"Love Letters" has been re-released for more than a week.
As of today, the box office is close to 60 million.
In the case of a Japanese import film (and it is still a re-release), the results are not bad.
After 26 years of love classics, whether it is the handsome teenager who leans against the window to turn the pages, or the shy girl who does not understand.
Scene after scene between each other is tenaciously stationed in the memory of the audience.
"Good to cry", "touched", "healed"...
For years, these compliments have been the labels of "Love Letters" and director Shunji Iwai.
Backstage, many poisonous rice that was moved by this pure emotion were curious about how Sir had not talked about it.
Not because I don't want to, but...
Can't bear to poke.
For "Love Letters" and the director, everyone really has too many beautiful "misunderstandings".
We are accustomed to calling Shunji Iwai's films "beautiful", "small fresh" and "literary", and even some fans exaggeratedly call him the most talented director of youth films in Japan.
Sorry Sir to tell the truth today.
The little couple in love should look carefully, and the little couple who recently went to see this "Love Letter" together should be more cautious and cautious...
In Sir's opinion.
Cruelty is the main theme of Shunji Iwai's emotional map.
Remember Hikari's "Fairy Tale"?
In the MV, the movie that makes the girlfriend with leukemia cry is "Love Letter".
The intertext of this play-within-a-play is actually a mutual interpretation:
It not only hints at the final life and death of "Fairy Tale", but also sets the tragic tone for "Love Letter".
"Love Letters" is healed on the surface, but inside it is "depressed".
According to Shunji Iwai, at the beginning he actually wanted to adapt Haruki Murakami's famous work "Norwegian Forest", but unfortunately could not get Murakami's consent, and could only imitate a similar story.
△ Years later, Murakami gave the right to adapt the novel to Vietnamese director Tan Anh Anh
You'll see two stories with a lot of similarities.
For example, "Norwegian Forest" uses a male and female model, and so does "Love Letters".
Shunji Iwai cleverly changed the second daughter to a pair of "two flowers".
This "other me in the world" setting is a tribute to Kieslowski's "Two Flowers".
One person with two corners, the same short hairstyle, and the bridge section that meets and misses at the intersection can all be found in Kee's films.
Whether it is "Norwegian Forest" or "Two Flowers", it is accompanied by the death of one party, and the rest of the other party's life is no longer complete, which is continued by "Love Letters".
Remember that classic opening scene, Hiroko's breath in the snow.
What do you mean?
She is simulating the pain of her boyfriend's mountain disaster.
Two years later, she still can't get out of the memory, and even uses pain to make herself and her boyfriend sympathize.
Holding your breath in the snow is a kind of unforgettable, and so is a letter to the dead.
If Hiroko represents living in the past and the female Fujii tree represents living in the present, then this letter is the beginning of turning this relationship upside down.
By writing a letter to Hiroko, the female Fujii tree had to start sorting out the past with the male Fujii tree.
From these flashback clips of time and space, the audience sees a couple who have just opened their hearts but do not know it.
Because of the same name and surname, the two are special in each other's lives.
Compared with the unclear intentions of the female Fujii tree, the male Fujii tree is obviously more favorable to the other party.
Seeing that she was being teased and crying by her classmates, he immediately stepped forward to defend her.
Do not hesitate to use pranks to attract the attention of the other party.
And finally, draw a portrait of the other person in the library card.
All kinds of signs show that the male Fujii tree liked her.
Not only did I "like it", but I still "like it".
So many years later, when he meets a girl who looks similar, he will immediately go forward to show his heart.
To some extent, for male Fujii trees, Hiroko has always been a substitute for female Fujii trees.
There's a little detail in the movie —
The song that the male Fujii tree sang before his death was Matsuda Seiko's "Green Coral Reef", which contained the famous lyrics "My love is spreading, and it has gone away with the south wind, and it has reached the coral reef where the smoke blows."
The idol, who was all the rage in the 80s, is already a symbol of youth for that generation.
