Youth is such a thing, only after it has passed, will you realize that those days were very youthful.
Takeshi Kitano's films are clearly personal, and as an audience, I always feel that:
the film gives the impression that there is always a pair of eyes behind the camera.
The pair of eyes coldly watched Pony and Shinji do the bad things bad boys do.
These eyes are also arranging and controlling how the bad boy ends his youth and returns to the starting point.
The director's cleverness is that he gives the audience the same feeling as he quietly pays attention to how the two children walk on their own wandering road called youth, without any tough plot twists and contrived manipulations. But unlike us outside the real camera, the whole story is actually telling us how fate is reincarnated in the director's deliberately flowing plot.
The two boys made me miss the boys around me in junior high school.
We do have similar ponies and Xinzhi around us.
The pony, the leader of the bad boy, the ruffian appearance, the bad mind.
Xinzhi, the follower of the bad boy, is silly and others-centered.
But from a certain point of view, Pony and Xinzhi are actually one person.
The pony acts as an executor of bad things: playing puppets to tease the teacher, demanding money from weak classmates, pretending to be an adult to enter an adult movie theater, and learning boxing for revenge after being insulted. . . . . .
And Xinzhi, as a bystander of all the ponies doing all the bad things, is actually a narrator who tells the story of youth and rebellion.
Pony and Xinzhi are to one person as they ride a bicycle on the playground: one handles the handlebars, the other spins the wheels.
There are two scenes in the film that are full of infinite reverie:
1. After being insulted by the boxer, Xiaoma never came to school again. After Xinzhi went to the door of Xiaoma's house to ring the bell, which was regarded as a signal by the two, Xiaoma never came out.
Xinzhi waited outside the door for a while, then walked away silently.
In fact, from then on, the two people were destined to be two individuals as one soul began to drift apart.
2. The pony runs to exercise for revenge. Xinzhi is still a follower, riding a bicycle to accompany the pony to run.
On the way, the pony ran down from a bridge crossing and motioned Xinzhi to wait for him at the crossing ahead.
We don't know what the original intention of the pony ran down, what he was thinking about on the short way to meet Xinzhi's next intersection.
It was at that intersection. After the fate of the two people experienced a similar downhill turn, Xinzhi also chose to run down during the running training. He wanted to know what the road that Xiaoma ran down was like, and he wanted to know where Xiaoma was at the time. Thinking of something, but apparently he didn't get an answer.
But the setting of the plot seems to tell us that the two individuals attached to one soul will return to oneness from that moment on.
This is what we saw later when the pony was finally cut off by the gang boss and Xinzhi was beaten in the ring at the same moment.
If we cut it a little deeper, in fact, the other boy in the film who is pursuing the waitress in the cafe can actually be regarded as a person with Xiaoma and Xinzhi.
Three parts of their one-man whole: Pony is exposed as the one who does all the bad things, Shinji as the follower of all the bad things, and the third boy is the timid and weak part of the whole.
He also wants to do bad things, but as the weak part he can only watch the pony and Xinzhi skip school and play on the playground through the window, and can only be the one who is blackmailed and beaten by the bad kids.
In the film, Pony steals the love letter that the third boy gave to the barmaid in the cafe, and he reads it aloud while sitting behind Xinzhi's bicycle, which is actually a medium for the three people to become one.
Young and ignorant, they all yearn for hazy love and pure friendship. Xiaoma and Xinzhi completed the friendship part, and the third boy completed the love part.
If Xiaoma and Xinzhi were not bad boys, they might be the third boy. They did nothing during school and were bullied by their classmates; they were mediocre at graduation and were bullied by their bosses; the pressure of society and the burden of the family finally ended. Backlog to suffocation, and finally died in an accident Huang Quan.
Of the three parts of the last whole, only two parts remain, and the two parts return to the origin.
So when Xinzhi asked: Are we finished?
The pony will say: Fool, we haven't started yet.
Those that happen in schools, boxing gyms, gangsters, companies, the cycle begins again.
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