Song Fang, a girl from Beijing, came to Paris to study film. In order to earn money, she helped Suzzane, an artist from a puppet troupe, to take care of her child. Simon, an eight or nine-year-old boy, whose parents divorced, lives with his mother in Paris. He is well-behaved, cute, and knows how to take care of himself. Song Fang didn't ask much about Simon's father and sister who was far away in Brussels, who never showed up, but she heard that Suzzane also went to England to be a nanny when she was young - this is a kind of popular among young European girls Let’s take a “tour” way, and now it’s a Chinese girl in Paris…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Paris does not have the atmosphere of a modern city, only streets that are not clean and orderly, casual outdoor cafes, and noisy school gates. The old train platform, the messy room, the simple attic, the scattered old houses, the Eiffel Tower in the distance, the castle on the hill. I liked that Binoche was on the train, took out a postcard and said to a Chinese puppet artist a lot of age: I want to give you this postcard, although it is just a postcard, it has accompanied me throughout my adolescence, I bought it at the British Museum when I was a nanny in England when I was young. The content on it made me realize how profound China is... So I'm going to give it to you, although it's not worth the money, but it has my years...
Remembering Simmel's Philosophy of Money in class yesterday, anything that can be measured in money has been objectified. Human values and emotions cannot be objectified, and therefore cannot be measured with money. No one writes a check for $200 to a lover on the second day of a date, and a man sends a woman flowers because flowers have at least a part of their value and cannot be measured. I finally understand why after all these years, the gifts I give to my favorite people are all handmade - because I want him/her to understand that I am giving true love and true love is priceless.
It turns out that I have always regarded people as an end, not a means. I am a humanist.
After watching the movie, A asked me if I liked the movie and why. I said like, "coz' there are lot of metaphorical meanings, and it also could be seen as a feminist film in many ways, and it really made me love Paris, and also reminded of me another Italian film..'the best of our'...
"the best of our youth", A and I said in unison.
"So, what metaphor have you seen? "
The balloon is really the audience, all of us, at some point, like a naughty child, peeping into a part of other people's lives. Balloons are destiny and dreams. They seem to exist and seem to be non-existent. They are indistinct, floating and indeterminate, but difficult to dissipate. Balloons are also a call to the heart. No matter how difficult and noisy life is, it is always there, where you can see it as soon as you look up. "
Well, the balloon seems to me to be our daydreams, a place for children to escape when they can't concentrate on their day-to-day affairs. "
Actually, this is a story full of helplessness, but Hou Hsiao-hsien chose to tell it in another way. At the end of the film, a French female voice sounded, and the melody was Cai Qin's "Forgotten Time". I like it very much.
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