This is probably the heaviest movie I've ever watched. As a family member of an Alzheimer's patient, after watching the movie, I kept asking myself three questions: How to accept the aging of my loved one? How to accompany a loved one to grow old? How to free yourself?
The reason for giving this film 4 stars is that, as a person who has no such life experience, or who is not too fond of literary films, this film does not have a compact plot and gorgeous scenes, and even 80% of the time in the whole film. are spread out in highly similar (note, not the same!) rooms. But I did cry from the first minute of the opening until the movie theater lights came on, and I didn't even want to watch it a few times, because I experienced every scene in the movie, and I was for the first time I passed through the Alzheimer's Sea. People with mutism see the world from the perspective of helplessness and despair because they cannot see the future.
My grandmother was an Alzheimer's patient, and like Anthony in the movie, she became unreasonable after her illness. In my eyes, the life of an Alzheimer's patient looks like this:
She was talking and laughing with us one second before, and the next second she might be sitting on the ground crying.
She hid everything she had, even an apple locked in a drawer to prevent it from being taken away.
She is as obsessed with one object as Anthony, her purse. She always hides her purse in various places, and when she forgets it, she suspects that someone has stolen her purse, and then she becomes uneasy and suspicious of everyone around her.
She will fantasize about many things that don't exist and believe them to be true, so we don't know what she thinks of us today is not pleasing to the eye.
She would say a lot of nasty and vicious things to her children and to me. One night she started to get sick, and my mother went to comfort her late at night. Through the surveillance video of her house, I saw her yelling shamelessly at my mother's divorced woman, and saying to my uncle's child that she wished her father an early death. On the other side of the phone, I kept shaking, and I said: At a certain moment, I really wanted to give up and stab her to death.
She rarely remembers happy things, but she remembers those gray times in her life very clearly.
She seems to hate everyone in this world.
As a patient family, Annie is us:
My uncle and mother would take turns going to my grandma's house, every day, because she could no longer live independently.
One day my mother and I came out of my grandmother's house, and my mother looked at the sky and said to me: life is really boring. If one day I become like this, you will strangle me to death.
I tried caring for an Alzheimer's patient like my mom and uncle, but I didn't seem to be that strong. Grandma's house is like an alley with no light in sight. I hope I can illuminate at least a corner, but in this alley, in addition to darkness, there are violent storms that can extinguish the light. So when I almost started to be depressed to the point of being morbid, I gave up. Since then, I have never taken on the job of taking care of patients, and I also live with the guilt of being a deserter from my family.
The uncle and mother seemed to have not lived their own lives for many years. During the May Day holiday, I asked my mother if I wanted to go on a tour together. She thought about it and said: Forget it, I have to go to my grandma's house on duty. I sensed that she was sad too.
I really hope that my uncle and mother can make the same decision as Annie and send my grandma to a nursing home, but I also can't face the day when my grandma is like Anthony, crying and begging the nurse to take him home. While patients are trapped in time, we are also trapped in our own cage. At the end of the film, Anthony said: "I feel like my leaves are all lost, branches and wind and rain, I can't understand what happened, I have no place to live." After watching the whole film, I think this is A sentence that best sums up the world through the eyes of Alzheimer's patients. The memory of the past withered little by little like leaves, and in the end only empty branches were left. When the wind and rain hit them, they had nowhere to hide. And the family members of the patients, do they have to give up the sun above their heads to shield them from the wind and rain? When they give up the sun, does that mean they miss the sun too? At the end of the movie, Anthony was buried in the nurse's arms and cried like a child. The camera turned out of the window, the lights in the theater came on, and the movie came to an abrupt end, leaving only the endless thoughts of the moviegoers:
How can we rescue them who are trapped in time, how can we rescue ourselves...
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