"Another Year" was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, but it failed. Even as an ardent fan of Colin Firth, I have to say it was far superior to the King's speech. The king itself has an excellent story, and it is placed in a grand language mode. It is not necessary to deliberately exaggerate and refine a little to get a best script so easily, and "Another Year" almost lacks the basis of the storyline. Through the meticulous elaboration of the details and the wonderful portrayal of the characters' characters, it finally leaves people a masterpiece with tears in laughter and a sense of loss.
The film consists of four parts, spring, summer, autumn and winter, which are strung together for another year. There are very few plots, nothing more than explaining the characters' situation in spring. Mary is a lonely heart, but she is too vain to face a divorced woman whose beauty has passed away. Friends are like guests. Tom and Gerri, an old couple who understand life, still don't forget to scratch their heads when facing the old couple's 30-year-old son Joe who has never had a girlfriend. In summer, the most brushes and inks are laid. In this section, the characters are the most full, and the details are the most worth pondering. Tom's old friend Ken appears, an ordinary man who is stubborn in the past, has a heavy temperament, and longs for marriage. Ken, who is middle-aged and fat, shows his love to Mary and is rejected. And Mary is still Mary, no man, no house, fantasizing that a new used car can bring vitality to her quiet life, flirting with Joe laboriously, trying to forget her identity and age. When mature autumn arrives, Joe finally reaps his love, and the lively and lovely woman Katie appears, which makes Mary, who came unexpectedly, completely lost, and the attack on her new girlfriend also makes her almost lose the last of her dead life. Straw, Tom and Gerri's friendship. In the cold gray winter, Tom's brother Ronnie lost his wife, and his son Carl, who hadn't seen each other for ten years, was late for his mother's funeral. Tom takes his brother back to his home in London. Tonight, the old Ronnie, Mary who finally gave up her vanity disguise, Tom and Gerri, who seemed to be happy forever, and Joe and Katie, who were getting better, sat around the dining table and spent a winter together. Ordinary night.
Such a story, with 120 minutes of time, can hold up to three parts with specific plots, but Mary rejects Ken's show of love, the union of Joe and Katie, and Ronnie's loss of his wife. However, this dialogue with the wisdom of life is shining everywhere, and the actors' precise and accurate performances are placed in a narrative style that starts and turns, and the whole film slowly slides to the end in peace. Put on a robe full of lice. You have to quietly think about these characters, think about them who are similar to the characters in the play, think about yourself with them, and think about your own life. I got up and left my seat, walked towards the exit, accompanied by the cold ending music, like walking into a quiet old way, with dead leaves all over the ground, stepping on it and making a creaking sound.
Mary is the most portrayed character in the entire film. At the summer party, when Mary and Joe were chatting, she was swaying in a purple floral dress, curling her hair, holding a wooden post, like a 20-year-old girl, saying "I won't tell you" Such a youthful sentence. When looking at Joe again, he was about to remove his disguise and express his distress, but then he smiled and said that it was his beauty that delayed him. Mary was accustomed to putting herself in a favorable position. She was as beautiful as her when she was young and naturally had many suitors. She was accustomed to the stars holding the moon, but she could not face the reality that she was going to step down from the altar with the passage of time.
She is always self-centered, and every time she appears, she will talk endlessly, even if she leaves the host and guests next to her, she doesn't know it. She is used to being the focus of everyone's attention, enjoying this kind of stare, and even secretly obscenity. Some of it comes from admiration, and some of it comes from envy. In all the group conversations she's been involved in, the car dominates. In the spring, she talked about the car buying plan and imagined a new life. In the summer, because of her blindness and ignorance, she only looked at the appearance and ignored the displacement performance warranty. It is a dead wood that is about to be scrapped. She didn't talk about cars in the winter because she knew that she had lost her right to speak at the couple's home. The car is more like a symbol here, like a man. She was looking forward to him, fantasizing about a life that would no longer be lonely after him, but she never picked on him, so she saw the successful business man in the bar, the son of a colleague who was a generation different from her, but she was the most suitable for her. Kent turned a blind eye. There are still some fantasies about men like a little girl who is not familiar with the world. In the end, the huge gap between ideal and reality became one of the reasons that dragged down her life and made her collapse.
There are many times when she has to remove the disguise of her perfect life, tear up the label of an independent woman with a garden, a car, health, and freedom, and tell her all about her hangover every night. Accompanying loneliness. She hugged Gerri and said you have to tell me if you have anything to say, and said the same thing to Joe. She is good at beautifying her life like hers, but still can't hide the strong psychological hint, she urgently needs to find a person to confide in the reality of the object. If you dare to face your own tragedy and failure, maybe the final collapse will not be so complete and dead. The director's naked narrative of vanity and escapism shows that Mary is just a fragile woman, and she does not have a strong heart to face her own disappointment.
In fact, Mary is not the only protagonist in the whole film. Instead, Tom and Gerri are the thread that runs through. The directors show their personalities in a similar way, almost impassively, in the four sequences. A good man, Tom, is always diligent in taking off his coat and hanging it up for others in the four seasons. Even at his brother's house, he is no exception to strangers who come to express condolences. In his brother's small bedroom, he packed his brother's luggage back to London. Even in the funeral atmosphere, he still did not forget to fold his shirt carefully, and told Ronnie to bring the key when he went out. You can almost guess that these details of life are related to Gerri was nurtured in the life of each other. Making tea is Gerri's symbol. After working in the fields, he sat under the eaves with Tom, raised the warm tea cup, and smiled at each other while watching the torrential spring rain watering the seeds that had just been planted. In the cheerful gathering, make a pot of tea for everyone, sit in a circle, quiet as usual. While waiting for the funeral, make a pot of tea and wish the survivors strength. The director is almost consciously paving the way for their small interactions, cooking, reading, drinking tea, and going to the field. Immortal couples don't necessarily have to be immortal-looking and have broken arms. In a long shot from a telephoto lens in a summer day, Gerri switched from a less typical rural scene to a carrying vegetable basket. She raised her head and closed her eyes to meet the light, the wind was blowing her hair, you can feel the calmness of this woman .
The film has some outstanding supporting roles. The director tells you in a playful dialogue that Kent, the harlequin who can never get out of his memory, seems to be absurd. And the old stingy big brother Ronnie, now there is only silence. He sat on the sofa and stopped moving. His empty expression told the audience that his ability to perceive the outside world had been reduced to a minimum. Under those sunken eye sockets, his eyes might have been like torches, but now they are so deep and terrifying, because there is no longer a living person. expect.
In the last scene, in the face of Tom's polite question, Mary, who has always been talkative, just responded simply. Of course, she knew that this was just a greeting from the owner. Then everyone continued their chatting and laughing as if they had fulfilled their due social obligations, and she was completely ignored by the family, except for the confidant, helpless and awkward glance with Ronnie, the widower who was also an outsider. other. The surrounding voices gradually faded, and Mary was separated from the world. Those eyes, once ambiguous, once sent in secret, once lost, and once very depressed, are now like dry wells in winter, without the slightest ripple.
The subtitles rose on the black screen, and another year passed, Mary was not Su Wenwan after all, standing outside the besieged city, her heart was ashes.
Mike Lee, who refuses to scratch the itch, is accurate and ruthless with every knife, maybe it's Mary, maybe it's Su Wenwan, maybe it's nobody, have you been stabbed?
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