Top lineup.
Douban 8.7.
It's the most worthwhile movie to write about in recent times, but it's also a movie that can't reveal too much:
monster
Monster
The director is Hirokazu Kore-eda, and after the last "Broker", the state returned again.
Gold medal screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto, who has written "Tokyo Love Story", "Quartet" and "The Most Perfect Divorce", won the Cannes Best Screenplay Award this time, and also signed a 5-year cooperation contract with Netflix.
Starring includes Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayama, Yuko Tanaka......
As soon as the movie opens, it's like "Burning".
The "evil boy" in the middle is like "Confession".
The mystery is revealed......
You feel a force, like a clear stream, that always flows through the mountain rocks and forward.
01
Rashomon
The film uses three characters to keep the known facts reversed through a three-stage perspective.
Single mother Saori (played by Sakura Ando) and her fifth-grade son Maino Minato live together.
Saori noticed that Minato's behavior was something unusual lately, pouring mud and sand out of the thermos cup he had carried, cutting his hair short, and leaving only one shoe he usually wears.
Through various indications, she speculated that her son was being bullied at school.
When she came to the school, she wanted to know about her son's situation, but she got a very perfunctory answer.
Later, the son disappeared unexpectedly.
After she found her son in the wilderness, on the way home, he suddenly jumped out of the car.
Seeing that the situation is getting worse.
Under her questioning, her son finally told the reason and was scolded for being a "pig brain" at school.
When Saori came for the second time, the principal (played by Yuko Tanaka) brought the homeroom teacher, Mr. Poly (played by Eita Nagayama), but they just bowed and apologized, without too much explanation, as if they were mechanizing the accident handling process.
Saori had to come to the door again and again to ask for an explanation.
Finally, she hired a lawyer and sued the school.
As a result, the corporal punishment incident in the school was in the newspapers, and the teacher resigned.
Are the problems solved?
On a typhoon day.
Saori's son mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night......
The second perspective.
Did the teacher physically punish the student?
You can guess it, of course not, otherwise how could it be reversed.
Teacher Poly, he was a good teacher in the standard sense of the word, and he allowed students to throw paper balls and fight with him.
from his point of view.
Maino Minato is an out-and-out school bully.
Throwing things in the classroom, smearing paint on classmates' faces, and abusing kittens......
In the process of stopping Mai Nominato, he accidentally bumped into his nose.
This was later described as violent corporal punishment.
Under the pressure of public opinion, he had to leave the school.
He lost his job, his girlfriend abandoned him, and everyone around him regarded him as a villain......
The truth is hidden in the third perspective.
In fact, there has been foreshadowing for a long time.
For example, the teacher went to the house of Iri Hoshikawa, who was bullied by Mai Yeminato, and wanted to understand the situation, but the parents said that their son was "a pig brain".
So, who is the source of the phrase "pig brain"?
Minato Maino and Iri Hoshikawa, who bullied whom?
Teacher Poly, who lost his job, found a "hidden poem" in an essay, which was written with the names of two students......
The screenwriter disrupted the chronological order, and as the perspectives unfolded one by one, the suspicious and misunderstood behaviors of the original characters became traceable.
It's like the story of Rashomon.
If "Rashomon" is a different narrative, it shows the endless entanglement of human selfishness and hypocrisy.
Then "Monster" gives people malicious hints again and again.
But peeled back to the end, only purity remains.
Hirokazu Kore-eda once said, "Movies are not used to judge people, and the director is not God or a judge." Designing a badass might make the story (world) easier to understand, but instead of doing so, it allows the audience to bring the film's problems into everyday life. ”
But the movie is called "Monster".
We still need to ask what exactly a monster is.
02
One-sided people
It's Hirokazu Kore-eda's capture of life or the usual delicacy.
For example, Minato often wears cool blue clothes, and Iri always wears orange warm colors, showing their different personalities of introversion and cheerfulness.
A liking for a thing reveals a character's personality.
"Is it disgusting for a boy who knows the name of the flower?"
My mother, who is not very good at parking, always parks her car in a place where parking is prohibited.
The view from inside the car allows us to see the mother's appearance of pretending to be calm when encountering an impact.
Mr. Paulie likes to find typos in the book and circle it and send it to the publishing house, which also allows him to find the Tibetan characters written by Minato and Iri.
The shot of the fish tank in Mr. Paulie's house is fixed on the goldfish that is half-flipped belly, hinting at the fate of the characters.
