This movie respects the audience very much. The most important element of the whole story, Nai Nai knows, has never been shown to the audience from beginning to end. Aware of this element, the whole movie is sublimated from a story of Eastern and Western cultural conflicts to a story of coexistence, compromise, understanding, and a happy ending, which can be described as the finishing touch.
Grandma knew about her condition, and the film only gave Ruoyouruowu clues. For example, doubts about benign shadows, decisive use of "high-level vitamins", raids on X-ray results, and no doubt about the abnormal behavior of everyone, especially the person who concealed the condition. This feeling can only be understood and unspeakable, everyone's words and actions can round the field, which makes this element more obscure. But this is an American movie with Mandarin dialogues, Chinese subtitles, and an American audience. Such implicit expression, in addition to the confidence in the basic quality of the film, it can also be seen that the director is not interested in a temporary box office, but a work that can withstand the test. Billi in the film is also the incarnation of the director, telling his family that many things cannot be bought with money. This may be heard as the director's aspirations for the film for more than ten years.
If I use one word to describe this movie, it is timeless. Timelessness is a very oriental aesthetic pursuit. Western movies pay attention to drama, and the story should be laid to the climax of the conflict. It is best that Billi finally loses control at the wedding, grandma faints from illness, and the conflicts between everyone's family erupt together, and then solve them together to be enjoyable. And this movie puts all the contradictions and conflicts to the end. The contradiction between family members that could not bear to read, implicitly manifested, and immediately digested in everyone's mind. For example, at a family dinner, my mother tells the story of Billi playing the piano. On the surface, she praises the Americans for being helpful, but she tells the envy, unwillingness, and self-seeking relatives that her current life in the United States is from hardships. Built in.
The Americans couldn't understand it after reading it, so they felt that the wedding scene was lengthy and the congratulatory speech lacked climax. But Billi is a character they can empathize with, and they slowly wonder why Billi didn't say what they wanted to say, why he put up a smile and said congratulations. Maybe they can understand that this wedding is actually a funeral, maybe they can understand the dignity of grandma's acceptance and management of all this, maybe they can understand the meaning of some family affection and parting to the Chinese, maybe they can hear the last paragraph The farewell words of grandparents and grandchildren. Every time they want to understand something, the story gains weight. Maybe they don't understand, it's okay. They just need to know, in the end, everything worked out.
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