"Mom, what's my future?" a five- or six-year-old child asked.
"I don't know what your future is. Your future should be in your own hands."
This answer is orthodox, but also very irresponsible. Generally, parents will answer their children's questions as if they had read a FAQ book beforehand. They either didn't know it themselves, or they knew that they didn't want to let their children down prematurely, so they chose to answer this way. In fact, life is a series of compromises, it is disordered, it does not have orthodox rules like society, and a society that seems to be well-ordered is at the cost of countless compromises.
Anyone who is self-aware, if he succeeds in society, he will inevitably destroy himself. Many people want to control their own future, and they regard these as the "hope" of life. It is a pity that those "hope" are also the expectations of the society. Ask yourself, can you really control your own future?
The answer that Angelopoulos gave me was no. The answer is given by two innocent children who are not concerned with the future but the past - they want to know who their father is. Through a journey, Angelopoulos told us that life is disordered, it is sometimes frozen, sometimes flowing, sometimes noisy, sometimes quiet, sometimes lucky, sometimes sad. The children were taken to the police station, it snowed, and Angelopoulos let time freeze, giving the children the privilege of breaking out of order, letting them escape and go wandering. They met a woman with premarital syndrome, met a dying horse, met the first person who loved them, had unspeakable feelings, then experienced human atrocities, and then met a giant digging earth Machine, it's ugly, but it shows its claws. What's wrong with society? What happened to life?
Angelopoulos reflects on the changes of our times again and again. Did he fall into a black hole, or was he rebuilding the light? The times have become extremely powerful, we have more and more things, but we have become more and more small and fragile, and our lives have been disordered again and again, which is hopeless. Greek tragedy is no longer staged, but it is still in the world, and there are tragedies everywhere. The huge hand seemed to have severed its index finger, and the direction it was guiding was also cut off. We are gradually forgetting our old attachments, our spirits have nowhere to stay, and only children can be at the mercy of life and destiny under such a helpless wandering, but still firmly find our own way.
Like us, the children are all naked, wanting to fight against society, wanting to know who they are, and what we have experienced, 90% of them are not our expectations, but only 1% of them persisted. They understand that the outcome is not in their control, and even the process, they can't control their own future, but they can have the determination to control the future. This way, they have no regrets.
Angelopoulos' poetic images tell people again and again the hope in peace, albeit sentimental. In the end, he gave a satisfactory but unclear ending: the two children saw the tree that seemed to be in the mist, either in heaven or in Germany. But that doesn't matter anymore, because the moment they board the train, they've already reached their destination.
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