Once again deceived by Nichols' narrative perspective.
It stands to reason that every character in the movie has sincerity/hypocrisy in human nature. The director's treatment is generally to "point out" to the audience that the character is in a state of hypocrisy from the perspective of God; The words are all true and reliable, and serve purely to promote the film; or they may require the characters to lie in a state of "sincere" and deceive the audience in order to achieve some kind of reversal next.
The method of treatment in "Sludge" is different.
In the story, we willingly believe that Mud is more authentic than any other adult, and we are inexplicable because of the location (island), identity (tramp), characteristics (scars), behavior (can't buy food for ourselves) To give him a wild mystique, at first we wonder if he has good intentions (good and evil), but after going through parental conflicts and getting along with Mud, we choose to get closer to Mud. This is an instinct to seek good and avoid evil, but we have already fallen into Nichols' narrative trap.
In "The Thief's Family", there is also the same kind of trap. The first half is Hirokazu Kore-eda's use of techniques inherited from traditional Japanese family films, supplemented by his excellent talent for detailing, and how intimate, warm and beautiful a "family of choice" is The world" how ruthless, cold, sinister emotional opposition, followed by deconstructing the truth to shatter these illusions. Paradoxically, we feel that the first half of the experience is so authentic that we can hardly believe that every grown-up in the film is badly deceived and doing good deeds for profit.
Reasonably, adults are not completely deceitful and lying.
We are witnessing a kind of sincerity-hypocrisy in character.
This is why we allow ourselves to justify the emotional justification we paid for. In other words, there are moments when we are willing to be emotional servants.
For too long, we've been accustomed to movies showing characters who are "sincere", even when "sincere" is exposed by "pointing out" hypocrisy. Completely forget the sincerity-hypocrisy duality that makes people complex.
In a word, understood from two perspectives, there will be vastly different meanings. The understanding of people, from different perspectives, will yield completely different views.
Once again, Sludge puts us in a prejudiced, preconceived, emotionally-identified perspective where we easily believe that Mud is authentic, that Mud and Juniper are in love, that May Pearl likes me, that fighting parents are cheating on each other of. Like the depression in "Survival," we became children this time, using a child's mind to distinguish between sincerity and hypocrisy, black and white -- we've all done that.
Then, in the climax, we reveal two facts that are contrary to our understanding: Mud and Juniper are not in love, May Pearl does not like me, and we suddenly realize that it was all wishful thinking. The film took us to "grow up", and we "learned" again to the complexity of people and things in the world.
Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Winter and Winter Holidays" and Zhang Zuoji's "Summer Vacation Homework" have both put us in similar perspectives, but the difference between them is that they do not let "growth" happen directly in the movie, but entrust "growth" to the film. To the off-screen audience, we seemed to be ignoring "those things" as if we had received a secret code, but in fact we knew it in our hearts. In a sense, we seemed to be pretending to be children.
"Sludge" reminds me of things I misunderstood when I was Ellis' age.
It's just that most of us don't have good people in our lives who don't hesitate to sacrifice themselves for warmth like Mud, so our growth path is often more painful.
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