Author | Xu Guan
After killing fish for ten years at RT-Mart, my heart was as cold as my knife, but after watching "Modern Love 2", I still couldn't help but sigh: "I believe in love again." ”
After two years, "Modern Love" has returned.
▲ The second season of "Modern Love", the first episode of the praise
The first season was hailed as "the first love drama of 2019", and this limited drama with several different small stories strung together was the most moving autumn healing of the year.
▲The appearance of Anne Hathaway in the first season
In the past two years, the world has changed a lot, and the epidemic has changed people's lives. The second season has returned, and people's living habits and modes of getting along in the play have become quietly different, but what has not changed is that the emotions of people before people are still deeply soothing.
"Modern Love 2" is the same as the previous season, with a total of eight episodes, and each episode is still a short story of about thirty minutes. The stories are adapted from the New York Times hit column of the same name, "Modern Love."
▲ Stills of "Modern Love 2"
This longevity column, which has gone through 17 years, publishes countless real emotional stories in real life, pain and joy. The editors selected the most moving stories from the readers' letters to form a column, and the episodes selected material from the columns, and finally formed a modern love sketch that was either romantic or touching.
Some netizens said: "'Modern Love' can always be filmed, because human emotions are too complicated." ”
Indeed, love has a thousand forms of occurrence, constantly breaking the rules, and healing everything. When people know that there are so many love stories happening in the world all the time, it feels like everything is better.
The first episode of tear gas
Many people watch the first episode and cry.
In fact, this episode is also recognized as the best quality episode in the season.
The name of the story is "Driving a Convertible, Walking on a Winding Road", and revolves around a classic car that can drive directly into the scrap heap.
It's a forty-year-old car, it's always going to have problems in the middle of the road, and it's much more cost-effective to sell it than to keep repairing it in terms of price-performance. But the owner of the car, Curran, has been reluctant to do so. She seems to have unspeakable emotions about the car. But in order to alleviate the family's financial crisis, Curran still hung up a sales notice.
Before selling the old car, Curran drove the car through the winding mountain road. As if talking to herself, she talked about her feelings in a person's car. It turned out that the car was left by her late husband.
This is the first tear point of the whole film.
In Curran's perspective, the empty passenger seat sat her former lover. If she sells the car, it means that she has cut off all ties with her loved ones.
▲ "Modern Love 2" Curran's self-talk
"I was selling cars and it was heartbreaking. I can't talk to you in the house or in the office, and people will think I'm crazy. But here? Who cares? Like I can feel your presence. ”
This convertible bears witness to all the wonderful things in Curran's life: from falling in love to proposing, from pregnancy to having children to sending children to school... Until the ex-husband fell ill and died. The sports car has also gone from being incredibly windy at the beginning to being an obsolete thing that needs to be constantly tinkered with.
The car, it's time to be eliminated.
Should this emotion also be buried?
After the car was sold, Curran had mixed feelings, and she finally told her current husband about her troubles.
"That car was pulling me back, like a time machine, you know? When I sat in the car, it teleported me to other spaces, and sometimes I even talked to him. It's like he's sitting next to me, only when I'm alone. ”
▲ "Modern Love 2" Curran tells her current husband about her troubles
After her husband's death, Curran never communicated with anyone else, but she would sometimes take out her husband's sweater and smell it, completely releasing her thoughts when no one noticed.
It is somewhat surprising that in such a situation, the focus of many viewers is that it is too "scum" to get along with the current with such a mentality. Netizens in the 21st century seem to have a more stringent emotional cleanliness than in the past, and many bullet screens say that only after cleaning up the past emotions in their hearts can they enter new feelings, otherwise it is "evil".
But in the play, Curran's current husband expressed understanding after listening to it. He has empathy for his wife.
He understands why his wife can't control such feelings: "For those who experience bereavement, some people recover quickly and then move on with their lives, and they feel guilty about it; others have a hard time getting the dead to really leave, and they can't let go of the dead for the rest of their lives." That's love and sadness. There are no rules. ”
"When I'm with you, I know how much you love him. I am an adult. But I also know how much room there is in my heart. It appealed to me, and you had the broadest heart I've ever seen—I can see how you treat my parents, your patients, our daughters, and I can understand. If it gives me a little space, it will far exceed my expectations for life. ”
At the end of the story, the husband used the money from the sale of the boat to buy back the old car.
Curran drives to pick up her daughter, and the sad mother and daughter feel the happy moments of the past in this car, and they can calmly face the scars in their hearts and walk through the days when they may get lost.
Yes, "love is embodied in moments like this".
▲ In "Modern Love 2", Curran smiled with relief
Love when the epidemic spreads
Epidemic elements have frequently appeared in film and television dramas in the past two years.
The third story of Modern Love 2, "Strangers on the Train (Dublin)", tells a "love during the epidemic".
In March 2020, two strange men and women met on a train from Galway to Dublin. After getting off the train, they decided not to exchange phone numbers, promising to meet on the same train in two weeks.
Familiar?
That's right, this episode pays a stark tribute to Richard Linklater's classic romance film Love Before Dawn Breaks. The men and women who meet in pingshui on the journey also use the old-school conventions to verify the romance. As a result, the pandemic led to a total lockdown in Ireland, and the ever-extended restrictions have plunged the two into a variety of reverie about the agreed meeting.
