Now, it's hard for me to talk about the most influential film I've ever had because we know so much about it. But I'm still trying to read something new from my review writing.
First of all, this title means where I enter the text. I don't take it lightly to assume that a character in a film is as emptiness as he is narrated, and the audience has every right to radically interpret a dead person as a resurrected person without compromising the aesthetic value of the film.
The opening of the love letter is extremely beautiful, which also sets the main theme of the film. Hiroko opened her eyes from the snow, and the movie was born from the blankness of the snow. It seemed that there was nothing, but Hiroko was about to be oppressed by some kind of responsibility immediately. The memories of her fiancé, Fujii Ki, he has been dead for two years, and she is still there. There is no escape from the pain of his death.
In order to prevent the sudden heavy fate from breaking down the structure of the film, Hiroko got up immediately and walked towards the snow field. Over there, is the memorial ceremony for her fiancé. The commemorative ceremony in the structure of the film is undoubtedly to alleviate the destruction of the beautiful and light structure of the film by the cruel fate of the male protagonist's death, and to stabilize the emotions of the crowd to a certain extent. To be more clear, a funeral is a ritual for the deceased to leave the world as soon as possible, and the symbolic order urges the "dead" to accept its orders and return to nothingness. In this way, everyone can accept the fate of a person's death and forget as much as possible the vast majority of the dead. So much so that people mourn only one signifier, while its content is empty and does not point to anything.
In the film, Fujii's parents immediately show boredom with the memorial service, with the father still being forced to cope while the mother feigns illness and sits in Hiroko's car home. This seemingly casual behavior is of course the effect of funerals as a "forgetting machine", but on the other hand, it produces the result of fighting against forgetting.
Here, we can see the fundamental narrative strategy of "Love Letter", try to restrain the direct manifestation of trauma, and take natural forgetting as the main flow of the narrative, so as to maintain the calm and gentle narrative tone of the film, and at the same time create another kind of The power of reconstructing memory keeps creating cracks and tension in the plot. The dialectical relationship between forgetting and reconstructing memory is the focus of this paper.
Bozi wanted to "forget" the dead. If you think the word forgetting is too cruel, accept Fujii's death instead.
The relationship between Hiroko and Akiba Shigeru worries Hiroko, and Hiroko also bears the burden of two years of memories for Fujii's death. Whether it is to completely accept (forget) the death of Fujii Tree and move towards a new life, or continue to indulge in the fantasy of recalling the dead.
The progression of the movie shows that Hiroko tries to "forget" the dead, but this forgetting is achieved by pushing Fujii's reminiscence to the extreme. Instead of simply fantasizing about her ideal tree, she went to her hometown and made his first love (another tree) appear. At the same time as the thorough exploration of the memory of the deceased is completed, Hiroko Watanabe will put down the burden and gain a new life. For the deceased, this is also the process of completing his self-memory reconstruction. We don't really need to think that the dead person is dead according to the timeline of the movie, in fact, the dead person will hand over the power of his own search to the two heroines and all of our audience. When the memory is completely completed, it is the new life of the dead.
When the heroine opened Fujii's graduation album, the process had already begun, and the address on the album pointed to Fujii's hometown - Otaru. So Hiroko sent a letter. We can interpret this behavior as Hiroko's habit of resisting the fact that Fujii was dead, but the inevitable failure of the letter can be a medium for Hiroko to accept the death of the deceased. For the movie, pulling the camera to the stage of Otaru also means that the deceased must return to their hometown to a certain extent.
The letters were miraculously answered. For the audience, there is no miracle due to the appearance of Otaru City and the appearance of Nushu, and for Hiroko, it is a miracle from heaven, but this miracle is undoubtedly empty.
Hiroko finally found out that it was another person named Fujii Tree who replied, and her appearance that was too similar to her threatened her pure fantasy with the male Fujii Tree. The existence of Nushu is about to pull Hiroko back to a more cruel reality and let her escape from the beautiful dream. For the film, this beautiful dream will be opened to the audience again.
So why did the movie set the female Fujii and Hiroko as the same actor? On the one hand, it is a metaphor for Bozi's search for the memory of the deceased. In the final analysis, it is a search for his own self. Only by truly opening the knot in his heart and finding himself. She can start a new life. And this exploration is realized through the interaction with another "me" far away in Otaru. In other words, Mai Fujii assumes the role of Hiroko as a medium for self-exploration.
On the other hand, there is also the meaning of Hiroko trying to share the heavy responsibility of the memory of the deceased by calling another "me", the female Fujii. To put it a little more radically, the narrative of the movie itself follows oblivion, and the mission of the movie is to resist oblivion and create tension, so there is always a person who needs to bear the heavy responsibility of the dead, and the movie humanizes this responsibility. Dilute to a very gentle level.
