The reason why people pay attention and praise "Leave No Trace" is largely because of the appearance of the story: a father and daughter left the city and came to the forest to live a self-sufficient primitive life. This event alone is enough to touch the excitement of modern people, especially those who have lived in cities for a long time. They hate competing for limited resources and worry about a world surrounded by pressure, so when a gypsy-like image wrapped in a green and wild breath unfolds in front of them, the self that has been suppressed for a long time is instantly released, as if they are also in the middle In the mountains and forests, you can breathe the rushing oxygen through the screen.
Like many movies with similar themes, "Leave No Trace" naturally implies the questioning of the meaning of life. However, when we peeled back and tried to see how it answered this question, it seemed that something was not right.
This kind of doubt first comes from the motives of the characters' behavior, so we find that the film lacks context: no one knows how long they have lived like this, who the child's mother is, where relatives and friends are... As for why they came to the forest, We also pieced together the answer little by little in the subsequent clues, and it seems that it was just an inadvertent revelation by the screenwriter. What confuses us even more is the ending of the story: it doesn't seem to answer the ultimate proposition of life, in other words, its "meaning of individual life" is very vague. Compared with "Survival in the Wilderness", which is also about life in the wild, the narrative logic of "Leave No Trace" is obviously incomplete. There is no motivation, and naturally you don't know where to go. Similarly, if the direction is to pursue that kind of utopia other than modern civilization. In life, what reason do you want to say about the final parting of father and daughter?
Therefore, it can be determined that the film from beginning to end is not to explore the possibility of human beings relying on personal strength to be self-sufficient in the wild and build a utopian society. On the contrary, it always revolves around the relationship between father and daughter, and tells about their love and contradictions. It's about love and growth. In this sense, peeling back the shell of the whole story, the movie actually contains a huge metaphor.
If according to Syd Field's opinion, the protagonist of the story is the character who has changed the most in the play, the girl "Tom" should be the absolute protagonist of the play. "Leave No Trace" is actually a story about Tom growing up in an instant. Through her perspective, we can smell the very familiar taste of growth. It is universal, and it is almost the same as everyone's real experience. Like everyone, Tom had the full experience of her adolescence, which was sensitive, restless, throbbing and rebellious. These emotions have been established almost from the beginning. Tom will show her little rebellion, turn on the gas on her own accord when her father can't light the sawdust, reluctantly repeat the escape drill again and again, carry the Xinyi's necklace was secretly hidden. It was not until the accidental exposure of his whereabouts one day that these small fights in a peaceful life gradually evolved into a journey leading to a different life direction.
It was also Tom's journey of self-discovery. Passive at first, she reluctantly accepted the so-called relief from the government and had to interact with children her age; but she soon became less fearful, a young girl's curiosity about a strange world far outweighed her anxiety, and she slept in On a comfortable bed, with a warm fire, she went to a meeting, met new friends and the opposite sex, and saw many scenes that she would never see in the forest, all of which made her linger.
The role of metaphor is to express in an almost legendary form that part of what can truly empathize with us. Tom's father Will, a retired soldier with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), raised his daughter in ways that outsiders would seem extreme. You can understand him as selfish, but you can't deny that there are some unspeakable difficulties behind it. Since you have the courage to choose such a life, you must have gone through some painful struggles, and once you start, it means that it is impossible to go back. Will in the film acts with an incomprehensible obsession, so focused on his goals that he ignores the myriad bubbles of fantasies that arise in his teenage daughter. Isn't this kind of devotion to self-care in life the living state of life for many parents?
This constitutes a contradiction that is difficult to reconcile: one is the father who has shaped his life, and the other is the daughter who has just opened the door to the new world. No one can accompany each other for a lifetime, and the doomed ending is separation. As an individual with freedom of choice, this is not an assumption, but a necessity. Therefore, the director did not hesitate to deal with this paragraph. Although the separation of father and daughter was extremely painful, there was not too much entanglement, because they all understood each other's choices.
Of course, "separation" becomes very neutral here, it is not a tragedy, and it does not show the slightest pessimism. The director makes the whole story full of dialectical detours and the light of hope with a gentle and delicate brushstroke that is unique to women. At the end of the film, Tom enters the forest to deliver living materials to the homeless who live in seclusion here. This is a hint that the father and daughter are not separated from now on. Even if the father will wander for life and the daughter will never go back to the forest, They will surely meet again someday in the future.
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