It's been three years since Rimi Ishihara premiered on "Unnatural Death."
Douban scored 9.4, becoming a peak in the ten-yuan acting career.
At the same time, it seems that the ten yuan has entered a bottleneck period since then.
Flowers of The High Ridge has a rating of 5.8
Heavenly Restaurant 6.0
"Final Accounts! Zhongchen Zang" 6.3... The score is miserable.
However, this time, her new work has been called "the best work to date".
Douban currently has a score of 8.1——
"The Best Gift of Life"
Although the work of ten yuan is well evaluated, there are still many netizens who think that it is too old-fashioned.
So why do old-fashioned works still receive high reviews?
After reading it, I realized that the cliché in the eyes of some people is, in fact, a kind of sincerity without skill.
And sincere emotions never need to cater to the times.
The story begins with a long-married daughter suddenly returning home.
When the doorbell rings, Mr. Ryosuke (Satoshi Terao), who is working, feels a little irritable.
Mr. Ryosuke is a translator. His wife died young, and his daughter Yuriko (Rimi Ishihara), who married out of town a few years ago, currently lives alone in Tokyo.
Usually, there are only a few acquaintances in the family.
He has a bit of an impatient temper and hates being disturbed. The mantra is: Bored to death.
Someone interrupted his work and hit the muzzle of the gun.
He cried out in annoyance as he prepared to teach this uninvited guest a lesson.
However, his plan failed.
Because when he opened the door, what he saw was a surprising face, his daughter, Yuriko.
Logically, it should be a pleasure for her daughter to come home.
But Ryosuke was a little depressed. Because this time the daughter came home very strangely. With bulky luggage, no greetings.
Like every ordinary father, he could not help but wonder if something was wrong with his daughter's marriage.
But he asked his daughter, and she didn't say anything.
In the tavern, the lights were dim. Ryosuke goes to a friend's appointment and talks about his children together.
A friend's daughter is also married, but always comes home to eat and drink.
The friend said angrily: You know, she took all the good things with her, and didn't keep them at all!
Ryosuke smiled and was a little envious.
Unlike Yuriko, he is strange.
Ryosuke is a duplicitous man, and when he was young, like every big parent, he had a serious and unkind attitude towards his daughter.
Although he loves his daughter in his heart, what he says is not a good word, which leads to a deeper estrangement between the two.
Like, for so many years, Yuriko has always remembered one thing.
When I was a child, I wanted to perform dramas, and I very much wanted to get encouragement from my father.
But my father said, "I'm bored!" If you can't do it, don't do it! ”
This incident left a deep shadow on her, and she was still haunted until she entered the marriage.
The daughter was affected by him, and her temper was like a ten out of ten, all of them were hard stones, and when they bumped into each other, no one paid any attention to anyone.
Now that he is old, Ryosuke feels a little lost.
Fortunately, her daughter was at home as usual, her life was plain and natural, and Ryosuke's originally hanging heart was also put down.
Until one day, Ryosuke took flowers to prepare to pay tribute to his deceased wife, but saw his daughter leaning over in front of the tomb and crying bitterly.
His daughter's grief saddened him and made him determined to find out the truth.
In fact, the answer is not difficult to guess, Yuriko has cancer. When people are about to die, they always want to make up for their regrets.
For Yuriko, not having much memories with her father is one of them.
Therefore, she decided to divide up the remaining time, live with her father, and finally return to her husband to wait for death.
At the same time, she did not want her father to know about it, nor did she want to receive mercy from him.
I only hope that as before, the two quarrel and have a lively life.
However, after much tossing and turning, Ryosuke learns the truth from his son-in-law.
Surprisingly, my father was not immersed in grief.
Instead, she decided to do as her daughter hoped, not to be deliberately pitiful, and to pretend that nothing had happened.
But is that enough?
Those barriers that have been going on for years have not been lifted.
If it is really as expected by her daughter, as before, do not make any changes. I'm afraid there will be too many regrets in the end.
Ryosuke knelt in front of his wife's grave and asked, "Can I be a good father from now on?"
He knew that there was not much time left for him to change.
Originally, watching her daughter go home for a trip, Ryosuke was polite, like entertaining a distant relative.
Personally leaned over to hand over slippers, cooked herself, took care of all the housework, and didn't need her daughter to do anything.
And now, politely putting aside, Ryosuke's "fierce" nature has begun to appear.
"Hey, are you a princess, come and help!"
Fiercely called for her daughter to come and help with the cooking.
It seems to be the old father with the bad temper.
