The contradictions and pains of scholars who have undertaken the mission of inheriting the old school in the environment where the obvious learning is declining and Homer is dead seem to be one of the themes that the film tries to convey. However, the protagonist, Professor Harris, is not so empathetic to the audience. As stated in his speech in his exit speech, he "failed" his "noble calling" to "caring and guiding young people", and he was "overwhelmed", making the audience empathize with the students instead. A professor who cannot be warm and friendly to the students' polite questions can be understood as a matter of pedantic character, and takes up class time to give moral lectures on some trivial matters, or equally takes up valuable class time to show interest in a rare case. of students asking questions that amounted to public humiliation made it hard to speculate with good intentions, and instead made him think he lacked Alcibiades' beatings. Because of this, seeing the three verses of the repugnant formula "Hitler", Taplow's book giving, and Laura's whistle-blower parodies that should have long since disappeared, because they all appear before Harris' "Confession" , which makes the very touching plot to think soberly into "You have obtained exactly what you deserve - no less, and certainly no more" (You have obtained exactly what you deserve - no less, and certainly no more). Pity for him but not for him line of poetry. Even when he finally stepped down from the podium to apologize, what people saw was the courage to embrace the new life and the courage to face oneself, and it was by no means an emotion that could be described as "moved".
Likewise, the question of how the classics should go, which the film attempts to discuss, is not clearly answered. If Taplow’s translation reminds Harris that his own translations that were more than adequate and less accurate in his student days symbolized the classicism that stepped out of the ivory tower, if Harris gave up the apology symbolized by quotations and speeches If it is an attempt to cater to the popular classics, there is no doubt that this work supports the "modernization" of classics, but that's all, it doesn't even try to describe any scheme, no less, and certainly no more.
Nonetheless, the classical "ambience" created by the film is truly amazing. From the background to the props to the details of the lines, everything is eye-catching. Here are just a few examples. The first is the background. The blackboard in the tenth grade classical literature class has a few lines of poetry written in ancient Greek. Although it is very vague (…), it is barely visible that the first word is andra (person).
Since there is a saying that "the first word of the two epics is the subject of the whole poem", the answer is obvious when we consider the epic with the theme of man.
The first five lines of The Odyssey.
At the bottom of the blackboard are references to Sophocles' "Trax Maiden" and the Peloponnesian War.
Harris was sorting books like Leob when the principal came to visit
(This one may be far-fetched) Harris calls "10th-grade Hitler" an "epithet"
This sentence seems to be rarely noticed, and the sentence Who will be faithful, and who won't also seems to come from "Agamemnon" (whether the coach can do it has always been one of the controversial topics (´･_･ `))
And, with regard to Taplow's inscription "The gods from afar graciously gaze upon the master of gentleness," I found a translation of Robert Browning's Agamemnon on Perseus, but no similar sentence appears in the full text. The first reaction to this sentence may be "For a kind master, God is always gracious and caring from heaven" (952, translated by Luo Niansheng), but in Browning's translation this sentence is
God, from afar, benignantly regardeth.
And there are only two results in the full-text search of the word afar, any of which is far from the one that appeared in the movie. Maybe Browning has published more than one version of the translation. (A film reviewer mentioned that this line was said by Clytemnestra before the murder. I disagree with this view. Even from the perspective of film lyricism, this line may only come from Agamemnon and not Clytemene. Stella.)
3 stars overall, plus 1 star for feelings.
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