Life is like Hirokazu-eda's empty mirror, but it contains loneliness and sadness, but also light and daily life.

Kody 2022-09-07 14:03:27

The lens of life was there when you were not born. When you came to the world, you only added sadness to the camera, as well as memories, memories that can't be erased.

In the blue night of the evening, you ran to catch up with grandma who was staggering on the bridge and persuaded her to go home. She said that she just wanted to go back to Shikoku and die in Sumao. Just like that, grandma disappears from your life.

At that time, you were only thirteen or fourteen years old, with a long ponytail. The incomprehension and helplessness of life are engraved on the bridge and written in the night sky.

Later, you and Yu Fu got married. His small eyes were hidden behind his long hair, and there was no light, unlike your eyes, which shone with light and hope for life.

After get off work that day, he stole a bicycle because his bicycle was stolen by someone else. You bought the paint, and you and Asano painted the bike together under the dim streetlights, dark green, just like the night. You ask him, why is he absent-minded, is he tired? He said, "Yeah." Later, he said that the company hired a sumo wrestler who was retired because he was not good enough. This was the only frustration he had ever expressed. Maybe you didn't hear it.

You jumped up and down to the factory to see him, and greeted him with a sweet smile and a pouty mouth through the window glass at the factory entrance. It took him a long time to look back, expressionless, and there was still no light in his eyes.

That day was the same as before, and the tram on the track next to it continued to run like life, except that the sky was gray and blue and it looked like it was going to rain. Yu Fu suddenly went home to get an umbrella, turned his head and left. You said you wanted to take him out, but he said, "You're stupid, you still have to send it." go. You stood at the door with a bright smile on your face, watching his back go away.

That day, he committed suicide. The police said he was walking on the tracks, facing a tram coming on the opposite side. Just like that, Yu Fu also disappeared from your life without leaving you an explanation.

Later, you took your son to marry a foreign country, and followed a divorced man with a daughter, a man you never seemed to call his name - Minxiong, living in his hometown, a quiet and remote seaside village.

In this way, there are more people and things in the lens of your life: the second man, the man's daughter, the silent father-in-law, the optimistic mother-in-law, the neighbors in the seaside town, the village, the town, the sea, the waves, the calm Ponds, distant hills, and snow on the slopes. Life seems to be bright again, but the people and memories that have passed away in life are hidden in your heart like a thorn, often stinging you in your dreams, from winter to spring and summer, and then to autumn and winter.

You follow the funeral procession in the town, in the dark sky, trying to unravel your inner confusion. You finally express the puzzlement hidden deep in your heart: why do you want to commit suicide, why do you want to walk on the rails. Minxiong next to him said: Maybe the sea is calling him, because there is a beautiful light there. Yu Fu, who has no light in his eyes, may be pretending to be a huge burden to life, just like the black tone that the director Hirokazu Koreeda repeatedly expressed through the lens, the black hole in life, in the seemingly dull and quiet daily life, the darkness of life is swallowing Yu Fu.

Yes, in the empty mirror of life, there must be darkness, sadness, and loneliness, but there is still bright light.

This film is "Phantom Light" (Japan, 1995), which is the debut of the famous Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda.

In this film, Hirokazu Koreeda used a lot of fixed camera positions and fixed shots, including a lot of empty shots and natural light, and he used this lens language to the extreme. This is an objective and restrained film language. In such a long and slow empty shot, the characters greatly express the loneliness and sadness of the characters. This expression is indeed very similar to the early Hou Hsiao-hsien, and also has the shadow of Japanese film master Yasujiro Ozu. Coupled with the very elegant composition, the picture is beautiful, clean and ethereal. In "Phantom Light", the language of the camera lens is bigger than the expression of the characters in the play, and even bigger than the plot. This is the flaw in this film.

Original: Movie Past (Public Account)

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Extended Reading

Maborosi quotes

  • Yumiko: It's harder to say goodbye if we keep postponing it.

  • Yumiko: [Recalling her first husband's unexplained suicide] I just... I just don't understand! Why did he kill himself? Why was he walking along the tracks? It just goes around and around in my head. Why do you think he did it?

    Tamio: [after giving it some thought] The sea has the power to beguile. Back when dad was fishing, he once saw a maborosi - a strange light - far out to sea. Something in it was beckoning to him, he said... It happens to all of us.