The English work that you want to translate yourself,
Knowing that my daughter does not understand,
Let her evaluate it too.
He seemed to be involving his daughter in his life in various ways.
But just like that, day in and day out of life, they gradually approached.
Perhaps, it is difficult for us to understand why the father and daughter in the film care about each other, but they are so twisted.
This kind of Japanese politeness, which seems strange, is actually the most traditional.
Shunji Iwai said that when he was filming "Hello, Nowa", something happened that made him very new.
Zhou Xun plays the mother who wants to sit with her children. The actors sat close together.
But in Japan, this is not the case. There will be distance.
Whether this sense of distance is good or bad is always controversial; yet the respect it brings in a sense is really something that we lack in most of our lives.
Like, Yuriko didn't want her father to know about her illness.
After her father learned the truth, he always obeyed her wishes and pretended that nothing had happened.
Just like in the father's day-to-day change, the daughter has already discovered the truth, but she still pretends not to know.
"The level of lying is really bad," she said.
In the end, this mutual fulfillment is also a feeling of mutual cherishing, old-school and restrained. The less exposed, the deeper it feels.
As the article said at the beginning, why is such an old-fashioned story still receiving praise?
Because the film makes the old story a clumsy beauty.
This beauty is old and has the shadow of Yasujiro Ozu's work. Seemingly peaceful life, there is endless love underneath.
And the sadness that should have been exposed was fused in, covered up in life, in smiles. Layered on top of each other, it is more touching than sadness itself.
In particular, the four laughs in the film.
The first time was when my daughter had just come home.
When the keen Yuriko noticed that someone had used the kitchen, she panicked.
Because in her perception, her father could not cook.
She came back to be companion.
The used kitchen gave her a sense of crisis.
In the long, absence of her, there may have been someone else who had replaced her, who had replaced her mother, who was accompanying her father.
So, when her father told her she had learned to cook, she would laugh so hard that she couldn't stand up straight.
The father thought his daughter was laughing at herself for learning to cook.
But he couldn't see the stoicism and sadness behind the laughter.
The second time, after the father learned that his daughter was ill.
As soon as Ryosuke learned the truth, he walked to the door and heard his daughter laughing at his mantra with others: Annoyed!
The laughter in the room made him feel good.
As if he wanted to make the moment stay a little longer, he deliberately shouted a few times: annoyed to death.
Because of her father's funny behavior, Yuriko laughed until she couldn't close her mouth, thinking that her father was just the same as before.
She didn't know that her father was perfecting himself, that he was deliberately dressing up as a clown.
The third time, it was the father and daughter who listened to rakugo in the theater (similar to stand-up comedy or book people).
At that time, the trivialities of life slowly filled the gap between the two, and they finally approached.
The father took his daughter to listen to rakugo, and both understood that the day of parting was not far away.
Rakugo just happened to talk about the funny place, and everyone next to him was laughing.
The father and daughter laughed, but tears came out of their eyes.
They can finally vent, and they also bring the mood of the film to the climax.
A smile seems to be able to hide sadness, but what can't hide it is love.
Such gentle and deep love is a restrained warmth that strikes directly into the heart.
What is even more rare is that it is also this kind of love that allows the father to look back at the hurt he gave to Yuriko as a child and make up for it with a feeling of regret.
Remember the one that Yuriko was angry about mentioning earlier? Acting in a drama wants encouragement, but what you get is ridicule.
And when the film is coming to an end, when the parting comes, when the deception and the deceived know it.
Father finally stopped hiding it. He said to his daughter what he had always wanted to hear: Come on, you can do it.
Here, we finally usher in the last laugh of the film.
Although this is the final goodbye, as soon as you turn around, it is the distance between life and death,
But when they bid each other farewell with love, it seemed that the sadness and grief had all disappeared, and all that was left was full of emotion.
The smile at this time is no longer a mask to hide sadness, but a relief from the bottom of the heart.
The regrets in those hearts are no longer regrets.
And the future,
Even if the daughter continues to fight the disease,
Father is going to face the situation of being alone,
But none of them panic.
Because those deep emotions will eventually turn into the strength to move forward.
ps: At the time of writing this article, Zhao Yingjun, who was diagnosed with new crown (no infection symptoms, and has been isolated at present) and sang "Send You a Little Red Flower", passed away due to illness. The world is uncertain, and the old saying is vulgar, but in the face of reality, there seems to be only one sentence left: May everyone cherish the present.
"Live like Johnny, laughing when others want to cry."