The most profound and touching thing about this film is the pain. The pain of loss, the pain of enduring, the pain of missing, even happiness, is painful. In this film, the male protagonist Dexiu (played by Huang Zhengmin) is used to interpret these pains alone. When Deok-soo was a little boy, he experienced the pain of loss in the Korean War, losing his father and sister; growing up was always accompanied by poverty, because of poverty, he dropped out of school, lost his choice, lost the joy of family reunion, and finally only He was able to travel far away to go to West Germany to mine; when he was middle-aged, he went to the Vietnam battlefield again and again; when he was old, facing an international metropolis, he had no choice but to sell the store after struggling.
In the 126-minute film, Dexiu expressed these pains bit by bit with all his demeanor, and deepened them bit by bit. From the cry of a young boy and his youth when he went to dig in West Germany, to the silence of middle-aged soldiers in Vietnam and old age, the cry is heartbreaking, the silence is low, and fate has tormented him over and over again. After all the torment, he has come to understand that he is submissive and never gives up his efforts. Whenever the hardships of life and the ups and downs of fate are revealed through Dexiu's tears, we can always resonate deeply. Although our experience is not as bad as his, the feeling of struggling in the hardship is identical.
Who can understand whose tears? War, poverty, separation of life and death, children who grow up in such an environment are obviously different from those who grew up in times of peace. The film spanned more than half a century, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and internationalization and globalization unfolded in turn. Having experienced these, Dexiu has strong feelings, which is completely different from his younger siblings and children Wen Tun. In the end, he earned peace and prosperity for them, but in the end, he hugged his father's clothes and cried. He failed to get a return commensurate with his efforts, and no one understood him. His sister has never been sensible enough; his mother tacitly sacrificed him; his wife did not stand up to defend him in front of his children; and his children were people of different eras from him. Between them, there is an insurmountable gulf. No one saw their generation cry when they were rescued from the mine disaster, and no one knew that he was writing to his wife the letter "Our generation has experienced this so that our next generation will not experience it again" Before, he saved his life in the explosion on the Vietnam battlefield, but the money he just received turned into ashes in an instant. He doesn't say it, doesn't want people to know it, and doesn't expect anyone other than his father to understand. He doesn't care about getting enough in return. For him, the family gathers together in peace and happiness, without worrying about food and clothing. A lifelong dream.
But deep down in his heart, he was so lonely that he believed that only his father could understand him, and maybe that was the case. It was his father who asked him to do this. He spent his life to complete the task that his father gave him. Those wailing, those great frustrations and pains, can only be comforted by his father, because he is a man, just like his father. , is a man in hard times.
If this film is about the endurance and perseverance of people, especially men, in those difficult years, it does it almost perfectly, even if it's a bit sensational. If what it wants to say is the cruelty of those historical events, then this movie can also give people a deep feeling, not only Dexiu, but also the scene of thousands of people looking for relatives in the second half, there is a sense of returning to the scene, on TV Those scenes of family searches that are suspected to be documents, the real and natural feelings are enough to make people cry.
After watching this movie, I felt enlightened, and in retrospect, it didn't have any profound arguments, but it was unforgettable.
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