At the age of 18, I wanted to love, I wanted to eat, and I wanted to escape

"Do I look like A Sacramento?"

"You're a Sacramento."

The first line of dialogue of [Miss Bird] is the daily life of the American high school girl and her mother.

The girl will soon be 18 years old, and her memory of going abroad is still stuck in her childhood, but she has to live in Sacramento, the "eighteen-line town" in California.

To the boring city and people and life, Kristen had a shit-eating expression on her face, and she just wanted to escape.

At the age of 18, I wanted to love, I wanted to eat, and I wanted to escape

So she shouted, don't call me Kristen!

Stubbornly correcting everyone, he said, "Please call me Lady Bird."

The meaning is unclear, but it sounds different from those vulgar high school students.

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Miss Bird certainly looked down on Sacramento.

Because her dream place is the literary city of the East Coast - New York.

Sacramento, the capital of California, has no features to no name.

Speaking of California, you know the purple and golden fantasy Los Angeles in [Philharmonic City], and you know the colorful San Francisco in the American drama "Seeking";

But Sacramento...

It is in this place of birds do not in Sa Village that Miss Bird has obviously inferior dye but warm red hair, a stubborn expression, and a tall figure.

Although math is always a mess, Catholic schools are always boring enough, love is frustrated enough, and moms are nagging enough...

But, fortunately, the year is fast enough, and New York is not so far away.

So she secretly applied to the university on the East Coast and applied for a scholarship without her mother.

Because of the ordinary, because of poverty.

The yearning for change becomes a destination.

Yes, that's right! I'm going to go to New York!"

Like you or I who volunteer at the end of the college entrance examination.

Schools are less important, cities are more important.

I want to go to Dalian, I want to go to Qingdao, I want to go to Xi'an, I want to go to all the far places.

耳机里听着鲍勃·迪伦的《blowing in the wind》，哼着“how many roads must a man walk down，before you call him a man.”

The city in the distance has become a multicolored bubble blown out in the sun, full of dreams and shining light.

However, when I was 18 years old, I was always focused on myself, and the adults around me were not only useless, but also became obstacles.

That's the relationship between Miss Bird and Mom.

When others say bad things about their mother, she will immediately refute it back: "She loves me, and she loves me very much." ”

But a disagreement and emotional outburst: "Give me the money I raised, give me a number, I will return all the money to you, I don't have to talk to you again." ”

Arguing in the car, even the tone is like the quarrel between Dolan and his mother in "I Killed My Mother".

Probably all children and mothers have similar overlaps in their relationships.

Because you didn't know what an obstacle was and what it was to be lost, but my mother knew.

It's like Wang Xiaobo wrote in "The Golden Age":

"I was twenty-one years old that day, and in the golden age of my life, I had many extravagant hopes. I want to love, I want to eat, and I want to turn into a half-light and half-dark cloud in the sky in an instant..."

At that time, I was young and vigorous, so I always wanted to escape, to escape from the town and my mother.

Wang Xiaobo's sentence also has the second half of the sentence, "Later I learned that life is a slow process of being hammered." ”

Miss Bird soon felt lost in a foreign land.

In the strange new york city, the memories of Sacramento came to mind.

After a hangover, after hearing the choir at church, she finally called her cold-war mother:

"Mom, do you remember how you felt the first time you drove down the streets of Sacramento?"

I never realized that Sacramento was such a beautiful place, familiar with every street, every shop. I just want to say, thank you. ”

At this point in the film, you finally understand the cunning of screenwriter and director Greta Gerwig.

She obviously wrote a love letter to her hometown of Sacramento, but disguised the movie as how to escape from her hometown and her mother.

It's all an illusion.

Or another way of understanding it, Miss Bird finally had the courage to face and acknowledge her inner feelings for her hometown.

A real growth.

When I was in my hometown, I always thought about leaving; when I really left, I missed it again. This is probably the hometown complex of people.

Of course, it is also a kind of family complex.

Greta Gerweger's original screenplay was called Mother and Daughter, and her hometown was Sacramento.

After graduating from high school, she was like Miss Bird and went to New York alone.

Interestingly, about this story of working hard in New York, Gerwig also played a [Frances Ha], the kind that can be seamlessly connected to this film.

In short, the complex feelings for the mother/family/hometown are in themselves the private feelings of Gerweger.

Projected on Miss Bird, even though there are fictional parts, emotions cannot be hidden.

"There will never be anything out of this town, its nights are so dark, the winters are so cold... In two months I'll go to Milan, Genoa, anywhere. ”

In Fellini's [Wanderings], there was a young man who chanted this, but finally stayed.

In the end, it was another silent young man who left, and Fellini, along with him, bid farewell to the seaside town of his hometown.

Those who have left, those who have left, perhaps every young person has wandered and hesitated between their hometown and far away.

Stories are always the same story, and everyone is so different.

Later, in [Amarcord], Fellini finally fondly recalls his hometown and his childhood.

How to escape, how to return.

So Fellini said, "The record that a man can do will always be, and can only be, a record of himself." ”

Shen Congwen also ran away from Xiangxi, although he was in the city, he spent his whole life recording everything in Xiangxi, recalling and fabricating everything in Xiangxi.

This is a complex that he himself cannot escape.

In [nostalgia], Tarkovsky photographs the poet's sorrow in a foreign country as dense as a breath;

In Guy Martin [My Lake Winnipeg], the young man in his dream boards the departing train, and the beauty of nostalgia falls into the eyes of his mother's watchman;

In Yoji Yamada's [hometown], when the family leaves, they think, "Remember her appearance, don't forget, this is our island!" ”

Only when I came home on holidays, still sitting on the stone steps of the old bridge and looking at the river as I was a child, did I think that I had settled in another country for a long time.

Maybe since I grew up, my hometown will never be able to reach it again.