Justin returned to his wife's former residence in London. He looked around the courtyard. Savagely growing plants occupies this small space wantonly. The square table in the center of the courtyard was scattered with a few dead leaves, creating a gloomy scene. He put his hands on the glass door and looked at the living room, which was where he and his wife Tessa had fun in the past, but that has become an unrepeatable past with the unexpected encounters of Tessa in Africa. Thinking of this, he was on the verge of collapse and became crying.
This is a fragment from the movie "The Immortal Gardener". And the deep sorrow that overflows from this is enough to make the audience feel heartbroken. The movie opened with a sudden bad news, and from then on, it entered a mode of memory. Let us return with Justin to the encounter with Tessa, the acquaintance and the familiar past. Ralph Fiennes, who has starred in "The English Patient", plays a calm and calm man in the film, but the inner waves that surging secretly under that calm expression accurately capture that share. The unspeakable sadness manifested beyond words.
Justin is a British diplomat, he is easy-going and gentle. His wife Tessa is a radical journalist who is always driven by a strong sense of justice. This kind of combination seems surprising anyway, but in fact they got acquainted with a boring speech, Justin preaching diplomatic rhetoric on stage, and Tessa pursuing it step by step from the stage. This is the beginning of this relationship. There are no deliberately romanticized bridges, but only embarrassing tit-for-tat, and a bit of kind understanding and apologies for recklessness after that. The scene of such a quarrel became a microcosm of their lives in the future, and it was not until the news of Tessa's death that everything was broken.
During his tenure in Kenya, Justin's biggest hobby was pruning plants. However, Tessa is busy fighting against a complex organization every day-it is a reputable pharmaceutical factory. There is a banner of providing free medicines for AIDS patients on the bright side, but privately, the patients are used as mice to develop new drugs. The side effects of those drugs have never been mentioned to patients. Tessa decides to expose all this, but reality is struggling. Out of a protective idea, she chose to hide all this from her husband. This huge gap between the two makes it impossible for them to touch each other's hearts.
After Tessa’s accidental death, grief Justin decided to take over the unfinished work of his wife. This is an explanation for his wife and a relief for himself. In fact, from here, the story has entered a classic search mode. The truth was shaken off bit by bit under those blatant rhetoric, and the estrangement between Justin and Tessa was gradually dissolving.
In the first half of the film, when the car drove from the hospital to the home, Tessa asked Justin to stop and pick up a pair of siblings who had to travel a long way back and forth, while holding a new life in her sister’s arms. . "We can't intervene in their lives," "There are millions of people here who need help," Justin reluctantly refused. "But we can help these three people," Tessa asked dissatisfied with geology. Perhaps in her eyes, Justin only cares about his own flowers and plants, but is full of disregard for these living lives. Later, on an escaped helicopter, the pilot refused to carry a little girl, because according to regulations, he should not have done so. And Justin argued indignantly: "Fuck the rules, how much money do you need to carry her?" Ironically, the pilot's rhetoric is the same as that used by Justin before. "But we can help this one!" In the end, in the inextricable quarrel between Justin and the pilot, the little girl jumped out of the helicopter's hatch and ran all the way, facing the unpredictable fate alone. But who can deny that Justin's indignant refutation was not the resurrection of his dead wife? Perhaps this is the graceful and magical place of love. It allows people to let go of their respective value entanglements, and pure love completes a close link between each other's souls.
In fact, compared to the dramas that exaggerate the grandeur and the tragic and reveal the shady scenes in the movies, those small but very real emotions can reach people's hearts more directly. Rather than telling the story of two people dying generously for a just cause, it tells how a pair of lovers slipped from a sweet love to a misunderstanding barrier because of this incident, and then from spiritual estrangement to integration into each other. . In this sense, those dramas that are related to revealing secrets are more like a foil, and the emotional line is hosted here and unfolded by this. And that touching and deep love enriched the flesh and blood of the movie and infused it with soul.
In "The Immortal Gardener", capital and bureaucrats colluded with the indifference of life, and there is also the deep affection between Justin and Tessa, which is placed on the majestic and boundless land of Africa, and then Stir a strange chemical reaction. At the end of the story, Justin was shot to death where his wife died. Those who are willing to play with other people's power in their hands have been punished as they deserved, and justice has been done. This is a difficult ending to simply judge good or bad, but there is such a sad and gloomy emotion that lingers in people's hearts, and there is nowhere to resolve it.
At Tessa's funeral, Justin stepped forward to stop a few people who were brandishing shovels. They came to pour concrete in the cemetery. This can prevent tomb robbers. "Tessa's hope is to lie in African soil, not in cement. Nothing can grow in cement." Justin choked. This may be a straightforward metaphor. In the end, Tessa turned into a plant, rooted in the soft soil of Justin's heart, immortal in the flow of time.
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