After thinking for a long time what title should I start, or summarizing this movie, I finally found a title that is too direct and interesting at the same time. It is interesting because "Should I live a real life or go to fantasy" is a song in the album "The Storm is Coming" at No. 43 Baojia Street, which is inexplicably appropriate.
After all, movies and music are still different expressions. Unlike the grief-stricken brother Wang Feng, Woody Allen's films tend to start from the absurd and express the core of tragedy in the form of comedy, so as to explore some kind of existentialism. Only this time, I felt that the movie seemed a bit "too real" and didn't quite feel the poignant irony that Woody Allen buried in it. Maybe I'm getting old, my focus has changed slightly, and I've become easily attracted and infected by the tragic meaning behind the plot. Of course, it's also possible that Woody Allen is really getting old.
Spoilers below...
Tangled life under the Ferris wheel
The whole story is actually quite cliché, and it is inseparable from the derailment plot that Woody Allen is used to writing. This time the protagonist is Ginny (Kate Winslet), who remarries to a man who works in an amusement park. This man named Hamdi and his ex-wife have a daughter, Carolina, who lost contact for many years. One day, he suddenly came to the door. It turned out that she was being chased by her ex-husband in the underworld. The return of her daughter suddenly became the focus of Hamdi's life, but it did not change the mess around Ginny. By chance, Ginny met the beach lifeguard Mickey and quickly confirmed the relationship. Ginny wanted to use this relationship to get out of her current life, but Mickey met Carolina and fell in love with her. At the end of the story, no one lived the life they dreamed of, and everyone returned to life.
From the script, the plot of the story is very ordinary, and the focus is on the shaping of the characters. In order to create a contrast, the director intentionally set the scene in an amusement park full of fantasy. Under the huge Ferris wheel, all the protagonists with different fates appeared.
The most important character is Ginny. In the movie, she is a troubled 40-year-old housewife whose life is full of bad things. A poor and poor financial situation, a son who is always making trouble, and a husband who he doesn't like. Not only that, she was an actress when she was young, but now she can only work as a waiter in a restaurant. She was always emotional, constantly complaining about life and working non-stop. Anyway, she just wanted to get out of the trouble at hand.
And that Mickey who is "both left and right", where is he attractive? He has the romantic nature that women like, as well as extraordinary insight, good at spotting women's weaknesses. He can see through Ginny's helplessness towards life at a glance, and by expressing a tone that is higher than life and unrealistic, he guides her into his dramatic life experience. It's hard to say that Mickey really has the talent as an artist, he just wants to do something to imbue himself with an artist's breath. This kind of person is destined to be easily empathetic.
There is another girl who loves fantasy in the movie, Carolina. She is a typical "vase" character. She is young, beautiful, and she does things out of tune, and it is easy for men to develop a desire for protection (green tea in the eyes of women). Nonetheless, in Woody Allen's films, such an image is specially "protected", and he is usually "open" to the role. In his shots, Carolina's role as a young girl is at best innocent and ignorant. Although she is in danger of being hunted down by her ex-husband, her life has few other pressures beyond that, and she has come out of a fantasy-filled past. Indeed, she lived a fairly real life compared to the others.
Speaking of Ginny's husband Hamdi, like Carolina, he lives a real life. Of course, his truth is based on incompetence. He was unable to do anything to improve his family's financial situation, but he was very masculine. He would only drink alcohol when he encountered problems, and he was habitually dependent on his wife. In fact, he has always been a fragile man. I think a big part of the reason Ginny couldn't find love in him was that Hamdi just needed a wife he could use and depend on, anyone. He knew that Ginny refused every time, and he asked her over and over again if she wanted to go fishing together, which proved that she was actually looking forward to the role of his wife, not Ginny.
