Original: Peng Yuan
If I had to describe my perception of the movie "Shame" with one feeling, I would definitely choose Arabica. When the coffee has just entered the mouth and has not yet flowed into the esophagus, the bitterness will wrap the entire tongue, as if the heart is soaked in the bitter sea. After it entered the belly, wait a little, and the lips and tongues were filled with a fragrance mixed with cocoa beans and Nile water. That feeling can make people's hearts sweet for a year.
A case caused by a water pipe
Tony, one of the protagonists of the film, is a 46-year-old Lebanese Christian who runs a small auto repair shop with his pregnant wife. Although their lives are not rich, but compared with many people living in this country, such as Palestinian refugees, their lives are really happy, and their unborn daughter adds more color to this little happiness. . But misfortune often prefers this kind of family and likes to come unexpectedly. It's just that the misfortune of Tony's family is a little different from others, because it comes from another unfortunate person, a Palestinian refugee.
Yasser is the film's other protagonist, the refugee who brought misfortune to Tony's family. He was a contractor for a construction company. Although he was hired illegally, he got the job because of his integrity and high work efficiency. One day, the old master was working near the construction site, but unexpectedly, he was drenched by the waste water discharged from the illegally built drainage pipe of Tony's house, so he went upstairs and told the crazy Christian believer of the matter, hoping that the matter could be solved reasonably, but Tony's image was Like a stubborn donkey. No, Yasser followed his previous temper and rectified the drain pipe on his own initiative. After Tony found out, without saying a word, he smashed the new water pipe with a hammer, and stubbornly believed that he had been humiliated, and only the old refugee himself could be forgiven by apologizing.
Tragedy arises from this. At this moment, Arabica was only barely touching the lips.
fist and court
Like all the old men in the world, Yasser is someone who doesn't want to apologize easily. Tony is also like the young people in the world, never willing to admit defeat easily. So, when the manager brought Yasser to the auto repair shop and asked him to apologize to the young man, he naturally closed his lips and refused to open his mouth. The young man couldn't wait, he said a lot of ugly things, and he couldn't think of the last sentence "I hope the salon will eradicate you all." This completely angered the old man, and a fist fell heavily on the young man's stomach.
The punch sent Tony to the hospital and Yasser to court. It's just that the young man was carried away, and the old man took his own initiative. No one would doubt Yasser's integrity and kindness.
Pride is a common problem for young people and old people, so in the first court session, neither of them hired a lawyer, thinking that victory was at hand, but each lacked reasonable and strong evidence and had to wait for the second court session.
Eat a cut, grow a wisdom, the second time he entered the court, the lawyer appeared. As we all know, lawyers are the most shameless people in the world, and they can do anything to win. If the original lawyer and the accused lawyer happened to be a father and daughter, then this trial would be even better. After all, a civil war is far more interesting than an external fight. Tony and Yasser are caught in a father-daughter battle.
Everything is going on normally, except that Lebanese Christians and Palestine refugees are fighting a lawsuit, and it is unavoidable to fall into political disputes. This seems to be destiny, and people cannot change it.
Before long, the old father began to recklessly open the history of Yasser like a curtain, and at the same time , the painful memories of the infighting in the Arab countries were also revealed and revealed to the world without reservation. It felt like a freshly scabbed wound, torn open reluctantly and then scorched by the sun. For a man of integrity, this is too painful. Both Yasser and Tony were suffering in their hearts.
Protests, riots, marches, and protests, riots, and marches ignited a wave of Palestinian and Lebanese nationalism in and outside the courtroom , fueled by lawyers, as their case ignited a wave of nationalism. In the end, even the president came to persuade them. Unfortunately, the meat eaters have never cared about true justice. What they want is only stable power and status. They are afraid of turmoil and civil war, not loving the people of the land, but worrying about losing themselves. Power and money in hand. Therefore, Yasser's boss can say "We support the Palestinians" without shame in front of the media . After all, this is always the greatest political correctness in Arab countries. Naturally, he has to take advantage of this to win some people's hearts and deceive some votes, and then in a blink of an eye, he can Fire him immediately. It is true that capitalists, like workers, have no fatherland.
Human blood steamed buns are indeed very fragrant, so there are always flies flying around, and no one can drive them away.
At this point, the coffee is flowing between the lips and the bitterness begins to spread.
good conflict
Before the third trial, the two faced suffering just like the society.
After the president's persuasion was invalid, the two drove away. The old refugee was probably really poor, and the broken car that came over could not start for a long time. Witnessing this scene, many young people who had already driven out of the car came back, got out of the car and helped the person who punched him to repair the car. Yasser showed a rare smile after Tony left. A person who has been struggling with life for half his life, a smile is not easy to find on his face, but a kind heart can always find another kind heart.