▲ Stills of "Love Before dawn breaks"
The main cast of this episode is a familiar actor, the male protagonist is played by "Game of Thrones" Jon Snow played by Kit Harrington, and the female protagonist is Lucy Baotong, who has doubled her love career due to "Bohemian Rhapsody". The combination of handsome men and beautiful women makes the excitement on the train much more reasonable.
The rhythm of this episode is full of cheerful humor.
But I have to say how much this story is like an empty romantic fairy tale in terms of the contemporary society with various social software.
The two people who were blocked by the epidemic from the romantic plan shared this encounter with their relatives and friends. The male protagonist who wants to break the rules for love and the brother who does not believe that the other party will abide by the agreement, the female protagonist who thinks about the whole thing rationally and the mother who vigorously encourages her daughter to go to the appointment romantically, the various views of the two sides collide interestingly, and the montage is constantly interspersed, which is quite comedic.
▲ The views of the brother and the mother collide in "Modern Love 2"
The episode "Modern Love" continues the romantic shell of "Love Before Dawn Breaks", such a tribute is an interesting Easter egg, but the love brewed in just two hours can not be compared with the latter.
"Love Before dawn breaks" paves the way for the two people to go from acquaintance to acquaintance, whether it is the whims of the two people, their thinking about life, or each other's ambiguous temptation and affection convergence. Long talk throughout the night, and finally the parting in the station becomes an irrepressible confession, and a romantic to the extreme.
In Modern Love, the story of the Dublin train leaves an open-ended ending.
The male protagonist suddenly remembered that the female protagonist had mentioned the street address on the train, so he drove to the car and began to "wait for the rabbit". In reality, the ending of this story is not so romantic.
▲ The male protagonist's "Waiting for rabbits" in "Modern Love 2"
This is the real experience of writer Cecilia Pesao last February, when she met a boy on a train from Paris to Barcelona, and the two had a six-hour conversation on the journey. After getting off the bus, they did not exchange each other's numbers, and agreed to return to Paris in a few weeks. The pandemic has disrupted everything.
Later, the boy found Cecilia on social software. The two talked for months, but never saw each other again.
What modern love looks like
The first season of 8 New York love stories was rave reviews. The second season will look beyond New York and put the love of different cities on the screen, the current Douban score is 8.5, and the reputation is also good.
▲ "Modern Love 2" Douban score
Why does "Modern Love" move people?
Because the various faces of modern people's emotions displayed in it can always poke the audience's heart to some extent.
It turns out that there are also so many emotional stories of ordinary people in love dramas, and they may also be trapped in various bad problems in life, but everyone can be healed in their love story.
Modern Love, in fact, may have a broader meaning than love.
For example, the moving story in the first season, "When your most important man is a doorman", tells a remarkable friendship. Maggie, the heroine who lives alone in New York, will date different men, but these dates always end in unsatisfactory results.
Apartment janitor Guzmin always saw at a glance whether the man Maggie was dating would have an outcome with her. When Maggie accidentally becomes pregnant and decides to give birth to a child, she also discovers that Guzmin is the man who has been guarding her. Years later, Maggie returned to the apartment with her new partner, and this time Guzmin gave her affirmation.
▲ Stills of "Modern Love 1"
He said, "I've never looked at the men, Maggie. I'm looking into your eyes. ”
The emotion between Maggie and Guzmin is not love, and some viewers have thought that there should be a more romantic ending between the two. From the start, the parties said, they felt more like a protective relationship like a father. In reality, Guzmin is much older and has a stable date.
▲ In the first season of "Modern Love", Guzmin and Maggie got along
People always can't recognize how true love should be judged, so they are constantly hurt and planted in love. The touching thing about Guzmin's story is that, whether he has the eyesight to judge true love or not, it is a blessing for people wandering in big cities to meet such a friend who can think of themselves and be guarded by their side, and it is extremely precious to have such a friendship.
In "Modern Love", the audience can see a variety of moving emotions.
In the story of The Night Girl and the Day Boy, a woman with sleep phase shift syndrome meets the love of her life, the two have friction and breakup, but are able to overcome the misplaced time for the reality of love.
▲ "Modern Love 2" Night Girl and Day Boy
In the story starring Anne Hathaway, a bipolar disorder suffers from bipolar disorder who is unable to have normal relationships because of bipolar disorder and misses out on the man he likes. In the end, she decided to face it bravely and confess her illness to all her friends and colleagues who had been hurt. "No matter what kind of person I am, please accept me", this episode is not only about the regret of missing love, but more importantly, how to accept and learn to let your true self get along with others.
▲ Stills from the first season of "Modern Love"
Modern love stories, there are pain and calmness of falling in love with your best friend, there are healing stories that heal the trauma of the soul after encountering an extramarital affair, there are also middle-aged couples who try to save the marriage crisis, and there are touching stories of fighting the disease with their lovers.
"Modern Love" is sometimes like a textbook, telling people how to insure love and how to deal with a messy emotional relationship;
Sometimes it is like a mirror, reflecting people's happiness, frustration, pain, and "love" in love;
Sometimes like the silent companion of the doorman, a fan of the show said: "The meaning of these stories that have really happened is that this is the common yearning of a considerable number of human beings." There will be a little more confidence in the heart in an instant, and this confidence is precious enough. ”
The world is big, the years are long, love, many things.
Edit | Ji Jie
Typography | Benin Fifi