Takeshi Kitano, a Japanese director who is well-known both at home and abroad for his "violence aesthetics", in order to get rid of the shackles of his original style, he subverts himself with a zero attitude, trying to change the audience's inherent impression of "Takeshi Kitano", offering the audience a unique experience. It is fresh and elegant, warm and simple, which is different from the previous works. It also allowed the audience to see this "double-sided Takeshi Kitano".
The film borrows the incident of the little boy Masao looking for his mother to bring out a theme of self-seeking, and further highlights this theme through the arc of characters refracted by the little man Kikujiro.
At the beginning of the film, Kikujiro was portrayed as an uneducated, idle and wretched uncle. In the process of helping Zhengnan to find his mother, his behavior changed subtly under the influence of Zhengnan. No longer arrogant and unreasonable, no longer care about. The emotional side of Kikujiro's heart was also inadvertently revealed in his gags. At the same time, the audience is also inadvertently falling in love with this cynical "old boy".
From the perspective of the play structure, "Kiujiro's Summer" also has many bright spots. In the film, there are many groups of dreams of male and eccentric chaotic gods. Freud defined dreams in the book "The Interpretation of Dreams", "'dream' is an illusory reflection of reality." Rather, it is a relatively distorted representation of something that happens in everyday life. It can be seen from this that the previous Zhengnan had an extreme but insecure sense of the world around him. The director wanted to reflect the panic and anxiety in Zhengnan's inner world through these disturbing dreams. After gradually stepping out of self-isolation, Zheng Nan no longer has such dreams. This also subtly deducts the theme of the film - finding yourself.
In addition, there are many plot settings in the film that help the audience to deeply understand the character's character and the direction of the story.
For example, many fixed facial close-ups of Masao and Kikujiro present different facial features at different times to the audience, so that the audience can realize the evolution of the characters' personalities. Another example is that Kikujiro and Masao have appeared in a fixed shot many times, and the characters' behaviors are almost the same, which also implies the similarity between the two. The setting of the character "Mom" in the film is even more telling. The character "Mom" does not appear in the camera from the beginning to the end, and the only appearance is only on the blurred photo of Zhengnan and The man watched from a distance. This also implies that Zheng Nan's "trip to find his mother" is destined to have no good results. A more brilliant setting is Kitano Takeshi's deliberate ambiguity of the true identity of "Kiujiro". For a long time before the separation between Kijiro and Masao, the audience mistakenly thought that the little boy Masao was "Kiujiro". In the end, when Kikujiro reported his name and contacted the film title "Kiujiro's Summer", the audience would reorganize the relationship between the characters and build a new understanding. It turned out that it seemed that the little boy Masao was looking for it, but it was actually the old boy Kijiro who was looking for it.
Another interesting thing about the film is the soundtrack of the film. The soundtrack of the film comes from the Japanese national treasure-level soundtrack master "Jo Hisaishi". Before Takeshi Kitano and Joe Hisaishi have collaborated on many films such as "Fireworks" and "Bad Boy's Sky", the degree of tacit understanding is naturally unnecessary. Sometimes cheerful and relaxed, sometimes sad and moving, the accompaniment changes with the changes of the plot, allowing the audience to better understand the sincere emotion between Kijiro and Masao, and at the same time sublimating the theme of the film.
"Kiujiro's Summer" is a movie dedicated to summer, a movie dedicated to children, and a movie dedicated to adults who have not completely lost their innocence in their hearts.
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