After watching it twice, for the second time, because I knew the ending, when I saw Li go home and hold his three children and his wife, I felt even more heartbroken and unbearable.
Life is made up of countless details, and so is the play. The difference is that the latter must be infused with meaning, while the former may not. As a screenwriter and director, Lonergan must have thought about the question, why in the play, the characters are always busy saving the world or falling in love, instead of having to deal with meaningless things like cleaning a toilet clogged with feces, such as Sisyphus. Hard labor, laborious and meaningless labor?
Does everything have to be meaningful?
In Li's life, apparently not, his heavy life tragedy was brought about by an unintentional misstep, a mistake so trivial that it would be impossible for him to even seek punishment. Several acoustic compositions, the imagery of Floating, and the first movement of Handel's Sonata in G minor are the backdrop for the great tragedy of life.
Compared with such pure music, it corresponds to the trivial matters of life that cannot go on smoothly all the time. Li's occupation is that of a handyman who specializes in helping people clean up such trivial matters. toilet. The damage has been done, rebuilding is impossible, life is broken here and there, and all you can do is tinker.
So in the film, every time we get into a tragedy that's too serious, we're interrupted by something boring and pointless. After saying Let's go, one drove the door and one opened the door because of a misunderstanding; the reason for the burial was that the permafrost could not be melted, and there were no other spiritual requirements; when Michelle was injured, when the stretcher was loaded into the ambulance, he repeatedly got stuck and couldn't. Get in the car without a hitch; the band's drummer is either a beat faster or slower. Moment by moment, life itself is always throwing up barriers, reminding us of how the real world is different from theatre. The background of the tragedy of life is decorated with less serious absurdities.
Yet this torrent of the absurd over time has eased the unbearable burden. It is not God that saves us, but trifles.
Casey's older brother, Joe, is someone who can joke about his own life and death. Corresponding to him, of course, is Joe's wife. When she yelled "how can you make fun of this kind of thing", her way of escaping the punishment in life is to be an irresponsible mother and escape into such a serious and unbearable mother. Puritan home. She and Joe's doomed parting ways are two completely different attitudes towards death and two completely different directions towards life.
The decisions of the gods were so cruel and solemn that Sisyphus had only a Rolling Stone life day after day.
And people can only save themselves in the torrent of life. My son's classmates once recalled Joe's joke about life jackets: a life jacket won't help you escape, but at least it's harder when a shark is going to eat you. This existential dilemma, those seemingly boring and uninteresting things that surround us all the time, are like life jackets supporting us in the vast sea of misery. Escape doesn't work, but at least it makes you less likely to be eaten.
Ultimately, we all need to resist the cruelty of the world with a bitter and dark sense of humor, which is what Camus called the smile of Sisyphus.
Manchester is a small seaside town not far from Boston. It is far away from Manchester in the United Kingdom, and it has some similarities in imagery. Director Lonergan was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with You can count on me as early as 2001, and after winning two Best Original Screenplay nominations in 2003 and 2011 respectively, he edited and directed. "The Seaside" almost won the screenwriter award of major awards.
As far as directing techniques and photography skills are concerned, they are almost modest and conservative, and audiences who are accustomed to accepting high-standard Hollywood visual glamour shows in luxury theaters suddenly see such a middle-aged man whose image quality is mediocre or even dropped. The story of the bereavement still has such favorable feedback. It can only be said that most of the moving parts of "The Seaside" lie in the solidity and excellence of the play.
Also, Casey's performance is really good.
The end of the story reminds me of last year's equally acclaimed "Tony Erdman", an ending that hardly obeys the three-act rule of drama, ending where it is not the end, a reality that came all the way from "The Bicycle Thief" doctrine method. Uphill, downhill, chasing the ball and playing, the two relatives who have depended on each other from then on, even if they are riddled with holes, they are nothing more than non-stop lives.
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