tree is a peculiar image, which symbolizes the continuation of life and carries eternal memories. The shadows of the trees are mottled, the wind moves and the shadows move, the city, you and me, can you stop and linger, the beauty of a tree!
——A movie composed of keywords such as "universe, life, family" in the inscription must be a movie with depth, breadth and thickness. A film that rises directly from father-son affection and family ethics to the origin of life, a philosophical analysis of existence and nothingness, and the director Malik, this is not only a film, but also a film poem, a philosophical poem.
Turning a movie into a poem, or turning a poem into a movie, is the trademark of director Malik, and it belongs to the film temperament of director Malik. Every grid and every shot in the movie can be taken out as a wallpaper, which is so beautiful and quiet that it makes people fascinated. From the movie poster, you can see the director's confidence in this. The beauty of sunlight, sunflowers, ocean, trees, and the earth is vividly displayed by Malik's poetic lens.
"It is where the branches of the tree of life stretch. We see unexplored light, vast nebulae, moving stars, planets before they take shape, sun and moon blocked by black storms, life-giving streaks of lightning , throbbing pristine lakes, prehistoric plants and animals, slowly dancing jellyfish, hammerhead sharks, dinosaurs living on the riverbank, the eyes of a fetus, and most importantly, a newborn child.”
The first three points of the film One section interspersed and juxtaposes life on earth with human life. On the other hand, there is the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang-Cambrian-Jurassic-Cretaceous. We see magma eruptions in the sea, changes in the earth, and growth of vegetation, until the dinosaurs. , and then to the age of mankind. On one side is human gestation: magnified images of cells, bacteria and embryos. The origin of the earth and the birth of small human life are the same. With the changing times of the earth, human beings are also multiplying from generation to generation. This is a story full of metaphors that touches you through the evolution of time. This piece of opera-style background classical music is majestic, making people feel like being agitated in the sea, drifting with the current, ups and downs!
After that, the director focused the philosophical meaning of the origin of life on the trivial things of an ordinary family. Emotional focus is used between father and son, mother and son, and husband and wife in a family. A father's love is like a mountain, and a mother's love is like a sea. The veteran father played by Brad Pitt represents the savage cruelty in the laws of nature, while the mistress of the family represents the graceful tenderness in human society. The three sons grew up with very different parenting styles, each with their own troubles.
There are two passages in the film that directly show the sexual budding feelings of father and son and son. One is that the father is lying on the bottom of the car repairing the car, and the son slowly walks to the jack that supports the car, hovering silently around. Small mouth muttered: "God, let him die, God, let him die." At this point, my heart hangs in my throat, because this jack is not only supporting the car that my father repairs, but also supporting my father's life and even the entire film. This is again a typical Oedipus complex. Only by killing my father can I establish myself as an independent self, a subject. But at the same time, this I is forever lacking, forever lacking, forever incomplete. Perhaps this also laid the foreshadowing of the younger son's suicide a few years later.
Another is about a son in his sexual initiation period, with a blushing forehead and a fever, who sneaks into a neighbor's bedroom to rummage through her underwear. But instead of being ashamed of what he did, when he lifted that nightgown into the sun like a holy robe, and stole it and let it drift down the river, Instead, they will smile knowingly as they marvel at the beauty of the image.
Although it is only a small family, it represents thousands of families and carries the childhood memories of most people. Although it is only a small family, it can reflect a cosmic view - contradictions and coexistence. Although it was only the loss of one life, a drop in the ocean, the death of a loved one—the death of a 19-year-old brother, brought disaster to the family, was a bigger catastrophe than the explosion that opened up the flood.
While affirming that the film has experimental breakthroughs in audio-visual language and expanded the extension of the film at the macro level, for individuals, the film’s breakthroughs in some aspects still seem to be too hard. First of all, the father is set to have three sons in the plot, and the back and forth switching of the camera is too frequent and trivial, sometimes it is very difficult to tell which son did what triggered the causal relationship afterward. Second, the director abandoned the ordinary linear narrative and replaced the usual storytelling with flashback memories and intermittent dialogue, which is very thoughtful, but also exacerbates the incomprehension of the film. Finally, I want to talk about the film is filled with a lot of metaphors, metaphors, symbols and camera voices, and the complicated meaning of life. Including the center of the screen in each chapter, there is a constantly circling orange sky light. Of course this can be seen as Malik's addition to the thousands of years that were omitted in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - a single edit that takes us from prehistory to the space age. At the end of the film, on the beach of the ocean of memory, the family gathers, the adult son meets his young parents and hugs them, and he sees himself and his brother when he was a child, as if he were a psychic world. The sea ebbs and flows, and it is the one that always stands silently and stands forever, the small tree of life.
2011-9-18
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