A woman, two men, three children around. Dilapidated Paris suburbs. More than two hours of dialogue, dialogue and dialogue. The movie takes you into the trivial, ordinary and even boring lives of these people. But if you have enough patience, you will gradually find that there is a lot of undercurrents behind the dullness.
At the beginning of the movie, a woman picks up her husband; then you find out that he is coming for a divorce; then you find out that the three children around the woman are not all their children; then you find out that the youngest son turns out to be the child of the woman's current boyfriend ; and then you find out that the eldest daughter is the third man's child again; then the woman's current boyfriend shows up and shares a room with her ex-husband who is about to divorce. In the bland chatter, you discover that this is a very complicated marriage and family relationship.
The film slowly lays out these complex relationships and backgrounds (in fact, their "past"), and begins to approach the secret in the middle: why did the new boyfriend's vegetative wife commit suicide? It's still in the bland dialogue, and the plot is stripped away a little bit, until the secret is revealed, and you realize that, damn, this can totally make a thriller movie.
This bland and at the same time thriller is technically perfect. Academics will give it lofty praise, but as a general audience, it often has a heavy and irritable look. There are very few characters in the movie, like in "The Past", everyone is unhappy, so watching movies has become an unhappy thing. To be honest, I don't like these people in the movie, although each of them can be described as delicate and full, and rationally you may really sympathize with their fate. When the film is in the middle, it really makes people have the urge to withdraw from the story. The heroine's performance is so real that you will feel indignant at her: a good life is nothing but tossing around? ! But soon, you begin to approach the knot behind everyone's unhappiness, the hidden secret. You follow the film to the center of the vortex, and you are brought back to the director's slow and highly forbidding narrative.
Farhadi's previous "A Parting" was one of the best movies I've seen last year. In that movie, why do we care about an ordinary Iranian woman, her husband and husband, her family's nanny, and everyone's dull and difficult life? In retrospect, it is not only because of the humanistic concern in the abstract sense held by the film creators, but the trivial and profound Connectedness of people connected by various relationships in ordinary life. In the films of 2008, ethics is not an empty preaching, it is placed in a seemingly ordinary but profound interpersonal relationship, and it becomes not so black and white. Life, the world and the human heart are probably like this, plain but not simple.
In this "Past", Farhadi goes one step further. The relationships of the characters are more complicated, the hidden dramatic conflicts are more intense, and people are more deeply entangled with the dark side of their own souls. People are still connected in a complex and eccentric way, each person's fate may be influenced by others, and each person seems to be unable to escape the entanglement of "the past".
The title of The Past is the finishing touch. In the last part of the film, the characters are tired and say "forget it" in the troubled entanglement. Their "past" casts too deep a shadow in their hearts, how can they save themselves other than "forgetting"?
Although the entire two-hour movie was tiring, I loved the ending of the movie. A man in panic between two women, he can leave his vegetative wife behind and go to the future with a new woman; but his heavy footsteps stopped, and he walked back to the unconscious woman, spraying her once liked The perfume tried to evoke her reaction. The camera slowly moved towards the woman's hand. At this time, I knew that this was the "eye" of the film, and I couldn't help but nervously asked: Will her hand move or not? Movement and inactivity will determine the fate of the man, and the fate of a series of people related to him. How will his wife wake up? What will happen if you continue to fall asleep...
However, the movie freezes on both hands, and the end credits appear. The following story is up to you to continue writing.
This is the genius of Farhadi, one of the most beautiful endings of a movie I've ever seen. With such an ending, I almost completely forgive the director's slow pace in the film that he was too self-conscious before. If he was talking so slowly, rambling, and seemingly bland, to get to this moment, well, I'll admit it.
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