The heroine's dream in the short film is divided into four stages, including three-stage repeated dreams, plus a dream within a dream.
The structure of the film itself is a deeper and multi-layered nightmare. Even the realistic parts at the beginning and end are a hot and dizzying dream created by the director.
Until the heroine sits in a chair and closes her eyes, all she has experienced is the reality of the afternoon. She first picked up the flowers on the ground and walked to the door of the house, and saw the back of a man. There are already men's tentative attempts to invade the world of women. The woman puts the picked bouquet between her legs and falls asleep. The delicate flowers are not only a reference to women themselves, but also a metaphor for concepts such as sex, female private parts, and chastity. Interestingly, the flower is placed on the ground in the title sequence by a stiff arm without an owner, whose arm is it? My personal opinion is that the person who places the flowers in this scene is the person who gives them the essence and character of women, which is God himself.
In the first dream, the mirror man took away the flower that symbolized the woman herself. The heroine sensed the male invasion and felt threatened, and the knife ran from the dining table in reality to the stairs in the dream. The house also began to malfunction: the woman walked up the stairs and entered the room through the window. She found the knife on the bed with her face reflected on it. This knife is not only a metaphor for male power, but also has the attributes of a mirror man: limiting women's personalities from their own perspective.
The hostess hid the knife and put away the phone, but her self-consciousness had begun to become disorganized, so she swayed and swirled in the window and the stairs, and her thoughts were blurred. Finding that the record player had not been turned off by herself, she removed the needle again, trying to regain control of herself. And the key to decoding self-consciousness is kept in the mouth, the most secret place.
In the second dream, the mirror man walks into the room and deeply interferes with the inner world of women. Placing flowers on the bed symbolizes sexual seduction and control, and flowers are a metaphor for sex and female chastity. The image of the heroine then teleported on the stairs with a dull gaze, which represented the further withdrawal and paralysis of women's self-awareness. After waking up, the flower on the bed turns into a dagger, and the heroine realizes that sexual seduction and manipulation are the weapons to hurt and coerce herself. The heroine spit out the key again, but the key turned into a knife: it turns out that the law of unlocking self-awareness is to defend yourself with the same tough attitude as men.
In the third dream, the key to open the door of a woman's heart turned into a dagger. The three-stage women sat around to grope for the mystery of the key, and finally confirmed that they must pick up the dagger and put an end to the self that was once at the mercy of others. In just a few short steps of holding the knife and stabbing, the director switched five scenes. The female protagonist stepped through the desert, soil, grass, road and carpet successively. It can be seen that the scope of time and space where women's consciousness is lost is wide, and women find their own way. It is also extremely difficult and long.
The three-stage repeated dream woke up, the man appeared and kissed himself, but the heroine's reaction was the same as when she saw the dagger, full of alertness and defensiveness. The two walked into the bedroom, and the male protagonist covered the mirror that reflected his own image. The reason why mirror people represent men is because women always see their own image under their feedback and requirements, they don't know what they should be like, they can only let the mirror - the male observer - decide their own image . Men, on the other hand, can get rid of it at will when they face the reflection of themselves in the mirror.
The man began to touch the female protagonist's body, and the flowers on the bed suddenly turned into daggers, echoing the second dream. Women refuse to be sexually enslaved and oppressed, wielding knives at men who try to control them, shattering the mirrors that shape their patterns of thought and behavior.
It seems that the mirror is broken and swept away by the sea, but when the man returns to his home in reality, he finds that the heroine died in the broken mirror. I personally have two interpretations of this ending.
On the one hand, trying to undermine the control of a male-dominated society will inevitably lead to a dangerous situation for oneself, and one may try his best to tear apart a corner of male-dominated oppression, but he will also be persecuted by irresistible powerful forces and social laws.
On the other hand, when the traditional perspective of men controlling everything is broken, the female personalities formed and survived in this system will also be disintegrated. The old-fashioned female consciousness has been eliminated, but a new female consciousness has not yet been established; under this situation, women will face more struggles and greater predicaments until the real awakening comes.
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