"People can't count how many bright moons there are on her roof
And can't count the thousand bright suns behind her walls"
- Mizar Mohammad
In 1627, when the poet Muhammad passed through the city of Kabul, he generously used a thousand suns to describe the Kabul maiden.
Human beings have never been stingy in praising women, but like the "flower of evil", praise is eventually intertwined in the endless suffering of women, and it stretches into an epic full of wounds. Perhaps, the light and heat of the thousand suns are still not enough to dispel the coldness of the land beneath them.
But there are always some people who will see them and stare deeply at their suffering. Such as the Brazilian director Karim. Enoz.
Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s was crowded and dull. Guida and Euridice are inseparable sisters, but Guida's one-night absence changes everything. The two girls care about each other all their lives, but never see each other again. For a time, they lived in each other's imagination - a life that they had longed for, but could not come true, until the truth burst out when the ice and snow melted over the years.
The title "Invisible Woman" obviously has some ambiguity. On the one hand, this kind of "invisibility" refers to the absence of the two girls in each other's lives, a real-world incompatibility brought about by a lifetime of encounters. On the other hand, this "invisible" metaphor refers to the obscuring of female identity and its independence, the objectification of female life, and the collective "aphasia" of females.
The family of origin of Guida and Euridice is a traditional family with strict patriarchy, and even the mother is just the shadow of the father. Perhaps it is this oppressive and stern atmosphere that reversely gave birth to Guida's desire to seek true love and escape from the cage, so she chose to elope - with a romantic sailor. Unsurprisingly, the father was furious.
And when, a year later, Guida, tired of the sailor's flirtatiousness, resolutely left him and returned to Rio de Janeiro—with the child in his womb who was destined not to be given legal status, his father angrily threw her out of the house and scolded her: " Bitch!" This is the scene we are familiar with to this day - "slut humiliation". In Guida's life, it was clear that her lover was the swinger, and she was just a victim who gave her heart too easily. Her mistakes were only blindness derived from the innocence and enthusiasm of the girl who fell in love. Completely irrelevant to morality and ethics. But the paradox is that in reality, she has just become the one who bears the moral criticism, as if in the entanglement between men and women, women are always the party who can be "reasonably" stigmatized. Even today, which has entered the post-modern era, the victims of the #MeToo movement still suffer from accusations, suspicions, and cynicism of "self-inflicted blame", "flies don't bite seamless eggs", and "smiling clothing is seduction".
And the unfriendly plot to women permeates the film can be said to be pitched. The most violent conflict occurred between Euridice and her husband. Euridice's dream was to go to a conservatory in Vienna, but she unexpectedly became pregnant. One month before the exam, my husband learned that she wanted to take the exam and complained, "I just want you to think more about your son and your family!" At that moment, I knew she could no longer live with her ideals meet. This kind of pain, which was separated from the ideal self and drifted away, stabbed me in an instant. Later, she was admitted to a local music academy. But when she tried to share the good news with her family, her father's first reaction was: Are you pregnant? When her husband found out, he was just as angry as before. This is easily reminiscent of the debate about "female fertility" that has been raging some time ago, and a professor's arrogant remark: "Procreation is a woman's natural duty." The so-called "natural" is nothing but a color of legitimacy painted by "violence" between a certain gender. In this way, all the reproductive pain that women endure has become a matter of course. Beauvoir said in "Second Sex": "A woman is not so much a 'born' as a 'formed'." This "formation" is a kind of construction, and construction The subject is male. Obviously, in the vision of the father, husband in the film, and countless men in reality, the grandeur and essence of female identity lies in "fertility" (this self-righteous obsession with fertility can really be selected as one of the most confounding behaviors by men. reward). Therefore, when a woman's individual rights and her desire for an independent life conflict with her "duty" of reproduction, she is required to give up her desire and the possibility of more experiences.
As I read Euridice's story, there is a deepening despair, a hopelessness that is more than Guida's embarrassment and hardship. I understand that she has long been thrown into a destiny that is prescribed, examined and arranged by men, and it is difficult to break free. I understand what she said to her husband: "When I play the piano, I seem to disappear." What disappears is this alienated life of Dasein, this false female identity, only in this disappearance, Her unique life of self-empowerment, her feminine self-awareness, her truest sense of being human, can only emerge.
When watching the movie, I was always thinking about a question, why is the relationship between Euridice and Guida so deep, and even after thousands of mountains and rivers have passed through time, they still can't forget each other. But I feel that this is not just a kind of affection. After thinking about it for a long time, I suddenly realized that under the coat of family affection, what is actually wrapped up is the fate of two individuals who also have female identities. It is the coincidence of fate brought about by this same identity that makes them deeply care for each other, sympathize with each other, and even sympathize with each other. Zhang Ailing said: Because she understands, she is compassionate. Only two women who understand each other's suffering can soothe each other's weakness and cherish each other's longing. So, when Euridice found out that Guida had "passed away" and that he had been deceived by his parents for so many years, he ignited the treasured piano - burning the piano is not only a symptom of mental illness, but also a farewell. For Euridice, Guida may be the only person in the world who truly understands herself, supports herself unconditionally, and loves her unique and authentic life, and when she left completely, the one in Euridice who has been trying to wake up and The escaped self is also "died". From then on, she will completely become an "invisible woman".
At the end of the film, the dying Euridice meets Guida's granddaughter, a girl also named Guida. As if a kind of deepest consolation - in the mouth of the girl's grandmother, Euridice is a pianist, a proud woman who has achieved her ideal in the Vienna Golden Hall.
Seeing this, my eyes were a little sour. I think the director is a gentle person after all, he saw the beauty of those women and their pain, so he left a slight outlet for them, so that through their last bit of residual warmth about human ideals .
Through the mouth of Guida's friend Filomena, he tries to get women to tell the world: "I'm fed up with pleasing others, I want to please myself"—a true feminist film. In traditional film texts, male characters occupy the center of discourse, and female characters are usually framed as "others" or "outsiders" in a male-dominated world, losing the space to tell their own stories. However, this film focuses on women, providing a possible image space for the self-expression of women's struggle and the call of women's subject consciousness.
He let people see the shaded bright thousand suns.
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