- "That is a tolerance that goes hand in hand with immorality, purity, truth and cruelty."
I can't deny that I watched this film at the beginning because my friend pulled me and said, "This film has a great beautiful boy~" So even though I vaguely knew that this film was well received, it was still like this. Go ignorantly. After reading it, I was silent for a long time, and then I had this article.
This is a cruel and realistic story.
Young Neil accidentally witnessed the scene of his mother and his lover having sex. However, what made his heart beat faster and his breathing quickened was the body of the man struggling above. In the summer of the age of eight, he joined the school baseball team, and when he saw the baseball coach who had just been hired by the team, his eyes never left.
Neil was too young to understand a lot of things, so originally everything was nothing.
Except for the coach who also took a fancy to Neil.
It's too easy to please. Neil enjoys the coach's unique care and special status in front of his friends. Compared with his mother who is often busy and invisible, he believes that he is special and loved. In the coaching room, while the colorful cereal was flying and falling from the sky, the coach gave eight-year-old Neil a taste for the first time in his life. For Neil, it was a wonderful experience in his life that he will never forget.
Watching Neil fall into the coach's calculations half-voluntarily, the tension, anxiety, and unease that accompany him all the way peaked at this moment. Here, director Gregg Araki found two of his long-cherished musicians, Harold Budd, and Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrier to create this rise. In the mid-to-late 1980s, the misty and dream-like music style was good at brewing a space that was detached from the psychedelics with echoes and human voices. In other words, it was like watching a sleeping self in a dream.
Although it is not uncommon for such techniques to be used in many originally hot and intense scenes over the past few years. For example, in "The Lord Of The Rings", the next battle in Gondor City, "TROY" in which Achilles led his men to land on the beach outside Troy City, "CRASH", the white police rescued the black woman who had been insulted by him in the car that was about to explode... The sweet and gentle soundtrack softens the bloody scene, and gives people room to take a step back and think deeply.
But it's different here - although I can't quite articulate what the difference is. It is also powerless to watch the facts happen with the plot, although I constantly resist "this is wrong" in my heart. But at this moment, why? Mingming Neil - this little gay by nature, he is not the type commonly seen in society traumatized by childhood sexual abuse - is so happy at this moment, and it is with this conviction that he has been loved. The happy memories of my life have continued for more than ten years, why can I only hold back the tears in my eyes? Why can't I even utter a single word of defending, knowing that he can only hold on to the only good memories for the next ten years?
It's like someone said, "That's a tolerance that goes hand in hand with immorality, purity, truth and cruelty."
The pure beauty that only belongs to children of that age, as well as the undisguised stinger contained in the childishness, reminds me repeatedly of Jack in the movie "Lord of the Flies", the beautiful and poisonous child king, I don't know. Why do children unknowingly succumb to his words and commands. Neil also helped the coach to start with other children, so another protagonist of the film - Brian was born. He believes that there was a gap in his childhood life with no memory that stemmed from being abducted by aliens.
One summer passed and the coach disappeared. When we see Neil again, he's already in his twenties, a male prostitute who picks up clients in private without any scruples. Without the shrewd and agile eyes of childhood, even though the beauty is still the same, there is a sneer that doesn't matter and disdain on the corners of his mouth, his eyes are empty, as if he only stayed with his lover for one summer when he was eight years old. The expression becomes vivid.
By the way, most of the guests Neil picked up were men more than twice his age, belly-bellied, rude and robust, with gray temples.
Until one Christmas, Neil, who was living alone in the field, originally promised his mother to go home for the holidays, but stopped for a guest on his way to the airport - an idea that almost made me think he would give up on going home. , The man who looked like his lover when he was eight years old - originally thought it was just an ordinary business, but was treated almost abusively and without pity, and finally was thrown out of the house with injuries all over his body.
At that time, a very vague thought: "Neil, can you finally give up? Stop looking for the shadow of your first love in various old and bloated men like this?"
Is there a way to liberation?
At the end of the film, the two protagonists meet again after more than ten years. Brian understands what happened to the five hours of disappearing memories in his childhood; Neil understands how much his happiness has brought another person. suffering. The two embraced each other on the sofa. Brian burst into tears in Neil's arms. The picture gradually zoomed away. Neil said in his heart:
I wanted to tell him it was over and it was going to get better, but that was a lie, it left me speechless, and I was hoping there was some way to get us out of this past, but no. We can't do anything, I can only be silent and hope to convey to him how sorry I am for all this...I just hope we can get our hearts out of this world, as mysterious as two angels in the night disappear.
It's not an old wound that can be broken out or redeemed immediately, it's still an inexhaustible pain that has nowhere to escape under the tangled tune of Sigur Ros. The pain never goes away, but they can at least face it from now on.
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