Interestingly, a sentence from Autumn Leaves:
That guy didn't like Matsuda Seiko.
The reason why this song is sung may be because the male Fujii tree is always nostalgic for his youth.
At the end of life, it is the first love girl who is worried about it.
Is Hiroko aware of this?
She realized, otherwise how could she have returned all the letters to the female Fujii tree and said that meaningful sentence?
The name he writes on the card should be your name
Maybe it's the realization of this.
She finally walked to the snowy mountain where her boyfriend was killed and said goodbye to the past loudly.
And when the outer clothes are peeled off on the run, revealing the bright red sweater inside, it means the transformation of Hiroko.
If the story ends here, all the characters are relieved.
But Shunji Iwai "makes bad" here, juxtaposing the two -
One side had a hard time letting go of the deceased's reluctance, while the other had just picked it up.
The ignorant emotions of youth are suddenly awakened at this moment.
△ Note this set of cross-cutting clips
Especially when you finally receive a bookmark with a portrait of yourself.
Although the female Fujii tree shyly tried to cover up (rummaging through her pockets), the feeling was overflowing.
Just like the arrogant one who cared about himself.
The "love letter" of the title of the film was originally thought to be the correspondence between the two heroines, but many viewers also felt that the love letter really refers to the painting on the bookmark.
This emotion is many years late.
The female Fujii tree did not know that Hiroko looked like herself, if she knew, would she sigh: it turned out that she had missed a love that should have belonged to her?
Hiroko is a substitute, and so is Mr. Akiba.
And the person who deserves true love the most is cruelly kept in the dark.
pity.
Everything is irretrievable, everything is human.
Understanding this layer, you will find that "Love Letters" is actually a very cruel movie.
This cruelty is amplified in his next film.
After filming the seemingly pure love "Love Letter", he immediately made a crime genre film -
"Swallowtail Butterfly".
If the cruelty of "Love Letter" is to say that a good relationship has been delayed, then the cruelty of "Swallowtail Butterfly" is a group of people who have been delayed because of the encounter of the times.
This time, Shunji Iwai reversed the beauty of "Love Letters" and made "Swallowtail Butterfly" "dirty".
Dark streets.
Rampant violence.
There are also characters, all of whom are a bunch of illegal immigrants on the left side of the road.
Based on pre-bubble Tokyo, the film fictionalizes a place called Yindu (or Yuandu).
This symbol of money and desire attracted a wave of dream-chasing immigrants, but they were scorned by the Japanese unified harmony as "silver thieves".
The film deliberately chooses a young girl (Played by Step Ito) who has no name at first as a perspective, recording the struggle of a group of "silver thieves" to survive.
At first, when asked for her name, she was gagged.
She has no name all along, and in the end a prostitute named Guliguo (Chala) gave her her a name.
Yaja (a homophone for swallowtail butterfly in Japanese).
For this group of illegal immigrants, the name that identifies them is meaningless.
They prostitute themselves, they sell drugs, they launder money... No light.
For example, the aforementioned Guliguo, who was photographed by the record company, was asked to lie about his nationality to make the record sell better.
Like this foreigner-looking man, after talking, he found that he did not know English at all.
He was a native of legal Hispanic descent.
However, the Japanese did not regard him as their own person at all, and what was worse was that they were not even silver thieves.
This is the silver capital, and here it is —
No one can dominate and get rid of their identity.
Even if you get away with it, it always has the ability to drag you back to where you are.
Some people choose to flee from their identity, and others choose to hug.
Whether it is Liang Kui (played by Yosuke Eguchi) or Fei Hong (played by Hiroshi Miike), he is doing the thing of chicken and dog theft, or he does not change his name, and he does not change his surname.
They embrace their past identities, as well as their present identities.
Under the introduction of Gu Liguo, Yajia met a group of silver thieves such as Feihong, Ah Luo and Wolf Lang.
Although they are all illegal immigrants, she feels a long-lost human touch in this group of people.
