Spring 1999
Kim Yong-ho, a middle-aged man who is desperate for life
Desperately participating in the class reunion
he cried nervously
And shouted at the oncoming train on the viaduct: I want to go back!
I haven't talked about this movie directly, but last year I actually silently listed it as the best movie of the year, and I watched it again this year. The reason for not saying it is by no means that there is nothing to say, just that there is so much to say about this film and this director. This time, there is not too much plot to tell, just simply express my heart.
From the very beginning, Li Changdong told the audience directly that the death of this man, Kim Yong-ho, was followed by flashbacks of the man. As the train drove, he discovered his tragic life, but Li Cangdong's film is never a simple tragic story, it is more like the epitome of the grief of the times. As a victim of the times, Jin Yonghao is sensitive, suspicious and divisive. The incarnation of the cost of social and political movements is also an ordinary person who feels distressed for his whole life because the mint candy was trampled. The wheel of fate or the times is undoubtedly cruel. You can see the evil side in him. This side exists in you, me, and everyone.
"Mints" describes the entire life of Kim Yong-ho, but it gives very little space for the beginning of that life, which is why I admire Lee Chang-dong. Youth is beautiful and short, and it is even just a tear of inexplicable sentimentality. In the lightest corner of countless dirty and painful memories, is that tear.
The sixth generation, who likes to film the pain of the times, has never made this kind of film. Everyone is obsessed with the pain and tangle of youth, but facing the depression of the whole life and the times, I am afraid that youth could not be more beautiful.
Just like Kim Yong-ho's friends sitting in a crowd, playing the guitar and singing:
What should I do, you leave my words behind
No, really no, please don't leave me
Is there anything you can't tell me about your troubles? You were so kind
you were so gentle
How can you be so ruthless and unbelievable
You will leave me, I don't believe
you say goodbye to me
1999, 1994, 1987, 1984, 1980, and finally 1979.
The time point in five lifespans allows a person to choose to die. All of this stems from the Gwangju incident, a theme (mainly literary works) that often appears in Li Cangdong's works. That rifle killed not only an innocent girl, but also all of Jin Yonghao's own fantasies of beauty. From then on, Kim Yong-ho began to destroy, and the destruction made him a person not worthy of sympathy, because he hurt too many people who were good to him. Is life beautiful? He saw this sentence in the diary of a man who was tortured, and he repeatedly asked him, himself, and society.
But is he really unworthy of sympathy?
I thought again of Li Cangdong's novel "Luchuan has a lot of dung". Junzhi in the text also began to destroy after a certain collapse, destroying everything that others thought was good, but it was what he always hated, and also destroyed those things he once yearned for cherished things. Junzhi's collapse was also the collapse of Jin Yonghao, but Jin Yonghao came more thoroughly. He did not take his younger brother to run again like Junzhi did. He chose to sell the last relic given by Shunren. Does he really care?
It's not that I don't care, it's just that, like Luchuan, the foundation supporting these countless majestic high-rise apartments is actually a huge pile of garbage. The tall buildings built on top of it, hopes, dreams, love, all collapsed when Kim Yong-ho realized what the foundation was.
The beauty of that society is built on the sound of a gunshot in Gwangju and the cracking of mints in the army.
There was a gunshot that Jin Yonghao could never forget, his mint was completely shattered, and he could never forget it again, so that he could not accept the false beauty. But when I feel Jin Yonghao's weirdness, I can't help but think of others, those other people, people of the same generation, why can they accept it so plainly, and even forget it. Is the train facing Kim Yong-ho really just a train? It is still a heavy blow to those who lag behind it. He lived like this for twenty years until the building collapsed.
Li Cangdong asked this era, will the pain pass? Is life beautiful?
Uninteresting tombstone
don't have to chatter
by name, character, experience, and place of birth
To challenge the omnipotence of forgetting.
No amount of praise is in vain,
Marble also does not have to count the things that people deliberately avoid.
The essence of a lost life
- trembling expectations,
The irreparable pain and the surprise of material desire—
will last forever.
Some people arrogantly and blindly pray for immortality,
Little did he know that his life had indeed merged into the lives of others,
Actually you are
mirrors and copies of people who have not caught up to your time,
Others will be (and are) your eternity on earth.
- "An Epitaph for Anyone" by Borges
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