And the female Fujii tree was reprimanded when she received this task, so that in the library, her colleagues called Hiroko "mental" and sent a letter with a more severe wording ordering to stop sending letters Activity. But when Otujii opened her memory, her desire to indulge in beautiful memories immediately made her accept the existence of Hiroko as a pen pal, joined the task of reconstructing Otujii's memory, and played the main role . In the end, the film narrative was able to progress to a higher stage, the middle school stage of the male and female Fujii Tree, which also carried the most aesthetic functions of the film. Of course, the highest aesthetic value of the film may not be completed in this part, but it must originate from this part. Shunji Iwai also reproduced this narrative structure in "The Last Letter", but because the expressiveness of the memory is too light and weak, the structure is dislocated.
Mai Fujii said that being in a class with a namesake is not pleasant, but the film deliberately downplays the pain of school violence, because the film's narrative strategy is to try to avoid intense emotions and purify reality as much as possible. This is not the insincereness of the film, but the choice of female Fujii's memory itself. If the female Fujii does not accept the male Fujii (the deceased) suddenly returning to Otaru and breaking into her life again, then the narrative of this memory can be completely dark and depressing. But because the female Fujii tree began to bear the gentle burden of Hiroko and the function of the film's narrative, it is natural for the memory to be based on grace and lightness. More radically, this is also the memory of the deceased selectively reconstructing himself.
When Hiroko sent the camera, the female Fujii tree took the camera and walked into the former school - a place where memories were made directly. The reconstruction of memory is reaching its peak, and memory and reality are directly blended. In this part, the female Fujii tree learned the news of the male Fujii tree's death from the teacher's mouth, and then the camera went over and crossed the wall. No one knew the mood of the female Fujii tree, only saw her pushing the bicycle away. Mai Fujiiki was burdened by the unbearable memory and escaped from the place where the memory was created.
Accompanied by the memory of Yuuki Fujii who is the backbone of the narrative. The image of Fujii's father keeps appearing in fragments in the film, all revolving around the scene where he died of pneumonia. Why do you want to set this up? The female Fujii tree does not live quietly in her years, and is not a happy and complete person. Before the film begins, the trauma of her father's death haunts her as a shadow of death, and there are gaps in her seemingly peaceful life. And this gap is the place where the deceased returns and the place where aesthetic values rely. The graceful figure of the girl Fujii Shu across the ice is the perfect reflection of her gloomy mood and the aesthetics of the film. (This is one of my favorite shots) Then the girl leans over and sees the dragonfly frozen in the ice, the memory is preserved in the ice, it can wait for an opportunity to continue to spread its wings and fly.
It is precisely because of the shortcomings of the past years that the female Fujii tree is more willing to take on the heavy responsibility of memory reconstruction. The father of the female Fujii tree and the Fujii tree finally met in front of the door of the female Fujii tree in the reconstructed memory. At that time, it was the funeral of the daughter of Fujiishu's father. The girl did not go to school. Fujiishu handed out the bookmark "Reminiscence of the Time Is Like Water" containing the confession. At that time, no one thought that this was a goodbye. (But not the end of the memory reconstruction) When the male Fujiiki said his condolences in an embarrassing tone, the female Fujiiki laughed. The two clues meet for the first time. If there is no crack in the death of the female Fujii tree's father, the other deceased (male Fujii tree) will never appear here.
My favorite scene in the whole film should be the snowy night, the run to save the girl Fujii. When the female Fujii tree collapsed due to pneumonia, the scene of her father's death and the death of the male Fujii tree are really standing in front of the audience. It's a movie that keeps hiding death, but here it can't hide anymore. The two clues reached the second and complete intersection, becoming a pure symbol of death. All of a sudden, the pain of everyone in the whole film is present here. The grandfather who was directly present lost his son, the mother lost her husband, and the daughter Fujiiki lost her father. As well as the pain of those who were not present in the loss of their fiancé, the pain of the parents and friends of the male Fujii, and even the pain of the two deceased's self-remodeling, all of which were most truly displayed. Of course, the impact of the film here depends on the countless times of repression before.
After a desperate argument, the grandfather resolutely took his daughter Fujii tree to the hospital. At the same time, Hiroko went to the mountain where the male Fujii tree died and shouted, "Are you okay?" The female Fujii tree answered Hiroko's question in place of the dead classmate. In a sense, many salvations are symbolically realized here. Through another her (subconscious) answer, Hiroko finally achieved "forgetting", unloaded the burden, and accepted the fact that the male Fujii tree died. Grandpa and mother Fujiiki were also rescued from the severe trauma of the last rescue failure.
But the reconstruction of memory is still not completed, and there is the last one, which is also the most soulful scene of this movie. The female Fujii tree took out the library card from "Reminiscence of the Time Like Water" and saw the portrait on the back. She finally completed the reconstruction of her youth and truly resisted the invasion of death. (Compared to the scene in the hospital in the previous scene, this is the real fulfillment.) And the audience finally saw the choked sobbing of the female Fujii tree with satisfaction. For the first time, she expressed her pain for the death of the male Fujii tree, which also means that she finally accepts After Hiroko recalled the burden of the male Fujii tree. (As mentioned earlier, this burden has been greatly alleviated by the film, and it is purified and elegant.) For the male Fujii, the reconstruction of the memory is really complete, and he has been perfectly reborn.
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