Working together in a repair shop, "treasure hunting" at a scrap station, having money to circle together, good things and bad things are done.
In Yajia's eyes, this seems to be the prototype of a family.
At the end, Fei Hong was tortured by the Yindu police for using counterfeit money to extract a confession.
He refused to confess his companions to the death, and asked the policemen who scolded him for being a silver thief—
Less to say about silver and silver thieves
Isn't silver the name of your own hometown?
Looking at it now, Shunji Iwai is not only cruel.
It is also in a cruel way, forcing out a kind of romance that is broken by marginal people.
Rather than these native policemen, FeiHong, as an illegal immigrant, is more willing to defend the name of their hometown, and even named the "silver capital" as the live house he opened with the first bucket of gold.
In order to protect this fictitious and unrecognized identity, FeiHong would rather be killed than betray his companions under this identity, and they are already the only relatives in this land of no dependence.
Life and death are separated, and they are divided and combined.
After experiencing so much, Yajia, as the narrator, has also grown little by little.
She deliberately tattooed herself with the same tattoo as the Guliguo that gave her name, just like in "Love Letters" Hiroko removes her coat and reveals a bright red dress, which is a kind of transformation.
The caterpillar's own self had been pupated into a butterfly.
There is a name, there is a family, there is an identity.
It's just that the people and things that once gave themselves warmth are doomed not to come back.
The yen that floats in the sky is like a coin.
This is a coming-of-age ceremony given by the state to Yajia, but it is done through a funeral.
How cruel, how ironic.
"Cruel youth" has always been a good play for Japanese youth genre films.
And "All About Lily Chow" is the cruelest of all his youth films.
It's an incomprehensible bullying story—
The bully and the bullied turn out to be good friends.
Hoshino (Shugo Shinobi) and Hayami (Hayato Ichihara), one is a good student with excellent character and learning, and the other is an unremarkable middle school student.
It's hard to tell how the two became good friends.
Just in a class, suddenly one day to play a piece, the water came to fruition.
Hoshino invites Lian to meet his home and share his favorite singer.
Boys, as long as there are more companions, they will do stupid things.
Stupid together, crazy together, a scene of long live friendship.
However, adolescent friendships are extremely fragile.
It only takes one trip, one summer vacation, and chances are that everything will be very different.
The new semester is back.
At first, Hoshino was just dissatisfied with the taunts of the little gangsters in the class, and was overly defensive.
But it was like opening Pandora's box.
afterward.
He began to humiliate his classmates, coerced female classmates to help, and sent people to rape the top students in the school.
Even his good friend Renmi did not let go.
Former honors became demons overnight.
But was it really overnight?
The film still reveals sporadic clues:
People in school didn't really like this honor student; and before middle school, he was probably a bullied child.
He invited people who might become friends to his home.
The rich family really makes friends envious and willing to associate with him.
But.
Later, his family went bankrupt, and this little trick could no longer be used.
The same effect can be achieved compared to relieving superior students and families to avoid the nuisance of others, and to make others afraid and afraid of themselves.
Hoshino didn't consider anyone his friend.
Befriending Lotus, bullying Lotus, in his logic is one and two sides.
Shunji Iwai refuses to use his fate as an outlet for ambiguity.
After all, people's sorrows and joys are not the same.
It could only be closed, and Hoshino could only shout hysterically on the empty grass.
Against the backdrop of this soft sky, we see a youth that festers like abscesses, with indescribable mixed tastes.
This is the "cruelty" that Shunji Iwai wraps in love, friendship, and even reality.
A good youth film is bound to make you like or feel sorry for a character, and you can always see a weak part of yourself in the role.
And the character made all the mistakes for us once and suffered the consequences for us.
This cruelty is also revealing a very deceptive truth -
In addition to the youthful beauty, there is also unarmed helplessness.
Among the truth, goodness and beauty, there is no shortage of false evil and ugliness.
Complement each other.
Indispensable.
Whichever side you choose individually, you are deceiving yourself.
The picture in this article comes from the network