Forget about the sensational soundtrack, the strange handling of the post-recording and the improvised sleight of hand, but see how Love to the End tackles this abstract theme: the relationship between the individuality and the universality of love - a profound Conflicts and amazing conversions possible. The director of the film simply didn't realize it, let alone present it and address it. In "Four Hundred Years", we can see fruitful efforts. How did Francis Coppola do it? Not to provide a logical ("logical" in the very narrow sense) explanation, which involves a chain of links. Instead, the strength of the two sides is enhanced to the extreme through artistic means, and each is on the verge of breaking.
I like the story, maybe the original novel is pretty good. But when it comes to the script alone, within the text, the various elements are not organically linked. The director just presented them there, put them there. When a man dresses a woman, the lover says to his mistress: "I'm jealous of your socks, it can be with you all the time, but I can't." "Are you still jealous of my shoes?" "Yes , because they took you away from me." How touching! This should be shot as an impenetrable and deep scene, but the actual effect is completely unworthy of the profound tension of the text (the relationship between love and jealousy, possession). In the cheap clothes and the thoughtless close-up shots, all I see is the intertwined corps, and there is no life in it.
Beyond that, the era of the war doesn't have any organic effect in the story that illuminates it at all. We can only see the most superficial and superficial denial. During the war years, the hero and heroine enjoyed the happiness of being together in the air defense alarm. In times of peace, they experienced inner strife and war. Compared with The English Patient's reflection on the theme of "ownership" shared by extramarital affairs and war events, the director of this film once again shows his mediocrity. Since the extramarital affair story itself has reached the border of customs and morals, why did it retreat at the end, emphasizing to the audience that the woman who betrayed her husband was a good person?
Melville's "Father Leon Mohan" is also about a fierce battle between the love of God and the love of the individual. But he wasn't just looking for a big reunion. Just after the conversion, the heroine's trial has just begun. "The ease of repentance makes me sad." Isn't that the case with the hero? If we see him as a perfect priest, a saint who does not need repentance, we are wrong. He is not a bit tempted by the beautiful, simple, sincere, and thinking heroine? Subtle, deep love, doomed to be impossible from the start, just makes religious piety stand out from the background of all mundane (and abnormal) backgrounds.
Many of Melville's excellent, heart-wrenching films are based on not-so-insightful, but not-so-good novels. When adapting a script, he would buy two novels, one for reading and one for deleting and adding. Where can there be a completely humbled original adaptation? There are only a few excellent novels that are suitable for film and television. No matter how they are remade, the quality will not be too bad. For most literary works, if the film director does not try to re-interpret it from his own perspective, if the director wants to be free from the burden of thinking, then the audience can only get a pile of garbage, at least tasteless.
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