According to my viewing and rough division, the whole film can be divided into 110 scenes according to the transition of characters and places, and the whole film never stops the frequent transitions between scenes and the shuttle in time. The first three scenes introduce the main characters, and the fourth scene is the film's famous bird shot - also seen near the end of scene one hundred and three.
Among the many discussions on philosophy, "21 Grams" chose two issues that are not unfamiliar but have always had fans - the power of religion and the meaning of death.
Isn't religion all virtue, all contemplation?
Is religion neither virtue, nor contemplation,
but miracles and wonders that flow forever in the mind when the hands are chiseling stones or weaving cloth?
——
Jack, a former prisoner of Gibran's "The Prophet" , appeared in the third scene, enlightening the youth, persuading them to believe in Jesus, and taking himself as an example, telling about the good luck that faith in Jesus brought him - winning a truck. Since then, several scenes—including in the car, at church, and at home—show Jack's devotion to Jesus.
However, in the thirtieth scene, Jack drove a truck on his way home and killed Michael and his two daughters, Catherine and Lora. After turning himself in to jail, he got into an argument with a pastor who had been preaching for him. First of all, Jack believes that Jesus arranged for him to win the truck, so it was Jesus who chose to kill the three people. The pastor corrects that "Jesus didn't know this" - which goes against the creed of God's "all-knowing". Second, Jack cites the Bible as a counter-argument, stating that "Jesus even knows the movement of every hair on your head," thus proving that Jesus was not unknowing, but arranging—and contradicting the claim that God is "perfectly good." . Third, at the beginning of the debate, the pastor had already pre-empted, declaring that "Jesus did not come to relieve pain, He gave us the strength to endure it" - contradicting the theory of God's "omnipotence". Due to lack of evidence, Jack was acquitted (scene 90). Contrasted with the opening scene, Jake, after being released from prison, has lost his past piety when he is at Mass.
It can be seen that "21 Grams" negates the power of religion in the traditional concept to a certain extent by means of euphemism and deviousness.
To live is to forget death and to
die is to forget to live
- Maeterlinck's "Hourglass"
"Life will go on."
This sentence appears three times in the film - the twenty-eighth scene where Paul responds Conversation with doctor when wife asks to donate sperm for artificial insemination; scene 48 Christina is comforted by her father at the funeral of her husband Michael and daughter; scene 59 Jack His wife took him out of prison.
The characters in the three main lines inevitably face the struggle of life and death - themselves or their loved ones.
The same scene appears in the fifth and one hundred and fifth scenes of the film - a dying Paul lying in a hospital bed, contemplating the meaning of death. And in the monologue at the end, the true meaning of the title is revealed - it is said that everyone will lose no more or no less than 21 grams of weight at the moment of death. In other words, 21 grams is the weight of the soul.
When life disappears, people call it death. However, when death also disappears, how will people recall the lives that once existed? Perhaps as engraved on Franz's epitaph in "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" - the long lost road will eventually return. And Lücher de Chateaubriand wrote: "Nothing drives us from the future like death."
Whether it is "expulsion" or "return" is uncertain. Because after all, only the dead can truly grasp the meaning of death. The departure of the dead, and the living, its meaning does not lie in death itself, but in the nostalgia for life—belonging to oneself or others—and the resistance to death.
In fact, when I first saw the title, I immediately thought of Milan Kundera's masterpiece "The Unbearable Lightness of Life". In the process of watching the film, chapters from the book such as "Life and Death", "Spirit and Flesh", and "Light and Heavy" also jumped into my mind with the progress of the plot.
To sum up, this film selects the seemingly opposite sides of several major contradictions in life, and dismantles them. Afterwards, it is reassembled like a puzzle through multiple means such as consciousness and technology to present another scene to the audience.
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