- "Peachy Apartment"
Foreword: I have always suffered from a strange disease, calling myself "Black and White Movie Viewing Difficulty Disorder". A long time ago, I found that when I saw black and white films, I lost my mind and couldn't concentrate on appreciating it. Because black and white movies are too difficult to get into, and they also exude an old-fashioned feeling, which made me sneer. "Dr. Strangelove", which failed several times in the film, has almost made up my mind and raised the white flag for black and white movies.
However, it is also Billy White's work, "Peachy Apartment" is also a black and white film, but I am a black and white film disorder patient. pleasure and satisfaction.
The protagonist of the film is an insurance company employee. Like tens of thousands of other employees, his performance is mediocre. However, he has a special capital that other colleagues in the same position do not have: a single apartment of his own. And his method is also very simple, that is, to lend the apartment to his boss, as a golden house to hide his love, to satisfy his boss's desire to have sex. All he wanted was an easier promotion opportunity than others, that's all.
As the story progresses so far, it is not difficult for the audience to notice that, just like the original English name, the core of the plot always revolves around that "Apartment".
In that apartment, there are too many things connected: one end is the release of the boss’s sensuality and the convenience of coming and going without a trace; the other end is the habitat of the protagonist and the hope of gambling for a better life in the future; even There is another end, which is connected with the guilt and shame of the elevator girl and the dream of the protagonist. The back-and-forth collision and friction between the three, and the sparks that erupted, gave rise to this Oscar-winning film that defeated Hitchcock's "Psycho" that year.
From a work point of view, the protagonist is by no means a good insurance worker: he uses his apartment as a bargaining chip for promotion, increases his competitive capital for higher positions and salaries, and even achieves this goal at one point. This point is believed to make many viewers look down on this young man: Che, he didn't rise up by relying on the sidelines, he is simply a villain.
However, they ignored that the protagonist's move was just an accident: due to his kindness, he lent the key to one of his superiors, and the situation got out of hand, and it turned into this vicious circle like a bad deal. And relying on this promotion and salary increase is just a smooth sailing after the protagonist makes sacrifices. I believe that outside the movie, countless nights, the protagonist also stood outside his own apartment, waiting patiently, enduring the baptism of the biting cold wind.
The story should have developed like this: after the protagonist borrowed an apartment to several bosses, he gained a good impression of them, and the bosses jointly recommended him for promotion and salary increase. But then, Billy White cleverly devised a plot: the protagonist's dream lover (actually equivalent to the goddess of diaosi) turned out to be his boss's mistress.
As a result, the success of business and the failure of love, in desperation, make the protagonist start to reflect: the promotion qualification that he dreams of is just a cheap behavior that can be changed easily in the eyes of the boss. In the same way, the person who he was so desperately pursuing committed suicide for the bad man of his boss - even more ironically, it happened in his own home. Are you just too incompetent?
Therefore, in the latter part of the film, we discovered the transformation of the protagonist: he gave up the opportunity for promotion, no longer bowed his head to the powerful boss, and decided to fly away and leave this place. At that moment, in the eyes of the protagonist, the peach-colored apartment is no longer a place for the boss to have fun, but a love apartment where he can meet the elevator girl even by accident. His departure is not the abandonment and escape of memories, but a kind of waiting and protection. He believes that even if some things only exist in his heart, they can support him to go on.
The ending of the movie is bright, the elevator girl Bai Fumei abandoned her boss Gao Fushuai and "dealed (communication)" with the protagonist of Diaosi. But this is an artistic creation after all, and I prefer to believe that the elevator girl did this because she is not Bai Fumei, and she is just a diaosi.
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