Is marriage and love related?
What if there was a relationship at the beginning, after 45 years of marriage?
On the eve of the 45th anniversary, a woman who has been frozen for 50 years suddenly breaks into her life, what should she do?
This is the plot setting of the movie "45th Anniversary", and it is also the first time that director Andrew Hagrid has focused on the theme of heterosexual marriage. The director not only bases the plot of "Anniversary", but also interprets the truth and crisis of marriage from the perspective of his wife.
It's just a pity that such a good movie only briefly showed a "nominated" face on the "Best Actress" of the 88th Oscars. As for the "Silver Bear Award", it will not help the global distribution.
An Oscar pushed "Marriage Story" to the cusp of the storm - multiple nominations and public relations hype before the lottery, so that "Marriage Story" smoothly hitched a ride on the "global release". It spreads out the chicken feathers of marriage between a man and a woman because they live in the city, infidelity in marriage, and power struggles (between the two and between children), and directly hits the "marriage story" of countless people. However, the demise of this marriage is not simply the cause of two people.
"45th Anniversary" is more pure and direct. There was only one "third party", or a frozen corpse. The father, who has no children between the two and only mentions the woman at the end, is even more unable to influence the marriage as for other social relations that are not related to each other.
So, even without the interference of anyone else, a marriage that starts with love can definitely go to the end without incident? This is the question left to everyone by 45th Anniversary.
At the beginning of the movie, Kate (the heroine) leads a Demu passively into the camera. Say "passive" because she doesn't look like she's walking the dog, but being walked by the dog — being led along. Life that seemed to be without waves, along with this morning as usual, was knocked open by a letter from Switzerland.
"I love Katya."
Jeff (the male protagonist) said this sentence, did not see or want to see the surprise on Kate's face, he was full of only his first love girlfriend Katya, who had been frozen in the snowy mountains for nearly 50 years.
Frozen, found, informed – this seemingly bizarre setting actually has 2 meanings:
First, this is a setting that has been forcibly pulled up,—— the life of two living people after the setting is thrown;
Second, "frozen first love" is itself a metaphor. In the movie, Jeff has a sentence:
"She's still the same face she was, but I'm the way I am now!"
Here alludes to the state of many people in real life: the first love is dead and does not die, it is the existence of eternal youth - because people who live in memory can become old?
Therefore, although this setting is bizarre, the core is very close to reality and the psychology of ordinary people.
Another clever feature of the movie "45th Anniversary" is that the true selves of the two protagonists are hidden in the details.
For example, I bought 3 versions of the same book, but none of them read a chapter of Jeff. This, for his first love's face and bit by bit, he never forgot - even the material of the first love ring is clearly remembered, making an understatement but not negligible foreshadowing.
For example, three nights before, he told Kate about himself and his first love, completely ignoring Kate's feelings. If this plot is simply seen as "selfish", it is slightly one-sided. From Jeff's own point of view, this is more of a trust, but also a manifestation of excessive demand.
At the final anniversary cocktail party of the film, Jeff himself finally reveals the reason for the illness that "delayed the 40th anniversary ceremony" - heart bypass surgery. Why arrange such a high-risk disease to the male protagonist? The director and screenwriter are here, laying the groundwork for Jeff's "temperament change".
In the heart of every man, there is a child who does not grow up. Although Jeff used to call "rejecting social civilization" "brave", after getting married and getting sick, Jeff could build a house alone, but later even repaired a toilet and cut his fingers. In other words, this disease, Jeff's life ability and psychological state, have degenerated to the state of youth, and then mention the first love, naturally "handy".
So he treats Kate, the wife who accompanies herself back and forth through the ghost gate, more from the husband's responsibility to gradually becoming dependent between relatives.
Charlotte Ramplin was young, a great beauty
So what does wife Kate really look like?
Charlotte Rampling, a goddess who has navigated between commercial and art films, is more skilled in acting as she gets older. The stoicism and paranoia of Kate's character have become inconspicuous under The interpretation of Ramplin, but they are endlessly evocative.
The first is the astonishing memory of the details – a German dictionary that has not been used for eight hundred years, which can be found in one fell swoop. This detail shows the woman's heavy heart and good memory (men like to call this "net memorization of some useless").
