The film just opened is a house by the sea, and there are two children's dialogues:
Alexander, we are going to the island, are you coming?
Where?
The island. We're going to swim across the water to see the old city. Follow us up to the reef. Greetings to those passing ships, do you know the story of the ancient city? Grandfather said this lucky city has been submerged. During an earthquake, she slept on the bottom of the sea for centuries, only on the full moon It surfaced once, and the time was very short. When the stars of the morning sun reluctantly left the earth and stopped to watch, everything stopped and time stopped.
What is time?
Grandfather said that time is a child, and a Children playing at the seaside. Are you coming?
Alexander sneaked out of the house and jumped into the sea with his friends, and from the window of the white house, his mother called: "Alexander, Alexander, eat." The beginning of the film is full of philosophy and literature. , Time is what the writer Alexander has always been obsessed with and pondered about, and he has been immersed in his thinking and his world. At the beginning of the film, Alexander is in his twilight years, his wife Anna has passed away, his mother is sent to a nursing home, away from his daughter and son-in-law, with only one dog and his nanny, and he is terminally ill and is about to leave the world and move into a desolate hospital to wait for death , the loneliness fills his life with only memories and the confusion that he could not ask in his whole life. The film is composed of the memories, experiences and fantasies of Alexander's last day in the hospital.
In his twilight years, Alexander looked for his daughter to entrust his dog, but his relationship with his daughter's family was indifferent. Alexander showed his daughter a letter written by his wife during her lifetime. The letter was written on the day her daughter was born, but it was never opened. The daughter reads the letter written by her mother, taking Alexander back in time, and Anna's letter is converted into her monologue. We learn that his wife, Anna, cherished him so much, knew him, understood his mind as a writer, understood the freedom he needed as a writer, and yet Alexander was immersed in his own world. Anna repeats "I'm just a woman in love" over and over, repeating her grief in beautiful, bleak Greek: a woman who loves her husband but fears that her presence will threaten the ideal world of the writer's husband , but suffers from the distance that her husband is by her side but not in her heart and the pain of his disappearance and departure at any time, all she keeps is the shirt he left... She loves her husband so humbly that she only needs the birth of her daughter. One day, because Alexander was by his side, with relatives and friends, full of new-born joy, just needed this day. After reading the letter, Alexander lost his voice and sighed, "So, I have never understood it."
Alexander was extremely distressed because of his belated understanding. He met illegal immigrants from Algeria who had fled to Greece as a small child. Alexander saved him from being sold. Alexander had tried many times to send the children back to the border, but the horrific sight of the dead bodies hanging all over the border had put him off the idea. The boy suddenly sang the poem "Wandering bird wailing in a foreign land / Lucky foreign land, I miss you / Kovra, my little flower.", which made him very interested. Because Alexander spent the second half of his life working on completing the unfinished work "The Trapped Freeman" by the 19th-century Greek poet Solomos (not mentioned in the film). Solomos was born in Greece and raised in Italy. When his homeland was enslaved by the Ottoman Empire, he was determined to return home to fight for his freedom. He finally returned to his mother's village, saw familiar faces, amiable houses and ports, and he wanted to sing about the revolution, but found that he could not understand their language. So he visited fishing villages and fields, recorded the language of the laborers, and paid them. So people surrounded him and sold him words. The poet completed his masterpiece "Ode to Liberty" in this way, but did not find the words to complete "Freedom Trapped", which became Alexander's dream, he searched everywhere for words, the first one he found was the little boy who read "My Little Flower".
After listening to the poet's story, the little boy saw Alexander's face tormented by illness, and he said, "You are smiling, but you are sad." In order to make Alexander happy, the boy said, "I'll sell you the vocabulary." The first vocabulary he sold to Alexander was the "foreigner" spoken by the peasant women in the village where he lived. Later, after the boy who had led the boy to escape from the police who arrested them was hit by a car and killed, the boy also decided to leave Greece after cremation.
