We don't know anything about what really matters: 17-year-old boy's life recognition
Related videos mentioned in the article:
"When We Were Seventeen" (France, directed by André Techynet)
"Seventeen-year-old bicycle" (Mainland China, director Wang Xiaoshuai)
"Call Me By Your Name" (Italy, directed by Luca Guadagnino)
What does 17 mean to a boy. Two boys living in the Pyrenees in the French film "When We Were Seventeen": Tom and Damian were born at the right time, and Damian, who was in love, was involuntarily attracted by Tom with a wild and precocious silhouette. , and Tom has the responsibility of growing up in his heart. Once the awakening of lust conflicts with this social responsibility as a man, Tom, who is actually a boy, will struggle against it. The heavy snow, hail, torrential rain, and dense fog in the Pyrenees created an almost mythical feeling for the game between the two boys and themselves, from winter to summer, the chronological changes of nature and the growth of the boy's soul Tight fit. The age of 17 is the age of dreams. Director Tessine gave the two boys the most precious gift with almost compassion: the growth and transformation brought about by the union of body and mind.
"Seventeen-Year-Old Bicycle" directed by Wang Xiaoshuai also focuses on two dreaming teenagers. A bicycle has become the sustenance for the teenagers to unleash their youthful dreams: Xiaogui, a rural boy, needs to prove that he can be self-reliant; what about Xiaojian, a Beijing boy, picking up girls No matter whether he smokes, fights, or races, it's just to prove that he is a mature man. The age of 17 is the most difficult juncture for a boy to reach a man. Even if his nose is bruised and his face is bruised, the two boys are still in pain and proud.
Therefore, when I heard Elio say "how ignorant I am about the things that really matter", I couldn't help but be attracted by the intelligence of this young man who was different from his peers: at the age of 17, at the age of 17, a boy of the same age is unaware. When he was young and restless, Elio had realized that some things might not exist in our common knowledge field, or the teenager had discovered that the unknowable was our own existence (this realization of Elio and the family in which he grew up) The educational atmosphere is closely related, and the film deliberately sets up an elio to discuss the details of medieval knight literature with his parents). And what is the really important thing, the answer is actually unspeakable, because once it touches this, the existing human language and words will become extremely impoverished.
Elio's unspeakable Daobai hit Oliver, and the two people who were in the same heart knew each other. However, Oliver's temperament is more similar to Tom in "When We Were Seventeen", and the one with a strong male identity in a same-sex couple is usually more loyal to the male norm in the mainstream heterosexual culture. Although Oliver couldn't help but have a skin-to-skin relationship with elio, along the way, Oliver obviously lacked confidence in himself and elio, which also made Oliver's behavior and the final marriage decision to make many viewers embarrassed. As a film about homosexuality, for most moviegoers who have not had real same-sex love or same-sex experience, how to make them understand a man's affection for a boy, how to explore from this The relationship between same-sex emotion and physical sex, and how to understand the self-contradiction and collision in the process of same-sex love, the above cognitions and findings, for heterosexual audiences, especially for those who have a high degree of heterosexual male character identification For male audiences, it must also be a difficult psychological process of self-challenge. The director must have realized this. Because of this, the above lines should be a kind reminder set by the director for heterosexual moviegoers in a wider sense, that is: do not insist on whether you like it or not, but please hold awe for the unknown areas you do not understand. heart of.
Although Oliver is more confused about same-sex identity, he can resonate with a smart boy like elio, which means that he also has a keen understanding. The casual catchphrase "later" inadvertently revealed this man's unique understanding of life: some seemingly tricky things are better to let go. Life can be complicated or simple. Seemingly unsolvable questions, time is actually the best answer. Heraclitus' "The Fragments of the Universe" has such a sentence that Oliver said: the passage of the river does not mean that everything is difficult to reproduce because of endless changes, but it is a metaphor that some things can remain eternal in the change.
I think this is also the most important reason why Oliver can be recognized by Elio's father. The father not only observed Elio's strange affection for Oliver, but even let go to create more opportunities for the contact between the two boys. Let's review the father's soothing rhetoric for elio: From my perspective, most parents would want the whole thing to pass quickly and pray that their children don't repeat it. But....I'm not that kind of parent. We are forced to strip too much from ourselves in order for us to heal faster...As we age, the less we can give each other with each new relationship. Many people don't even feel it so that they don't feel it... The sadness is greater than the death of the heart, what a sad life this will be.
I think that Elio's father's tolerance does not come from his status as a historian, but from his ability to see the limitations of human existence in the vicissitudes of history, and therefore to pour out deep sympathy for the shortness and fragility of life It was this compassion that gave my father the wisdom to access life.
The last thing to mention is an old photo-like sense of history and a dreamlike atmosphere created in the film. The nostalgia in "Call Me By Your Name" doesn't just echo a dream-like past, in fact, the writer and director are very clever to seek inspiration from ancient Greek art allusions. The sinking and floating Greek human statue in the river is a nostalgia for a star-studded era and a tribute to the concept of human art in the Greek era. Huang Yang from Fudan University's paper "The Bloom of Heavenly Love in the World: Homosexuality in Ancient Greece" discusses the prosperous bodybuilding fashion in Greek times and respects the aesthetic sense of male homosexuality on the basis of this concept. The film also mentions Praxiteles, one of the representatives of classical male sculptors, through the mouth of the historian's father. French writer Yourcenar's historical novel "Memoirs of Hadrian" wrote about Emperor Hadrian's grief for Antinous, a gay couple who drowned unfortunately. Laxiteles built a vivid image of his beloved Antinous, and the beautiful young Antinous was carved, stared, described, and remembered. For Oliver and elio, although oliver passed away, in the most prosperous years of his life, his image and breath were acquired by the young elio, and the latter wrote repeatedly in his later life to fix it, with his own Name the other party and confirm it by calling the other party's name. It is said that you have me and I have you. This is replicated thousands of times, so that the beauty of the combination of two people can be immortalized.
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