The first half of the film is trivial and unhurried about a fragment of the life of a girl who just entered the university. Like the accompanying piano music, it is clear, agile and simple.
Left home alone, went to school from Hokkaido to Tokyo, rented an apartment and lived alone. At the freshman meeting, she was reserved and shy, but she said that she was a very cheerful person; when I saw this, I was laughing secretly, maybe because I wanted to make more friends, so I said that she was cheerful, but she was the kind of person she answered questions. Be careful, it will be revealed.
Her life is as simple as a piece of white paper. She wears a long skirt with white flowers on a black bottom, white socks, and white sneakers. She rides a bicycle to and from school. She participates in club activities and practices fishing and swinging on the playground. Go to the bookstore to buy books, sit on a roadside bench to watch, watch a very unpopular movie at night, go home and cook a hearty curry meal, and eat it alone; lie in bed and call an old friend. . .
The plot of the movie here is quite slow, and even a little confusing. These trivial matters of life are randomly interspersed. What exactly do you want to show?
In the scene she watched the movie, there were a lot of complete movie scenes, and the political struggle of the Tokugawa shogunate era shown in the movie was completely irrelevant to the theme of this movie. What is the purpose of showing the content of the movie here? ?
In the same movie she was watching, a man in the dark seemed to approach with bad intentions, but she ran away. In fact, the man chased after her bicycle just to return the book she pulled down; her neighbor was a seemingly The gloomy woman, when she knocked on the door for the first time to deliver Hokkaido specialties to that woman, I always felt that the role of this woman in the subsequent development of the plot was not so simple, but in fact that woman was just a cold face, but she was actually very gentle inside. Man, that scene about curry was even a little moving.
So, once again, what do these seemingly unrelated plots have in common? ?
I'm not sure, just vaguely feel that the director is not really trying to tell a plot here, but to show a state of life, a state of spirit, and a character's macro-character; and this state and character are not any specific Events can be summarized, but they must be realized through gestures and life. Because of her introverted shyness and panic about strangers, she ran away from the movie theater; however, her nature was enthusiastic and optimistic, so she knocked on the door of the unfamiliar again and again, broke the ice of her relationship with neighbors with a smile, and introduced When I say I am an optimistic person, although it is incoherent.
However, if there is only a generalized plot in the first half, the character image obtained by the audience is vague and thin, and it cannot even be said that there is a character image here, but only an abstract mental state, character and emotion. So in the second half of the movie with the voice-over, the character is born; she has her history, she has her story, the audience jumps from a bystander into the character's heart, and there is a reason for all her living conditions.
She lives so peacefully because her heart is full, and because she has love in her heart, there is no restlessness and anxiety in her life. Instead, she goes to and from classes, club activities, movies, and cooking calmly, just for the bookstore called Musashino, Meet the man you love. .
Shunji Iwai's films seem to have a particular preference for voiceovers, which add a dimension and a perspective to the film. This dimension is the dimension of time, because all the content shown in the film has become a story about a history, and it is the present me looking back at the me at that time; this perspective is the character's subjective perspective, and the characters' thoughts and thoughts are directly expressed through subjective statements , rather than indirectly expressed through the objective observation of the camera (bystander). So, the pervasive style of the film is usually introspective, contemplative.
Correspondingly, in order to cater to this sense of historical retrospect, deep shots are often used in shooting. The subject (if the camera lens is imagined as a person's point of view) and the object (the shooting object, that is, the story to be told) are separated by a vast sea of time. , if another camera is aimed at this subject and object, it may be the me now looking back at the me at that time. In this film, there are two deep shots that I feel very emotional, one is the scene where the cherry blossoms are falling at the beginning, and the moving company asks for directions; the other is "I" riding a bicycle quickly on the embankment, and the voice-over sounded: " Last spring, Yamazaki went to Tokyo to study at university, and I completely broke down." The camera slowly zoomed out, as if the soul of "me" was watching "my" body from the sky, which was very beautiful.
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