At this time, Alexander had just finished watching the old mother in the nursing home. He hadn't seen his mother for a long time, and his mother couldn't recognize his face at this time. Her memory exists when Alexander was a child, her Alexander was her forever young child, who liked to disappear often, and she had been waiting for him, standing at the window calling his name "Alexander, Alexander", her The call brought him back to memory. On the day his daughter was born, he left his family and friends and climbed the hill. His sudden departure disappointed Anna, who wanted to have a perfect day. Later, when the rainstorm came, Alexander sent relatives and friends to the cave but found that Anna was not there. She ran somewhere sad, but she came back and hugged in the rain with her husband who was looking for her. She loved him so much that she even buried her grief. His mother loved him so much, and how much trouble did he bring to her? His ignorance of his father made his mother suffer, and his sudden disappearance... Alexander, who understood all this, cried like a child to his old mother: "Why mother, why nothing is What do people expect? Why choose between desire and pain? Why do I have to live in exile? Why can't I recognize my return? Not feeling confident in a place that speaks my own language? My own language, when I find it again Those lost words, or those forgotten words, why are only nightmares heard in the house. Why? Tell me, mother, why have I never known how to love?" He left the nursing home, hearing the boy's goodbye, but Knowing that he was about to die, Alexander was vulnerable, and he kept the boy who was leaving. For two hours, they sat on the bus, excitedly opening the window like a child, watching the dim lights, the uprising crowd, the cyclists... The life outside was still so peaceful, but one of them was about to leave Exiles, one is an old man who is about to die, and everything outside has nothing to do with them. Many people got on the bus and many got off. There were uprisings, bickering lovers, bands playing, and the poet Solomos. Solomos recited his unfinished poems to Alexander: "The falling morning dew is the last star of dawn\shows the coming of the rising sun\no cloud of pain, no fog to cover\in the endless sky\ The breeze stops \so softly on the face\like a whisper to the heart\life is sweet\and \life is so sweet" After the poet finished reading the poem, he got out of the car and left. Alexander asked him, "Tell me, how long will it be forever?" But the poet left. Eventually they got out of the car too, and the boy was about to leave, crying and saying "too late" to Alexander, who gave him a coin, the second word he sold to writers.
Alexander was left with only himself, and he couldn't wait to return to the original white house. Although it was empty, he was full of love in his eyes. The joyful music on the day his daughter was born once again rang through time, echoing Anna's monologue, "I wrote to you in front of the sea, I wrote to you, to you. Conversation, but one day you occasionally think of it, think of me, I have closed my eyes, I stroked my hand, I am here waiting for you, trembling. Give me today." The closed door slowly opened, In the bright old days, the mother was shaking her daughter in the cradle. Under the bright sunshine, on the beach, relatives were singing and playing the piano. The young wife greeted him with a smile and they danced gracefully. He said: "Anna, I'm not going to the hospital, I don't want to go to the hospital, Ana. I don't want to. I'm planning for tomorrow. Strangers always answer me with the same music, there must be someone who sells me those words One day, I asked you, how long will forever be? You answered me, forever may be only one day." "Forever maybe only one day", Anna disappeared after saying that. There is only Alexander's lonely back facing the sea, and he has no tomorrow. He murmured to himself: "My path is on another river \ with these words \ I'll go with you \ you are there \ it's all true \ can be waited for \ true, true" he Repeated the words he bought: "my little flower", "foreigner", "too late" until it was sad. And the mother's call came from behind: "Alexander, Alexander..."
Alexander was always like a willful child, lost in the world of poetry, but ignoring the love around him. Wife's love, mother's love, love, family affection, the writer who is respected and remembered by many people is a lonely person in the end, full of memories of the past and irreparable regrets. This person with the freest mind is just an ordinary person. It is a person's misfortune, but a poem's great fortune. What a sad paradox this is! This is the loneliness of a writer's spiritual world.
Fortunately, although he no longer has a tomorrow to plan to save everything, he finally understands that there is no tomorrow or not, because there may only be one day in eternity, the day when his daughter was born, and Anna once wrote that letter. that day. The connotation conveyed by the film is very complex, there are love and cherishing, time philosophy, warmth and hatred, but I am willing to regard it as the director's understanding of the writer and all the soul engineers who are persistently exploring the spirit. And praise, those writers who persistently created many fine works suffer from loneliness that ordinary people cannot understand. The director used this film to convey a strong Greek humanistic atmosphere. The long coast, the poets and writers thinking alone, will always be the most beautiful and unforgettable scenery in Greece.
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