Wait for the girl who loves

A pair of old sisters live together in a seaside town in the United Kingdom. The older sister was widowed, and the younger sister married from an unmarried woman. The two lived in peace, like an isolated town. Each day is a reproduction of the previous day, until the waves rush up to a Polish youth who has fallen into the water due to a shipwreck. The old women, who are over seventy years old, have treated and taken in young people. It's like taking care of a wounded beast, like an elder caring for a junior, but the problem is that youth is not just a little beast or a junior. The three of them live in the same room, and their genders are male and female.

When the white hair is green, weighing the rules of society and their own decency, can they still declare their love desires? In the movie "Lavender Girl", the younger sister who entered the winter of her life was pregnant with spring for the first time. Under the sun, the smile and posture of the youth always tapped the atrium of the sister's heart. The young man cut his hair in the shade of a tree, and his sister quietly picked up the strands of hair that had fallen from the grass and put them into her sleeves. My sister dreams at night, dreaming of her young self and youth kissing on the grass. In the dead of night, my sister sneaked to the side of the youth's bed, and her eyes were full of undisguised thoughts. She reached out in the darkness, almost touching the young man's cheek, and was stopped by the sister who was trailing behind.

Heartbroken and hopeless, she asked her sister what it was like for her brother-in-law to go to the battlefield and even die. After all, the sister had the experience of being a lover, and the sister was the first to taste this flame. Actress Judy Dench, who often shows herself as a queen and other strong roles on the stage, plays the sister who has just opened her heart here. In the 70-year-old fold, the eyeballs are already cloudy, but the eyes are flowing, and they are completely fragile at the age of 17.

The old man loves the youth, is it this specific object that he loves, or the abstract youth itself? In the movie "Venus", the retired actors Morris and Ian, the two elder brothers, like all elderly people, gradually live around the hospital, taking medication, giving injections and catheterizations, making appointments with specialists, and the rest is to look for reading glasses and count the heads of acquaintances on the obituaries until Ian's niece and granddaughter come to Ian's house as a caretaker.

Morris's reluctance to age and her fascination with teenage girls unfolded almost simultaneously—though she had a rough accent, lack of education, and ate junk food all day, not even pretty, she was so young, so young that her skin was shining, and it made her unscrupulous in the face of time. This profligacy made Morris, who was full of poetry, speechless. He called her "Venus" softly. He took her to the National Gallery of Fine Arts in London to see the authentic work of "Venus in front of the Mirror", telling how beauty triumphed over time and became eternal.

He didn't get involved with a girl, but he did everything he could: buy her jewelry, invite her to eat and drink, and even forced to go out of his home to let the girl meet with her boyfriend. In the cold and bitter winter, Morris, who was driven out of the house, walked alone to the park's amphitheater, lonely wind, empty, suddenly all the past came to him, the roles he had played in his life, countless lines, once honored, humiliation at this moment, split head cover face rushed to come, he stood in the leaves on the ground, read out Loud Hamlet's ultimate confusion "to live or die" - playing Morris, is Peter O'Toole who starred in "Lawrence of Arabia", a national treasure actor, and an actor of his contemporaries. No one can beat his acting skills, no one can resist his gaze – except time itself.

The Chinese translation of Venus is "The End of love god". Morris in the play is indeed at the end of life, like declaring war on death, and loves again, unrestrained and humble, with pity and jealousy. After his death, the city's newspapers repeatedly broadcast his life. A coffee clerk who had been entertaining the elderly for dinner exclaimed to the newspaper column that "he was so handsome when he was young." The clerk served Morris for a long time and regarded him as one of the old customers. People always think that old people are born with old age, but what is the kernel that is trapped by the appearance of aging? Whether it is still hot magma, tumbling under a calm volcano, non-stop for a moment, refuses to be defined.

The story of the old sisters, called "Lavender Girl", Chinese more straightforward, is "The Girl Who Waits for Love". In the second half of the story, young women come up in the town, and inevitably, the old ladies watch hopelessly as the Polish youth follow the young woman away. The wind that suddenly blew into their twilight years stirred people's hearts and disappeared again.

Jane Eyre, the orphan girl, once raised her head to make that proclamation to Mr. Rochester, who was of aristocratic origin, and said that we are equal, just as souls pass through the grave and are equal before God. So can Morris and the maiden, the sister and the youth of the town, after death, be equal in souls? Like two of their peers, is it possible for them to fall in love? There is no answer to everything.

The girl who waited for love, finally on the night when people went to the empty building, put the white-haired head next to the bed where the youth had slept, and cried bitterly. While age takes away a lot, it will more or less return maturity, wealth, dignity and even inner calmness, but in the end, nothing can replace love. (Shen Yilun)