Then there is her in-person tolerance and behind-the-scenes peeping at Jeff. When Jeff's nostalgia for the past progressed to the third night, the audience was a little overwhelmed, Kate can still be indifferent. But after discovering the secret of the attic, he went up to see a picture of her husband's first love with a big belly, and the book full of sticky notes, petals and love.
The final shot of this segment is meaningful, and the director's skill is also slightly apparent-Kate answers the phone and turns around in place, but still unwilling to take the ladder back to the attic. This "ladder" perfectly interprets Kate's voyeurism and unknowing masochistic tendencies. Not taking the ladder back is an indulgence of one's own behavior and the subconscious expectation of deeper harm.
The old saying still makes sense: fish find fish, shrimp find shrimp. Jeff's habits and way of thinking are not innate, and Kate herself invisibly gives others a chip to inflict harm.
Although the director changed the starting angle, he did not take sides. With details and past events, it filled in the blank scene of only two people in the large paragraph, and also peeled off the marriage robe layer by layer, driving out the lice below.
In addition to uncovering the "true self" of the hero and heroine through the details of the behavior, the director also shows the difference between the brain circuits of men and women through a long or short dialogue.
When Jeff mentions the year her first love died, Kate says her mom also left that year. In the ensuing dialogue, Kate moved closer to "fatalism" and "pity for the same disease" every word, and the hint she gave herself was:
Katya was just as important to him as his mother was to me.
Not all coincidences are to be thankful for – the husband's first love girlfriend died the same year as his own mother, or before they met. It's no wonder that Kate felt that the encounter at that time was full of scars.
This passage shows that women are more emotional, more imaginative, and have the ability to make strong connections. This also for the originally beautiful and smooth commemorative ball at the end, when the two danced to the climax, Kate suddenly angrily withdrew her hand and laid the groundwork.
Perhaps sometimes, the injury is given by others, but the scar is left because it is repeatedly torn open by yourself, so that it is difficult to heal.
There is also a long dialogue in the movie that reveals the marital status of two people -
The photo in the attic, and the pregnant woman in the photo, "no photo" and "no pregnancy" are likely jeffs obeying Kate's wishes, but Kate blames everything on the other party after this incident.
Men like to remember selectively, women are good at selective forgetting.
When it comes to selective remembrance, it is necessary to mention another detail that is very hidden. In recalling the past, Kate's lines focus on large paragraphs on descriptions of states and decades of concluding statements, while Jeff is more about unfolding a certain point in time, something, and then describing his feelings.
Without any hints, it reveals an indisputable fact: women like to summarize time periods, and men like to focus on time points. To put it another way, it is more interesting: women's regrets are linear, and men's regrets are dotted.
There is also a very wonderful "quarrel", although it is not as fierce and fierce as "Marriage Story", but the restraint and suppressed anger between Jeff and Kate's words can mobilize the audience's feelings.
At the end of this scene, Kate gives herself a solution:
"From tomorrow, we start over."
But Jeff has been hidden from the picture, with only a few responses from Starburst.
In fact, who let go of this marriage first? Was Kate's hand draw at the end of the film a last resort, or was it premeditated? In fact, a hint has been given in the middle of the movie: Kate chases the dog and constantly shouts "Max". Demu symbolizes absolute loyalty, and for the rest of the film, the dogs are tethered. That said, the dog leash was most likely that Kate let go and then regretted it again.
Good movies don't have a useless shot, and good scripts don't have a single nonsense line.
The final group portrait of the party in the film alludes to Jeff and the reckoning of the past – from "bravely moving away from the civilization of society" in his youth to the current unconditional commitment to social groups.
But Kate's drawn hands and twisted face, and the tears that were almost unbearable, were passing to the audience: it was too late to go back. But this day, it seems, still has to go on.
At the end of the day, they still haven't been able to keep the same frequency for a lifetime. Decades of love have been crumbling in the quiet of the years, but they do not know it.
Marriage to the end, the two sides are lovers? Or a loved one? None of them matter.
The important thing is that when I need who you are, you will change into who you are, and I will switch identities with ease.