The story of a London family

Harley 2022-12-09 18:23:44

Before watching this film, I stumbled across a comment that it was the British version of "Parents Love". So I watched this film with a desire to understand the life of ordinary foreign families.

In fact, the overall story of this movie is very simple. It is nothing more than the story of a man and a woman from acquaintance to falling in love, getting married and having children and finally dying. Such "templated" stories take place in every country in the world. But even though the stories are similar, there is always something in every story that only the people in the story can experience.

In the film, the heroine was originally a servant in a bourgeois family. Every morning, she would clean the glass in front of the window, and the hero would pass by the window to go to work at this time every day. The dust that the heroine cleaned just fell on On the head of the male protagonist, but the female protagonist is unaware of her fault. The male protagonist was not angry with the female protagonist's behavior, but was attracted by the female protagonist. Every day after that, he would reach out and say hello to the hostess when he cycled past there. Over time, the two began to fall in love and were about to get married, and the heroine also quit the job.

Although the life of the two is not rich, the male protagonist still gritted his teeth and bought a house, because the house can be paid in installments. The things in the house are bought or made by two people. The days go on like this: the male lead goes door to door as a milkman every day, and the female lead cooks and cleans the house as a housewife. Finally one day, the two of them welcomed a child. They thought that a happy life would be happier, but when World War II broke out, they had to send their five-year-old child to the countryside for refuge.

In the movie, the husband and wife take the child to the train station. Watching the five-year-old child get on the train to his aunt's house alone, the child's mother turns her back and secretly wipes the tears from the corners of her eyes. After that, they built an air-raid shelter in the house. At night, the two of them slept in the air-raid shelter. When they woke up in the morning, they had to clean the house that was destroyed by the plane bombing.

The war is cruel, but the description is very vague. Where is the cruelty of the war? The five-year-old child in the movie had to be separated from his parents for many years. As neighbors gathered to celebrate after the war, one dad said sadly: "But my son is dead."

After the victory of the war, the family was finally reunited. The son also grew up, and he dropped out of grammar school and went to art school without authorization. He entered a period of youth rebellion. He went to college with his girlfriend and brought his girlfriend home to meet his parents. At this time, his parents were slowly getting older, My hair started to turn white and less, and I needed to wear reading glasses to read newspapers and TV, and stay by the phone waiting for my son's call.

Finally, it is the husband and wife who begin to welcome the arrival of death. One day after Christmas, the heroine woke up lying on the hospital bed, pointed to her husband and asked her son: Who is this stranger? After the heroine passed away, the hero lived alone in the two-person house. When eating, he would still prepare tableware for the heroine, and the heroine's pillow on the bed was not taken away. He watched TV silently, beside him. With only one cat to accompany him, he eventually died of a heart attack.

The story ends here, and I don't feel relieved after reading it. In fact, it is a simple life of a person. The final outcome is to separate from the person you love the most, and then to die. In the film, after the heroine passed away, I felt empty and empty. I suddenly thought that my grandfather was like this when my grandmother died. I used to think that as long as the hero was accompanied by other people, it was fine. No, in fact, the two people who love each other have long been an inseparable whole. When one person leaves first, the one left behind is like a puzzle without a piece.

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Extended Reading

Ethel & Ernest quotes

  • Ethel Briggs: I could have married a deep-sea diver.

    Ernest Briggs: Well, why didn't ya?

    Ethel Briggs: Because I didn't love him.

  • [first lines]

    Raymond Briggs: [voice over] There was nothing extraordinary about my Mum and Dad, nothing dramatic, no divorce or anything, but they were my parents and I wanted to remember them by doing a picture book. It's a bit odd really, having a book about my parents up there in the best seller list among all the football heroes and cookbooks. They'd be proud of that, I suppose, or rather probably embarrassed too. I'd imagine they'd say, "It wasn't like that," or, "How can you talk about that?" Well, I have, and this is their story.