I haven't seen many Dutch movies, but I can only remember Paul Verhoeven. Like Verhoeven's works, this film is very dark and suspenseful. The always humid and gloomy Netherlands of the 1920s showed a chilling air. In terms of narrative, it is also a classic narrative mode, but it is double, a flashback-style suspenseful case as a way to proceed in the context of the present tense, and a growth story mode in the process of flashbacks. The latter is basically promoted by the dictation of the protagonist in the former. Develop to the beginning of the first mode - until the protagonist leaves the scene after a fight. And in the middle of the two lines of the successive relationship, there is a gap, that is, the cause of Dufrehaven's death. This paragraph becomes the core suspense of the whole film and promotes the whole story. The narrative goes very smoothly, and the director knows how to tell the story. For example, the protagonist's mother rejected Dufrehaven's marriage proposal many times, so she cut together the expressions of the postman's visits several times, and explained things neatly. Clear. Even if it doesn't go into too many of the deep symbols in the film, it's a very successful story as a popular story.
But the film gave each character too much personality to be considered a simple drama. When I watched it, I felt sympathy for the protagonist, not only because of his perverted dad's incredible attitude towards him, but even the mother who raised him was also very mentally ill - I don't think that's called being strong . It's a miracle that a child who grew up in such two polarities can finally get on the right track relatively normally. Let's talk about Dad first. Dad is a guy who admires strong ideas, has metallic sounds and has a high tendency to self-destruct. He actually loves that woman and child, but his long-term habits have determined that he doesn't know how to express his love at all. For him, the same order to propose marriage, or to greet the mother and son in a wet suit, was the greatest gesture of affection he could make. And for that son, he pushed his son's growth in a destructive way - note that this push is actually quite selfish push, not the kind of strict father-like teaching that many people think, or even put it plainly Now, he has never considered his son's thoughts and whether these are suitable for his son. He just wants to push his son to surpass himself, so as to complete his spiritual inheritance in his son. destroy. Since he is a strong man himself, he is also a strong man, but the people around him are too weak, so he is eager to be challenged, and he pinned this hope on his son, even if he sacrificed his son in the process (The son either completes the process, or is completely beaten by him) or sacrifices himself at the end, it doesn't matter. He took out the knife the first time he talked about debts with his son, and he still took out the knife the second time he fought with his son, entered the barricade occupied by the leftists, unarmed, and proceeded to the scene in which he was knocked down in the dream until the end The ending of his confrontation with his son all showed his self-destructive tendencies, but every time the challenger failed, he was extremely disappointed, so when his son finally showed that he could inherit in both career and physical strength When he was there, he finally died in peace - aging was more terrifying than death to him, and his life could be extended on his son.
And for this poor son, he was born into this family and decided to lose the right to grow up as a normal child forever. He didn't have the qualifications to be an ordinary person. He would either become a complete failure or fly over the top. Although he succeeded at the end, no one thought that this was what he wanted to get. Maybe he just wanted to open a small cigar shop, marry that OL and have children, but the pressure from the father forced him to fight. When Dad died, his big success was meaningless, and there was only blankness in his eyes, because it wasn't what he wanted in the first place, and every time he turned around, his father's figure was always on the corner of the street Flickering - he would never leave his father's shadow for the rest of his life. But, can you say, so he lost to his father? I don't think so, don't forget, when he knocked down his father in the end, he didn't put the knife in, you can understand it as cowardice, but it can also be understood as his humanity defeating his father's strong theory, That alone doesn't make him a loser. But he has no life of his own, no love of his own, and his future is unpredictable.
The mother is one of the very unique characters. In fact, the calmness of the mother and the violence of the father can be regarded as two sides of the same coin to a certain extent, and the lethality is equivalent. When the son missed the girl and was considered a fool by the mother, the mother didn't know if she had thought about it. In fact, it had nothing to do with her. If she could be a little warmer, the son's mentality might not be so entangled. She actually loves his father, but her same hard personality doesn't allow her to accept any gift from Dufrehaven - even for the sake of the child, the two are a perfect match because of this personality The confrontation between them caused the battle between them to be extended to this son, and no one won.
In addition to such a purely private perspective, we can actually look at the character relationships in this film from a broader social picture-because the social class analysis in this film is too heavy, whether it is the recurrent left-wing forces ( It's also a little nostalgic), or the class flavor in the father-son relationship. In the beginning, the relationship between the father and the mother and the son was not only a family relationship, but also represented the relationship between the ruling class and the bottom of the society, but the relationship between them was not as tense as Marxism. Although it was also the beginning of rape, the ambiguity in the middle was not a few economic It can be summed up in academic terms, what's more, in the end, the son also successfully climbed to the ruling class - note that at this time, he was still in harmony with his leftist friends. And the reason why my father is a strong man, what is the source of that power? The badge he has repeatedly emphasized - what he represents is the country, the law, and the order. He no longer exists as a person, but as a system. It is precisely because this power is somewhat empty that he is naked in the dream. Apart from the power given to him by this system, he is actually very fragile inside. But such a challenge did not last, on the contrary, it finally became a successive postponement. One of the most important scenes here is when his son goes to a law firm for bankruptcy for the first time - we all know that this kind of thing is not a good thing, and the lawyer's business in Western movies has never been very good, often greedy , treacherous, dislike the poor and love the rich, but what makes people feel very different is that the film's attitude towards the law firm is very ambiguous. Quick editing, even the tone has changed from the cold tone of the whole article, which is rare to warm up. The intention conveyed here is worth pondering. For a pure ruler like his father, a man who is supreme with instrumental rationality, although the film also shows his personal charm, at least it is not appreciated. For the bottom and leftists in the film, it is only an objective description, at least not much. He has a positive image, but the people in the law firm appear to be spirited, decent, smart, and polite, and his son just seized this opportunity and found a relatively stable way to ascend to the top of society from the bottom. Judging from these, the implicit flavor of the film is to criticize the insensitivity of cold-blooded instrumental rationalists, and to ridicule the vulgarity and brainlessness of the lower left, pointing out that although such a class society is unfair, as long as The way is right, there is still a way to ease - such as knowledge and education, and the best way to embody such a path is to be a lawyer. Use knowledge as capital to become a new strong man, which is precisely what the son has replaced
The above explanations are somewhat deductive, but this movie, as a friend said, has a strong symbolic flavor, and many characters can be icing on the cake / superfluous decomposition, but it makes the original story flavor melt a lot, but no matter what. No matter how you look at it, even if there is a little warmth in the end, it still makes people feel quite heavy.
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