Chaos, confusion,
Fear, loneliness, self-blame...
These are the movie- watching experiences of this year's Oscar-winning film, " Father Stuck in Time ", which was just released in China .
It is also what the movie shows, how a patient with Alzheimer's disease feels when he gets along with the world.
Our dear father, there will always be a day when we get old. If this old man with Alzheimer's disease is our father, how should we understand his world?
This is the task of "Father Trapped in Time".
Therefore, at least in the first third of the film, the film deliberately entangled the fog and doubts:
Where is "Father" Anthony's watch? Who is "Paul" the son-in-law? Who owns this apartment in the film? Did daughter Anne go to Paris? What exactly is this story telling? ...
Someone tried to manage the time structure of "Father Trapped in Time" with the same rigorous logic as when watching "Creed", but found that they returned in vain, because in the latter world, the appearance of characters, events and objects is not tame. For any logic.
When you feel the chaos and repetitive dislocation, you really start to walk into the film.
Keep looking down, you forgive it.
On the contrary, I can't help feeling sad and heartache, maybe that is the world of the father of Alzheimer's disease.
Unlike many film and television works that first throw up issues and then discuss, "Father Trapped in Time" is to let the audience feel it first, and then try to lead people to understand it.
The best way to feel a person, a group, and experience what they have experienced is to put yourself in place. In reality, this is almost impossible to achieve, but the movie can do it.
The movie made us, the audience, suffer from Alzheimer's disease just like our father from the beginning.
There is no grand scene, no passionate dialogue and reversal, and even few outdoor scenes. "Father Trapped in Time" uses the most plain language and the quietest narrative to tell people why "touching people's hearts" will become the biggest movie. The advantages.
Lost time
The story begins in a clean apartment.
The camera enters the room before the protagonist, representing the eyes of the audience, and leads the audience in first like a maze.
There is 84-year-old father Anthony (Anthony Opskin), a patient with Alzheimer's who can't even understand the words and has a vague memory.
From the first frame, we have to accept the chaotic time and space he saw, and his illogical words and deeds.
Anthony ran away from the nanny again, and his daughter Annie (Olivia Coleman) was helpless and exhausted, and declared that she would move to Paris with her new boyfriend.
This is the first scene of the movie, a simple stroke, the identity of the "father" comes out, and the opposite is the "daughter".
The dialogue between the father and daughter is short and simple, even somewhat indifferent, slowly opening the tone of the film's overall plain narrative.
As we all know, the most important symptom of patients with Alzheimer's disease is forgetfulness.
But this is by no means ordinary forgetfulness. It has a progressive level and a long process of confrontation with the memory seesaw. The memory is divided into countless fragments, and then random and unsuspecting splicing, which is reflected in the old man Anthony. It is the perplexity, vigilance, loss and confusion of constant switching.
For example, he didn't put on clothes for half an hour.
For example, he often "lost" in familiar places, never knowing where he is or who is in front of him.
Therefore, Anthony may be vigilant and defensive about the people and things around him at any time, and even the closest people may become strangers in an instant.
He always doubted his daughter and quarreled with her, but this was because he was afraid that his daughter would leave him;
He doesn't want to live with his son-in-law because he always yells at himself, making him feel inferior and helpless.
Anthony occasionally picked up some excitement and joy.
There was a little nanny, Laura, who looked exactly like his little daughter who died young. Anthony couldn't help but tap dance, his time seemed to have returned to his youth.
By the way, Anthony is always looking for a watch.
From the beginning of the film, he suspected that the carer had stolen his watch. But in fact, it was he himself who hid all the important items.
The watch is undoubtedly one of the most important props in the film.
Anthony mistakenly thought that the watch that was lost or stolen was a symbol of his efforts to maintain a clear understanding of time. Even if the watch was at hand, he was still helpless, searching and losing it. "Time" is irretrievable. The earth drifted away from him.
Exquisite and restrained shots have been directed at the shock, astonishment and shame on the old man's face countless times. The audience found that his emotions are not always the same, but are intertwined repeatedly in different emotions.
Anthony repeatedly searched and questioned in his own constructed memory, and finally had to admit that he had indeed lost his time.
With the switch of Anthony's perspective, the audience also switched between the father's apartment and the daughter's apartment.
But the strange thing is that many of the furnishings of the two apartments are almost the same. The shape of the kitchen, the furnishings of the living room, the size of the dining table... The only difference is the color of the picture and some details of the furniture, such as the appearance of the chandeliers, the size of the sofa, Utensils in the kitchen.
Two almost identical spaces, where is the old man’s home and where is the daughter’s home? Are fragmentary stories that seem to happen in different locations, believable?
This approach is a propelling action with even a hint of suspense, which makes the audience unable to help but explore the truth about the father in the movie.
The answer was revealed in the last scene of the film.
Anthony woke up in the morning in the nursing home, and the audience in front of the screen suddenly realized: It turns out that the old man has been living in a nursing home for several weeks. Many of the previous chaos in time and space actually occurred in nursing homes.
It turned out that Anthony mistakenly regarded the nursing home as his home, his daughter's apartment, and the male nurse in the nursing home as his son-in-law.
The rich, bizarre and terrifying life in his mind is actually nothing but loneliness.
Sadness, followed by feeling the warmth of the film director, and fell into the sadness of the father again.
If nothing else, Anthony will spend the last days of his life in a nursing home, quietly killing away the chaotic, headache-inducing fragments of time and space.
He will usher in a huge emptiness, which is the real fear in real life.