After crying in the middle of the night, Tony greeted Yasser at the repair shop. Unlike last time, this time it was Yasser who cursed, and Tony naturally gave him his fist. However, both of them already understood each other's meaning in their hearts: start with boxing and end with boxing.
According to Hegel, tragedy is the conflict of the good. Fortunately, the two felt each other's kindness before the tragedy was born.
At this moment, the coffee has entered the stomach, and the bitterness left in the mouth is mixed with the aroma of cocoa beans, hitting people like waves.
two hometowns
From having memories until death, we always have two hometowns, one is a hometown that is made from the remaining fragmented memories in our brains, and is constantly processed and shaped by imagination after leaving hometown; the other is a real existence, every time A hometown that has been eroded by time all the time.
Song Zhiwen, a poet of the Tang Dynasty, wrote in "Crossing the Han River": "The voice outside the mountains is broken, and the winter returns to the spring. It is more timid to be close to the hometown, and I dare not ask people who come." This poem is the truth of the two hometown attitudes. portraiture.
Indeed, the hometown is too far away in time, and we can’t help but be afraid that when imagination and reality collide directly, or even conflict, we will finally break the hometown landscape that has been shaped by decades of effort in our minds without any scruples. The hometown in childhood memories is as bitter as Arabic coffee, and the real hometown that has not been seen for a long time is as sweet as the milk of Aleppo.
lost world
"Don't ask me where I came from, my hometown is far away. Why wander? Wander far away, wandering?"
- Song "Olive Tree"
Hometown itself is the lost world, and it is from this that imagination can play its role. But if it is lost by the world for too long, the hometown will disappear, and finally become a distant place beyond imagination, so we can only wander far away.
Palestine and Lebanon, one has been invaded by foreign enemies and lost its homeland, the other has been in constant infighting, the wall of brothers, the war that took place in the two lands has not only caused many refugees in the political sense, but also left countless people like Tony and Yasir who lost their hometowns. " Memory Refugees".
After the three Middle East wars, the real homeland of countless Palestinian refugees no longer exists. They can only live in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and other places called "brother countries", which are really exotic places. The first generation of refugees is lucky, they They can still live with the nourishment of some memories of their homeland. The second, third, and even fourth and fifth generations of refugees are so unfortunate that they can only get a fragmentary understanding of their hometown from their predecessors, and it is already mixed with countless Imaginary virtual landscape. Over time, the accumulation of imagination has made the hometown a more illusory and exotic place. The real one has been lost and cannot be found. Just like Palestine today , there is no better word to describe it than the lost world .
Yasser is one of them who lives with memory, a person whose head is still alive in the lost world. He has been refusing to apologize to Tony because he is unwilling to compromise with reality - Palestinian liberation is almost impossible, and the return of refugees is far away. Yeah, how could a staunch idealist, a fighter who vowed his life to fight for the liberation of Palestine, bow his head so easily and admit defeat? From this point of view, he is still a young man, after all too many Arabs have already compromised. On the other hand, he is really a bad old man, stubborn, conservative, clinging to his memories and unwilling to let his imagination shape his new hometown.
The hometown is mostly beautiful elsewhere, but for Tony, the hometown is bloody and unforgettable. Because it cannot be recalled, imagination can play little role, but the question is, won't the retained memories form over time a new imaginary exotic that is far from reality? Obviously, the answer is no. At this time, the role of imagination is not to create new landscapes, but to maintain old landscapes to oppose time . time.
By the end we find out that Yasser and Tony are actually the same person. They are kind-hearted, upright, and a bit stubborn in temperament. They all fall into endless pain and become weak in life because of their unspeakable nostalgia and persistence in the memory of their hometown. The only difference is that Yasser was forced to become a "memory refugee" by the external environment, and Tony made his own choice.
Although Yasser and Tony are guarding their rusted memories like Grandet guarding money, they are reluctant to visit that lost world and try to maintain their dignity as a person. Is this kind of "near nostalgia more timid" feeling cowardly? Not necessarily, this kind of "timidity" naturally has a kind of respect for the mother culture and a deep love for the people of the hometown. Just like in the movie, Tony ended up back in Damour. Witnessing the homeland, he showed a long-lost smile, natural and kind, and the bloody memories also disappeared with the wind.
true death
At the end of the movie, the judge finally acquitted Yasser, and the two smiled at each other at the door of the court. It really meant that "the brothers who have crossed the robbery are here, and they will meet each other with a smile and lose their grudges" . At that moment, it really seemed that there was still some hope for Arab nationalism, and that the unity of the Arabs was not a fantasy.
However, time can wait for Yasser and Tony to reconcile, but it is difficult to wait for reconciliation and unity among Arab countries. When one day Palestine is forgotten by people all over the world, and no one lives with bitter memories like Yasser, will the definition of hometown change? At that time, the hometown became not only an imaginary foreign land, but also a real foreign land.
Without memory, people and their hometowns will go to true death.
That day is not too far away.
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