In this year’s awards season, "Brooklyn" is not a big movie. If it weren't for the extraordinary acting skills of the genius girl Saoirtha Ronan, coupled with the fresh and bright scenery of Ireland and Brooklyn in the early 20th century, "Brooklyn" Whether from a literary or commercial point of view, they are slightly boring. But after watching the movie, I couldn't put it down and bought a novel of the same name by Colm Tobin online. It's a thin book, and it happened to be finished on the way back home on the plane. The plot of the novel is actually the same as the movie, but the details are richer and more subtle, which affects the "foreigners" empathy.
The story of "Brooklyn" is actually not complicated. In the early 1950s, Alice, a young girl who lived in the small town of Enniscorthy, Ireland, was going to live in the United States. She bid farewell to her mother and sister and came to Brooklyn and squeezed in. I went to a young girl's apartment and started a new life as a department store operator. The sorrow of homesickness was filled with fresh life. The prom met a guy who had immigrated from Italy, and he was in love and longing for a bright future. If it weren't for the unexpected news of her sister's death, she seemed to never face the choice of returning home and staying: the hometown remains the same, and Alice in Brooklyn is no longer the Enniscorthy girl back then.
As a commercial film, the story of "Brooklyn" is indeed too light. A short life of an ordinary girl, a little homesickness and a little confusion, how many waves can it cause to others? Just like those Irish workers who arrived in the United States earlier and couldn’t go back in the movie, they left traces of Brooklyn’s construction. . Travelers are like stitches, stitched on the back of history.
The moving part of "Brooklyn" may also happen to come from the author's sincere and simple sympathy and praise for the ordinary protagonist. This feeling is stronger when reading the novel. The author Tobin was born in the small town of Enniscorthy and once taught at New York University in Brooklyn. He wrote about the past of his hometown, and he must have also projected his own shadow. And these subtle emotions, for us who continue to experience the process of urbanization 50 years later, will surely be able to find a familiar connection code. The original generations of people who have left their homes and forge ahead have the same unsustainable feelings and homesickness.
There is a detail in the beginning of the movie. Alice went to the United States by sea and was bumped by the wind and waves. However, what is more devastating than the turbulent waves is the panic of leaving home for the first time in the face of a stranger: the kindness and hostility of strangers are equally distracting. . I remember that the first time I left home was also straight down the river. Three days and two nights of the river drifted to Shanghai, and the more profound memory is the first time I took a plane, I was an intern at a newspaper office in my senior year, and I was ordered by the leader to travel alone to Fuzhou. , Ticket collection, security check, boarding, step by step, I nervously follow behind others to learn from others. I don’t know how to fasten my seat belt on the plane, so I tied a knot and flew with my hand; NS.
The second half of "Brooklyn" actually collapsed. Alice's character was lost because of hesitation. Fortunately, Saoirtha Ronan had a simple and innocent look that saved the character's "green tea". The surface that makes Alice entangled appears to be emotion. Two equally good men have no distinction of character. In fact, one represents conservative and comfortable, and the other represents romantic unknown. In the torrent of the times, personal emotional conversion is by the author. Some are simply and deliberately weakened into lifestyle symbols. The film adaptation has a splendor. When Alice faced her hometown moral benchmark Mrs. Kelly, her blushing response: "I almost forgot what this town is like", which prompted us to move forward. It was those hands that deliberately held our hands.
"She's back to Brooklyn," Alice knew, years later, this sentence would have less meaning to the people who heard it, but it would be more and more important to her. The last shot of the movie is the most beautiful. Alice tilted her head and leaned against the wall to greet Tony across the road. Not far away was the big house Tony had promised them—now it was still a vacant lot, and it would be their kingdom in the future. The future is not because it is necessarily beautiful, but because it is full of unknown hope, and this is the reason why we have relentlessly stepped out of the house of the dog left and Erya again and again, and turned into Kelvin and Rachel full of ambition.
When I write this, the warmth of the Spring Festival has decorated the hometown with warmth and fullness. Compared with Alice's Enniscorthy town, the hometown of our generation is less idyllic and more restless. "Hometown" seems to be not only a geographical concept, but also a time concept. When we returned home, strange neighbors and neighbors represented yesterday's moral code like Mrs. Kelly, and under the influence of the information age, they have never seen the big city you wandered as wealth and hope for success. "Things are not humans" seem to be insufficient to describe the strange and embarrassing strangeness, but one day we may understand that the memories and emotions of our hometown are actually carried on ourselves, and we are our own hometown.
PS: Happy New Year to everyone, everything goes well.
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