Please let us "make mistakes" under self-protection

Dejah 2022-04-21 08:01:09

I watched this movie a few days ago. The theme was about family. The specific point is about the troubles of a pair of problematic parents and the two children under their knees that have been affected by the family and the adolescence is slightly gloomy. The film's director and screenwriter is the original form of this story, so this new 2005 film brings us directly back to Brooklyn, New York in the 1980s.


This movie is of the kind that I particularly love-small films, short stories, with a very simple narrative, leading us to quietly enter a memory (I want to emphasize that "memories" is only one part of the story. Kind of shell, hints given to us through various environmental symbols of the times). I feel like this when I watched this movie: standing in front of the transparent window glass, silently staring at the other side-a family of four in that world twenty years ago.


The selection of the story has been a long time ago, because it involves the director’s personal autobiography after all, but the family crisis exposed in the story reflects an extremely common social phenomenon, which is enough to reposition this story under the background of any era. no problem.


Perhaps it was due to personal experience, so under the director's calm design, everyone in the family from parents to children has problems: his wife Joan creates all kinds of "affairs", and her husband Bernard has a low career. And the ever-increasing weird personality, parents unscrupulously divorced and separated, even let their children hide a little private possessions (in fact, some books that can’t tell who paid the bills), husbands scolded his wife’s scandals in front of the children, and talked to the children. Playing lazily in the game; then it was their children's turn-Walt and Frank all contracted adolescent mental illness under the influence of family life.


The thing that caught my attention in this story is that the director made everyone wrong, and they were all so wrong, but the story’s expression process did not drastically exaggerate the problem, which, on the contrary, was more able to let the audience. I feel empathetic: Yes, it is often like this-each of us, no matter what role we play in society, will always make some mistakes in the end, big and small, and the reason is often self-protection under a conflict of interests , And no matter who the object of the dispute with us is, the formation is exactly like fighting between Squid and whale.


It's not a heinous crime, but it's not completely innocent.


Speaking of "age", I want to say one more thing about the art part of this film (which is another reason why I like this film)-although it is a small production, the film can strictly guard every detail about the era in the art. . Not only the environment and services, but also the color processing of the film itself. It's really not easy. As for when I saw the introduction, I knew it was a new film in 2005, and I couldn't help being in awe of the art part of this film.


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Extended Reading

The Squid and the Whale quotes

  • [first lines]

    Frank Berkman: Mom and me versus you and Dad.

  • Bernard Berkman: Joan, let me ask you something. All that work I did at the end of our marriage, making dinners, cleaning up, being more attentive. It never was going to make a difference, was it? You were leaving no matter what...

    Joan Berkman: You never made a dinner.

    Bernard Berkman: I made burgers that time you had pneumonia.