Akiko is always imitating what she is not, like a kite trying to imitate a bird before it breaks. On the one hand, she loves her grandmother deeply, but runs away silently, and when she chats with a strange old man, she always talks about her grandmother; on the other hand, she repeats Xiaozhu's jokes, but she doesn't find it funny.
Akiko shuns her grandmother, and the old man's daughter doesn't visit her father for a long time—a set of symmetry. In this group of symmetry, there are two asymmetric points that make a connection: Akiko, who escapes from her relatives, and the old man, who is escaped by her relatives, become father and daughter (grandfather and grandson) in the structural sense. This is dislocated symmetry, but also quiet sadness.
The old man envied his youth and tried to occupy this vitality. He had a sense of guilt that had to be wiped away with a sense of ritual before meals, but this guilt would peak when Akiko's boyfriend came to borrow fire. But the old man was at least acting gentle. As for her boyfriend and the store manager, she was just using the control and distrust of men to show her power.
Everyone's fear is the same: the fear of losing. "The window is my life", I (the neighbor) have lost you (the old man), but I can't let you take away my window again. Who would have thought that casual remarks would become unintentional prophecies, and at the end the old man lost his window and his life. For Akiko's boyfriend, the existence of the old man is like "repaired - ruined"; for the elderly, the existence of Akiko's boyfriend is like "repaired car - smashed car".
The setting of the protagonist's identity is very interesting: male - female; professor - sex worker; knowledge (soul) - body (body); wisdom - sexy. If the contrast of the protagonists' identities only stays in the above four layers, then this film is really full of arrogance, but the most important contrast is in the fifth layer: the old, the dying - the young and the fresh. So all the people on the left side of the dash above are envious of the person on the right side of the dash. The left side treats the right side as a lost daughter, envies the right side, but finally dies because of the right—but this kind of identity setting, whether in the context of movies or in everyday contexts, It seems that there is nothing wrong with it - this is what we should be alerted to and reflect on. Is this a fable that heralds a new world, or an old myth that needs to be broken?
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