Lonely end
Watching the movie, I can’t help thinking, would an old man be afraid to grow old?
My grandmother has been hardworking and hardworking all her life. By the age of 70, she was still energetic and diligent, but she quietly told me more than once: "If one day I get sick and cannot take care of myself, no one can remember, so she buys it for me. Let me break the knife by myself."
This is not necessarily a joke. The tone of "killing and decisive" reveals the fear of being forgotten and disliked.
Grandma doesn't seem to be afraid of death, but more afraid of the weakness and forgetfulness brought about by aging, and the trouble to the living.
For her, the latter is perhaps the cruelest torment that time has imposed.
Alzheimer's disease is such a tormenting executioner. This disease has another nickname: "gentle and terminal illness", it will not directly take away life, but it will take away people's memories.
The phrase "Death is not the end, forgetting is" in "Dream of Dreams" has been cited by people over the years to soothe the grief of death: as long as the memory is still there, life is still meaningful.
But Alzheimer's disease is like a dark magic that pierces it.
The person I love is still there, but he/she forgets me and our past forever.
Of course, healthy people are not overly afraid of such diseases. We can still infuse the sick with unilateral love and make them a complete beloved. A sunny example is a pair of famous old Internet celebrities in Taiwan, "Brittle Goose and Lao Xia". The man suffered from Alzheimer's disease. The two were full of forgetfulness while getting along, but did not lose love.
But someone has thought about how a lonely patient with Alzheimer's disease thinks about the eternal passing of memories?
In the movie, the disease is like a silent and invisible knife, gradually cutting off the memory capacity of the father's mind.
In the final scene where people "break the defense", the elderly Anthony finally got rid of his disguised rationality and strength, sobbing and begging to himself in front of the nurse like a child: "I want my mother, I want her Come pick me up, I want to go home..."
He was like a child, but finally had to face the exhaustion of his life.
The nurse cuddled the old man into his arms and gently soothed: "Relax, relax, you will be fine in a minute..."
The audience suddenly pulled out of the movie passively, realizing that everything that happened in the past two hours was probably caused by the Alzheimer's disease that the poor old man was enduring.
This is a very sharp heart-wrenching, soothing flow of two hours, a plot full of mystery like a suspense film, but it's just his amnesia, memories, and assembling memories during the day the father was in .
That's the way the father, an Alzheimer's sufferer, gets along with his memory.
Anthony the old man
Anthony Hopkins, the best actor winner, was absent at this year's Oscars.
He returned to his birthplace in Wales, and read the poet Dylan Thomas' "Don't Go Into the Night Gentlely" in front of his father's grave:
"The old man, at the end of his life, should burn and growl, angry, angry at the fading light."
This is a bit of a sigh, not only because of the shock that "Father" brings to people, but also because the film looks like it was tailor-made for Anthony in many ways.
Twice to win the Oscars for best actor, British national treasure actor Anthony Hopkins is 84 years old this year.
The name and date of birth of the hero in the film are the same as those of Anthony Hopkins, the same old age, and the same cherishment and nervousness of time.
"Father Trapped in Time" is not only a solemn footnote given to actor Anthony by time, but also a gift he gave to film art.
But instead of substituting for himself to understand the father in the movie, he substituting for his own father .
On Christmas Day 1979, Anthony's father suffered a myocardial infarction. Although his life was saved after first aid, his health has been worrying. Beginning in the spring of the following year, the old father's consciousness gradually deteriorated, occasionally falling into a coma, and he was often irritable during his waking period. As the only child, Anthony was often affected.
Anthony said in an interview with "Vogue" magazine in April this year: "I am now over the age of my father when he died. I can understand the character Anthony from the beginning, which is like interpreting my father."
Anthony Hopkins' acting skills and his contribution to the film cannot be summed up in a few words.
From the perverted murderer with high IQ in "The Silent Lamb " in 1992 , to the rich father of "Deep Love and Responsibility" in "The Sixth Sense of Life and Death ", to the root of painful change in " The Inheritance of the Pope " Pope Du XVI, this performance lasted half a century.
During the filming of the final scene of "Father in Time", the character Anthony sobbed in front of the nurse, and the actor Anthony fell into an emotional breakdown outside the scene .
An 84-year-old old man will still miss his father-because a pair of auxiliary reading glasses placed on the bedside cabinet of the nursing home reminds him of the day his father left:
"I remember standing there, thinking that he worked so hard all his life, but on the day his life ended, it was just like this... I began to think about myself, I am not getting better, one day I will be like this (to end my life)."
He said so in the interview.
In another scene, Anthony was asked by the doctor about his date of birth. He replied "Friday, December 31, 1937."
The "Friday" in this passage was originally not in the script, but Anthony believes that this word can make the audience more aware of how old people are unwilling to persuade them.
Some critics think that Anthony's performance is "A Great Way to Jane", but maybe he just poured his unreserved love into the film. What is the relationship between reality and fiction? Movies are his life. If you don't give up time every day, you don't give up life day by day. Of course, you won't give up movies.
The resistance to forgetting is that Anthony outside the film still insists on drawing, playing the piano, and recite poems to exercise his brain power after filming. "I am close to the age when I may be dementia, I hope not. So I work hard to paint and play the piano. , Reading poems."
For Anthony, film is the true destination and starting point of life, so there is no retirement. According to him, "Once you stop, life stops."
He is to be a fighter, confronting time, burning up on the stage.
Author | Xiao Yao
Edit | Ji Jie
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