Finally, a brief word about Ginny's son. This little boy is the most obvious dramatic factor in the film. For some reason, he likes to set fires anytime, anywhere, and maybe it means something to him. I guess it's a projective act of the little boy trying to get rid of his past, which he doesn't like being abandoned by his father. Plus, he's obsessed with watching movies, and as you might guess, he prefers fictional life to real life.
What is the line between reality and fantasy
How do you know if you are living a real life or a fantasy life? If the unsatisfactory life is simply regarded as the fault of the real life, then again, does the fantasy life never intervene in the present life? How can you know that the bad parts of reality are brought about by fantasy?
Looking back at the lives of the protagonists, you might wonder, what part went wrong? Love, marriage, life, reality and fantasy are all intertwined in it. It has to be said that sometimes fantasy life and real life cause and effect each other. For example, in Ginny, you can see that she fell from reality from fantasy at the beginning, and was forced to pursue fantasy from reality, and finally had to return to reality, and so on. In fact, she has long been unable to find the boundary between the two in her life. Just like the end of the movie, only the face of a woman who is tired of life is left. After being torn apart by both real and fantasy life, she was left with nothing but an empty shell.
Carolina represents a person who has gone from fantasy to real life, and there seems to be a possibility of seeing a certain "boundary" in her. But Woody Allen still brings her absurd past to life. This shows that the real life really exists objectively? How do you justify the objectivity of real life? Or to use an analogy, how do you know that you are not dreaming at the moment? Some people seem to be born with a "dramatic life" physique. No matter how ordinary life is, there will always be some unusual things mixed in, and life will be ups and downs because of this. I don't know whether such a dramatic life is worth envy or sympathy?
In the end, I can't tell the reason for the series of tragedies in the movie. Is real life inherently cruel, or the protagonists are too addicted to fantasy? Sometimes life is really cruel, like saying that the island where the protagonists live is going through a recession, Carolina's mother died, Ginny's husband abandoned her and her son, and other objective factors that made their lives unsatisfactory. . And sometimes, unrealistic fantasies can also bring a lot of harm to people, including Ginny's two derailments, Carolina's elopement with her underworld boyfriend, and so on.
No one can make it clear that the boundary between reality and fantasy may be separated by some kind of absurdity. This is a tragic life.
Life is fate or personal choice
If you ignore the authenticity of life itself, sometimes complaining is the true nature of real life. In the film, where Mickey successfully seduces Ginny to complain about life, the film asks the question: Are personal tragedies all their own fault?
Mickey said in general that he wanted to write a great tragedy, "the protagonist is defeated by his own Achilles' heel".
Ginny was attracted by this literary man, and asked solemnly: Do you always think that personal tragedies are your own fault?
Afterwards, Mickey said to her as if explaining his work: No, it was largely fate.
Mitch's views on the issue partly explain his behavior. He glorified his promiscuous shortcomings as "too easy to fall in love" and put the main responsibility on fate.
What kind of person Mickey is, those who watch the movie have their own answers, and the important thing is that his views have been recognized by Ginny. See what Ginny does next? She cheated. Attributing tragedy to a matter of fate seems to alleviate a lot of guilt. Before that, Ginny still had a deep sense of guilt about her last cheating. She couldn't get rid of the present, and she was also burdened with the sins of the past. Her life was a mess, and she needed such a "justifiable" "release" like this ".
It is true that the film does not need to give correct values, it only needs to constantly create dramatic conflicts, but can destiny really explain all tragedies? In the face of life's tragedies, does personal choice matter? Yes, in the world of drama, one can artificially ignore the tragic element and fill in the part of the fantasy of an ideal life with romanticism.
In the movie, one of the places where Mickey and Ginny date is a Chinese garden, which seems to be another space intentionally created by the movie, a romantic fantasy space. This may represent the possibility of personal choice in addition to the determinism of fate.
But then again, although there is always room for personal choices in life, it does not mean that it is real life. Like I said before, how can you be sure that the life you choose is the real life? This is the film that impressed me the most, sad reality and absurd fantasy, should we live in real life or go to fantasy?
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