Maybe it's because of some unpredictable eccentricity and romantic unknowability that makes love charming. As a kind of intimacy ruler, it measures the mutual fit between lovers and the complementarity of the soul to some extent. However, when love tends to collapse, the impact of this world's most delicate emotion on people is always full of hidden cruelty and pain. When love and goodbye gradually became a common combination, people began to seek healing, hoping that these emotions could be separated from the past along with time.
However, the healing process is not always satisfactory, so "Blue Jay" is like an emotional slice with a lyrical flavor, showing the pain and relief in the healing process.
Jim and Amanda met in the supermarket. They each carried shopping baskets, and they greeted each other without knowing what to say. Panicked and embarrassed, they use repeated tones and sneer to defuse their predicaments—they fell in love so passionately at the age of 20, and now have separate lives, all 22 years later.
What kind of atmosphere was that? The person you used to think of as your life is now always the name of another person. In this cafe called "Blue Jay", the two decided to catch up. The embarrassment and sneering continued. The two people were talking incomprehensibly. In the interval when they lowered their heads to stir the coffee, they both tried to break the embarrassing situation, but it was so difficult. It was a 22-year estrangement.
So they decided to walk on the streets of their childhood. He bought her the fondant fudge she once had. She and he replayed the childhood games in the supermarket 20 years ago. Making fun of the shop owner of the young couple, everything seemed to become easier, and the two could finally talk in a normal tone by the lake.
The two seemed to be doing well. She was married to a man with two children, but the life of taking care of them only every other week seemed comfortable to her. "I'm fine. I'm working on repairing houses. I'm married to a job, and I'm very stable." He smiled reluctantly. They all seemed to see the clue, and that kind of obsessive cover-up could not escape each other's eyes after all. Jim's business collapsed and his mother died. This time he came back to tidy up the house and clean up his mother's belongings; Amanda has been taking medicine to resist the depression of life. Unsatisfactory sigh of relief.
The whitewashed reality always wears a seal that wants to hide it, showing their respective desires to forget the past, but it is a near-absolute impossibility, because those pictures once existed so clearly.
The two came to Jim's house, and in front of them were the novels they had read together when they were children, the long gown he wore in a fall in high school, a box of love letters he wrote for her, and the middle-aged performance they recorded together. In a time of sitcom, everything reappears with an eerie familiarity. The two decided to do it all over again, repeating the drama twenty years ago in the way of games. The two put on their childhood clothes, played their favorite music at that time, danced, sang, hugged freely in the room, For a moment, they seemed to be really fascinated between the reality and the past, unwilling and unwilling to escape, although they had tried so hard to paralyze themselves and deceive each other with the distorted reality, but now, in this place will eventually pass away. At midnight in the winter, this carnival with a bit of elegy has completed the temporary redemption of the two people. At this moment, they finally recognized the existence of the past, recognized all the good things that existed in the past, and recognized that the past would not collapse like smoke and dust as they thought.
The carnival was so intense that they embraced, but finally stopped just as they were about to kiss. The two were silent, and finally ended all the excitement with this second of reason. He and she frowned again, thinking about the pain of their lives. The two still returned to their respective lives, and went their separate ways without any worries. The joy of a night became the sacrifice of a certain life.
The two parted in front of the supermarket where they reunited, as if nothing had happened.
In a broader sense, what the film wants to express is probably the approval and re-acceptance of all past emotions. To a certain extent, the film struggles to resist some kind of chicken soup dogma like "time can solve everything", so the escape and avoidance of the past no longer become reasonable.
"Blue Jay" depicts a love disciplined by time in black and white. Separation, collision, dissolution, farewell, like a lyric poem, it redefines another possibility of love for memory: love is love, even if you escape, the past is not like smoke.
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