The film "Mints" is a work directed by director Li Cangdong in 1999, in the spring of 1999, a middle-aged man who is desperate for life, Jin Yonghao (Xue Jingqiu), participates in the classmate association in despair, and an upside-down train takes the audience back to the life of a man who is ultimately desperate, he opens his hands and shouts desperately in the wind before he dies: "I want to go back to the past." ”
The film adopts a unit-style flashback structure, from the 1999 male protagonist Kim Yong-ho's suicide outing to 1979 Kim Yong-ho's meeting with Yoon Soon-jin during the outing, a total of six small units, telling different stories about the same person's experience in six time periods. Each fragmented unit of time and space is connected by a train that runs backwards along the tracks, and from the known desperate ending methodically flattens Jin Yonghao's ordinary and small life, the literary meaning is strong and full of literary poetry.
The story starts from the beginning of the outing to the end of the outing, and the closed-loop story structure sets a confused, helpless and sad tone for the whole film at the beginning. What kind of person is he? Why did he commit suicide? What did he go through? With such doubts, the audience follows the film step by step from the end of the story, revealing the once innocent but fleeting beautiful past of the male protagonist. When our eyes return to the green and bright outing place again, and we see the desperate man holding the camera and taking the mint candy in the girl's hand like the first love, the heart is full of emotions and yearning for beautiful youth, but the pain and the urge to cry without tears from the bottom of the heart.
From the perspective of the overall pattern, the film's memory perspective is more like a reflection on history, which closely combines the fate of small individuals in the torrent of contemporary historical scars, takes us back to 20 years of social changes in South Korea, and shows a bloody path of social change that destroys individuals.
The mint item appears in the film several times. It was cold, fresh but also stinging. Kim Yong-ho first met Yin Shun-ren and took the mint candy in the girl's hand; the box of mints that Kim Yong-ho had carefully collected when he was serving was overturned to the ground and trampled at the feet of one soldier after another; Kim Yong-ho's cheating female secretary gave him a mint candy; Kim Yong-ho went to see the dying Yin Shun-ren and returned the box of mints to her.
This mint candy from the initial ignorance of the symbol of beauty to being trampled on, covered with a layer of guilt and once again returned to the pure and beautiful yearning that was pressed in the heart by Jin Yonghao, but at this time, it was already human, the forked rails could no longer be gathered, everything that had passed could no longer be made up, and the emptiness and guilt in the male protagonist's heart could only be brewed with time, like mints, which gradually changed the original taste.
The film skillfully uses motion shots such as shaking, holding, pushing and pulling, combined with the mood of the scene environment, to create a sense of atmosphere in a specific era. Many years later, he met the criminal who forced a confession and used the small trick of the mirror. One after the other, with the panning camera, when the two appear in the mirror at the same time, it also means that the contradictions of the year were resolved, Jin Yonghao said that "life is beautiful", forming a strong contrast with the previous violent beating scene. At the bee-friend reunion, the camera follows Kim Yong-ho's steps to create a sense of synchronization, and the slight shaking makes him out of place with his surroundings, reflecting the anxiety and despair of the characters before the train crosses the track.
Before the war begins, the camera focuses on the mints that fall to the ground, and the combination of shaking shots shows not only the urgency of the war, but the brokenness and trampling of the branches of love that are difficult to grow in the context of the entire era. The perspective of the train forward runs through the whole text, dividing the whole film into different time nodes, watching the changes with an objective and calm attitude, with a sense of peace and dilution of the flow of the times.
However, the best part of the film is the ending. Under the viaduct paved with railroad tracks, on the green embankment next to the babbling brook, the young protagonist goes on an outing with his friends on campus (this is also the place where the protagonist finally committed suicide). The protagonist suddenly said that he seemed to have been here before, and the heroine next to him said to him: "It is a dream that I have had before."
Not to mention the cycle of life, isn't this "dream" the image itself? As the material manifestation and third memory of dreams, shouldn't movies be "déjà vu"? Isn't it the movie itself that has been here? So this ending recalls the beginning, the film restills into a closed loop in the course of the railroad tracks, the first, second, and third memories converge, the past, the present, and the future meet here, and time flows from the future to the past, and quickly passes through the point of the present.
Ordinary people are small people, a complete twenty years, the protagonist Jin Yonghao's ordinary life, because of some fatal changes, can not look back. At the moment of the destruction of his life, Yonghao walked up the tracks of the viaduct with tears and laughter, and shouted at the oncoming train: I want to go back. The picture freezes at the moment when he opens his mouth and shouts and appears to convulse in pain.
Then the train went backwards and took time to sail back in time. In the bleak memory, "Peppermint" recounts the past. The protagonist, Kim Yong-ho, begins with the impression of being mentally disturbed and grumpy, but it is inevitable to have questions about why he committed suicide. Time back to three days ago, on a rainy night, it turned out that he had already prepared to commit suicide, but a mysterious man suddenly found him and said that his former first love wanted to see him before he died.
The technique of flashbacks shows its real cruelty under the lens of director Li Cangdong - it turns out that standing at the end of the layers of life is the real despair, a flashback story, how to still tell well in the order of establishment, anti-establishment, development, climax and epilogue, director Li Cangdong gave a nearly perfect answer. Because for this man, the things that changed him completely happened in the past... It happened on that day of the year, and after that everything changed.