when they come. When you watch the movie again, you will find that this news is the director's foreshadowing for the ending.
The lost dog has just been declared dead, and in the next shot, the woman is alone on the escalator, which looks like a straight road. At first she was alone, then the crowds came, drowning in them, swaying from side to side.
The woman met an Asian man at the subway station, and they looked at each other immediately. Lonely people can see the loneliness in each other's eyes best. The next second, the train passed between them, blurring their vision of each other. The man got on the subway, and the woman looked at him through the glass. until the man leaves. The woman's body moved a few steps forward with her gaze, and then stopped.
She was in the phone booth, less than half a meter away from the man opposite her. But on one side of the scale is the non-stop fury at the microphone, and on the other side is the number that has been unanswered. The distance between two people can never be defined by simple physical distance. The girl's phone call didn't get through until the end of the movie. Who was she calling? Maybe the person over the phone didn't exist, she just subconsciously hoped that she should call someone.
Finally, the woman leans on the other woman and finds that the body temperature cannot be shared. The woman closed her eyes on the deck chair in the park, the tiredness in her eyes, and the reflection by the river printed a huge Ferris wheel. A suitcase floated past, and her consciousness went to another place.
- Father
The father appeared in the foreground again, with a back gesture. He used an umbrella to help the girl carry her luggage ashore. The girl was still sleeping soundly in the background, and her father understood that he had stayed for too long.
In front of the huge Ferris wheel, my father lit another cigarette and finally looked back.
This cigarette, he still smoked very slowly.
The back of my father is getting farther and farther away, and the Ferris wheel in the background is slowly turning against the skyline.
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