Last time I saw Isabel Coixet's film was "Map of the Voices of Tokyo". I don't know how to say it, but every time her movie is different from what I expected. Except "Days Without Me". For example, when looking at the "Map of the Voice of Tokyo", I was looking forward to an interesting Japanese story, but it turned out to be a mess, and I saw a bunch of Japanese city signs in front of me. While watching "The Secret Life of Words", I expected to be a sketch about the secrets of words or languages, but it was such a heavy topic of the Bosnian War. ——More importantly, the love in Isabel Coixet's films is always unexpected, as if any two lonely people will always end up together.
The hostess is a hearing-impaired person and needs to wear a hearing aid. At the beginning of the movie, there is a voice-over of the little girl. I don't understand what she is saying, so I can only wait for the director to slowly tell the secrets carried by these words.
Coming to the oil rig, everyone here seems to have interpersonal communication barriers, and everyone is so silent. If this is a piece of life, it seems that the secret of silence has almost been revealed.
Robbins relentlessly recounted his childhood experiences when he couldn't swim. And finally, finally ruthlessly brought out the heroine's secret.
Although the war experience was sad, when they were stopped by soldiers who spoke the same language as them, they were still worried about how to explain to the Fiat owner when they returned, but their fate had been completely changed. Because they thought the war was far away.
Despite being surprised and saddened by the heroine's experience, I can't help but feel that the director's way of narrating the experience, the whole story itself, is a little too forceful.
SECRET.
Everyone has secrets. Every story is ultimately about telling a secret about someone.
There are many ways to tell secrets and tell stories. Why did you choose this oil rig and these strange men (two of them are still in love)? Why does this story always feel weird even though it is touching? For someone like me who doesn't care about the world, it was only after watching the movie and looking up the information that I realized that the war in question was the Bosnian War.
It's like after reading "The Map of the Voice of Tokyo", I still don't know what happened to the old man who was lying on the ground at home and eavesdropping on the heroine's words.
Why does Isabel Coixet always choose to tell stories in such strange ways, with strange characters?
Reminds me of a Korean movie called "슈퍼맨이었던사나이" (The Man Who Was Superman - 2008), the whole movie uses an exaggerated, boring way to depict all kinds of silly things about a man who wears a Hawaiian shirt all day. It was only at the end of the story that he was ruthlessly shot in the head when he was walking on the street as a child. ——After watching this movie, the first impression is a farce, but I don’t know why I always worry about it, why when the male protagonist was a child, on that day, someone would shoot ruthlessly on the street, and no one would investigate the shooter? So I couldn't help but check that day, only to find out that the director was talking about the "Gwangju Incident".
If everyone has watched the movie and understood it only as a farce, and no one went to look up information with questions; or if the audience needed to look at the information collected by others to understand the director's true intentions; then such a film would be considered a success. ? After all, the movie is not a "reading comprehension question". Since the director said it intentionally, why not just make it clearer.
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