April is a second-rate actress who is unwilling to be ordinary, Frank is a salesman who is struggling to work, and both of them are going back and forth between unwilling reality and self-esteem dreams. Their combination is simple and classic, making them an outstanding couple in the eyes of everyone. In fact, they quarrel fiercely, and they reconcile warmly, time and time again. Frank cheated, with a typist whom he hardly knew. This was his way to fight back against the troubled life and bored work. April hopes that she can go to Paris and start a new life. She will no longer be an ordinary housewife, but a good wife and mother who supports her husband in finding his dream and self-fulfilling. At first, they were very excited about this plan, although friends and neighbors thought it was naive but attractive. It’s a pity that the good times didn’t last long. April found out that she was pregnant, and Frank got the chance to be promoted again. The reality played with them again. On the one hand, April resented the shattered dream, and on the other hand hated Frank's compromise and withdrawal, she began to struggle hysterically. Rebelling and trying to escape the suffocation of ordinary life, until the end, she herself took away the untimely child and strangled her own contradictory life.
I think many people can find their own shadows in this couple, ordinary and unwilling to be ordinary, want to complete an extraordinary life but indulge in children, warm up their cowardice, and watch their dreams in unwilling despair. slide. Life entered its thirties, as if life no longer belonged to itself. It faded its shining brilliance in the exhaustion for family, children and other trivial matters. Life without the protection of dreams began to crack and peel, until it was riddled with holes and turned into a pool. Crumbs.
The quarrel between April and Frank is always so horrible, as if the next moment, one of them will be unable to control his mania, rushing over with a knife to cut off the other's arrogant and ruthless arrogance. But letting go of the possibility of this impulse, I can feel their deep love for each other from their "deep love and hatred" quarrel. But in the face of reality, what is love?
Another wise point of the director is that he arranged for a neighbor's highly educated but mentally unsound son to pierce the window paper between April and Frank. A lot of real thoughts came out of this crazy mouth. For this couple, especially April: the crazy people who were abandoned by this society are the ones who truly understand themselves. This cannot but be said to be a great irony.
I like the performance of the two protagonists very much. I feel the same with the characters' struggle and pain in the contradictory vortex, but I don't want to give this story full marks, because I am afraid of such truthfulness, and I am afraid that I will eventually repeat their mistakes. If you refuse to believe it, it won't come true, that's great.
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