Louis pulls meals from the refrigerator, eats them, washes his forks, and flips through Sudoku in the newspaper over the monotonous weather forecast. Addie lingered at the door of Louis's house, turned, turned back, hesitated, and finally knocked on the neighbor's door. After a few timid greetings, she asked Louis, "Would you like to make time to sleep with me at night?"
To a certain extent, love may be the most paradoxical emotion that exists among human beings. It is complex, perverse, and difficult to fathom, and at the same time, it is accompanied by infinite romance and tenderness. It may come quietly without you noticing it, or it may It disintegrates like smoke when you squeeze hard, it's mixed with lust, possession, sex and hormones, and it's always chanted "how brave it takes to drive to the end of the world". From this level, "Soul of the Night" is an absolutely heterogeneous existence. It tells about love, but it always keeps the audience unconsciously estranged from the word love. The color is purified to near transparent.
Eddie and Louis, who are in their 60s, have been neighbors for half a lifetime, but their understanding of each other is only a courtesy chat when they meet each other on weekdays. Louis lives alone, and every day worth of entertainment time is nothing more than chatting with old friends in the corner coffee shop every afternoon. Addie was also alone, and after she had asked Louis the startling question, she continued: "Long nights are always the hardest, and I just wish there was someone I could chat with and talk to at night. ." Thus, the abrupt question from the previous sentence actually gave birth to a kind of cruel taste, which came from the inability to do anything about loneliness. Louis began to pack his clothes and slippers every night, tidied up his neckline before going out like a young date, and walked to Addie's house. He kept dodging the eyes of his neighbors, avoiding the crowd, and knocking on Addie's back door. When the two old people were lying on the bed, talking one after the other, the life that had been killed by loneliness for a long time began to be gradually reshaped. They talked about their usual hobbies, past feelings, and the days when they were young were brought up and reminisced little by little. Louis talked about the betrayal and the broken family in the past, his tone was flat and gentle, it was a reconciliation with his heart that lasted for 30 years. Eddie talks about her lovely little daughter and the night she lost her in a car accident, and although her eyes are still wet, time and loneliness have healed all choking. They listened to each other, groaned, and then fell asleep, peaceful and quiet.
If it is a very imagery expression to accompany each other into a dream, then the intrusion of Addie's little grandson Jamie has undoubtedly become a kind of compensation for life between the two. Aidi's son temporarily handed over his son to his mother's care due to many troubles in career and relationship. Therefore, the picture of two elderly people living with five or six-year-old children has become a retrospective of their past lives. Louis played with Jamie with a train toy he bought for his daughter early on; the three went out camping together, eating fluffy toasted marshmallows around a campfire; they adopted a dog, whom Jamie named Bonnie. This kind of life scene like a family of three has become the evidence of mutual soul integration. When the film tells the two people to relieve their loneliness, their interaction with the surrounding environment also becomes a very interesting part: Louis can't stand the ridicule and jokes of old friends, to go to town with Eddie arm in arm Dinner at the restaurant, and then planning an exciting trip together with the two; Eddie goes from a constant obstructive confrontation with her son, to a peaceful and temporary separation from Louis, to finally dialing Louis' phone late at night. From the point of view of competing with secular and dogmatic concepts, this film is very similar to "The Bridge of the Dead Dream", but compared with the former's fatal grief, "Soul of the Night" depicts the barriers that lie between each other. Light and slack, as if between frowning eyebrows, all the karmic hindrances appear to be nothing.
The movie sets the ages of the two protagonists at an ancient age, which itself has an indescribable subtlety. In the days of waiting for the death of their fingers, they could not predict the plot of life: the sudden darkness, or the gentle luck of accompany each other like a long night. In the age when passion and anxiety have faded, any small luck can taste the most authentic taste.
"Soul of the Night" is extremely calm and pure, and it articulates the height of love that is rarely seen on the screen, without violent collisions, quarrels, relief and reconciliation. It's as tranquil as a few poems I accidentally read, about consolation, about companionship, just like at the end of the film, Louis's cell phone suddenly lights up in the dark camera, and Eddie on the other side of the phone asked: "Louis, I How can I sleep peacefully?"
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