But there is one detail that many people may overlook.
Many viewers noticed that the principal deliberately stretched out his leg in the supermarket and tripped over the children running around.
But not many people cared about how she was cleaning the stickers from the floor with a shovel twice.
Maybe it's because her granddaughter used to put stickers on the floor of the house and she needs to clean it up, and now she brings the tools from home to school, which is also an act of atonement and nostalgia for her granddaughter.
People are more curious about the evil of human nature for no reason than about the goodness of human nature.
Unable to find a reason, people put the blame on another person.
Hirokazu Kore-eda said in an interview: "When people encounter something incomprehensible and refuse to understand it, a 'monster' is born. It's like between a mother and a school, let the school become a 'monster', between the school and the teacher, let the teacher become a 'monster', and between a child, let one of the children become a 'monster'. ”
Monsters are one-sided people.
It is our prejudices that create monsters.
Think about it, why on the Internet, we are so easy to be angry, hateful, and attack a person, but once offline, some of us basically become "normal people" again?
Because when we see not a three-dimensional, concrete person, only an abstract ID remains.
It's easy to magnify one side and take it as the whole thing.
What about the cure?
It seems to have been said in the movie:
Restore real perception.
Minato and Iri are playing a game of guessing animals.
Irie describes the animal: "There are very powerful ultimates, when you are attacked, you use all your strength, and then give up, you block your senses. ”
Minato asked: Is it Iri Hoshikawa?
This is also the reason why this film, although it does not profoundly reveal social issues, is moving enough.
Just like when a mother and a teacher are looking for a child, they are constantly trying to wipe the stain off in front of the fallen car window, and the perspective of the upward shot looks like the Milky Way scattered with stars in the dark night.
It's just that no matter how you remove it, that layer of black can't be erased.
This means that the damage caused by people turning people into monsters with prejudice cannot be eliminated.
You will find that Hirokazu Kore-eda and Yuji Sakamoto have been working to eliminate the incomprehensible barriers between people in their works.
This is because the arrival of the epidemic has made communication between people more difficult.
People's eyes will be attracted by the hot news on the mobile phone screen, biased by hot comments, speculating on motives, and attacking others.
03
Cruelty and healing
Before working with Yuji Sakamoto, Hirokazu Kore-eda admired his drama works very much, and he could even feel the similarities between the two works.
"Because both of us, although in different fields, have been exploring similar issues: the biological family that has been neglected versus the family that has been discovered or chosen. ”
It is Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Sea Street Diary", in which the four half-sisters go from alienation to acceptance.
Yuji Sakamoto told the story of the mother-son relationship of mutual choice in the Japanese drama "Mother", seeing that the child was too pitiful to be abducted by domestic violence, so the teacher implemented a plan to abduct the child.
This time, they were involved in more social issues: the relationship between the school and parents, the ambiguous feelings that arise in children's interactions, and how people respond in an environment surrounded by prejudice.
The final scene of the film is finished with Ryuichi Sakamoto's "Aqua".
Aqua,坂本龙一 - The Best of 'Playing The Orchestra 2014'
The rising tone of the second half of "Aqua", which arrives after Minato and Iri climb out of the canal, is a kind of hope and liberation.
The fence at the end is gone.
There are three times in the film, and each high tide means that a typhoon is approaching.
From the fire at the beginning to the heavy rain caused by the typhoon at the end, it hints at the birth of a world where fire and water are compatible.
But will such a happy ending be comforting to everyone?
What we could have found in Yuji Sakamoto's social analysis and Kore-eda Hirokazu's lens is that the sharp and stinging things in social problems are now dissolved in the dazzling sunlight.
In "Nobody Knows", my sister accidentally fell from a chair and died, and the 12-year-old male protagonist could only bury her.
In the final eye between the male protagonist and his younger brother in the film, we can feel the deep sadness of the male protagonist for a hopeless life in the future.
In "Keep Walking", the mother's son died because he saved people, and said in front of his son's tombstone: "There is nothing more tragic than sweeping his son's grave, he obviously didn't do anything bad." ”
"The Most Perfect Divorce" The two couples felt that each other was a destined couple because of the 311 earthquake in Japan, but even with such a profound experience of common suffering, they still couldn't withstand the quarrels caused by the small earthquakes that kept occurring after marriage.
These are all things that need to be carefully observed and gazed at for a long time to feel the profound cruelty.
Because these cruel moments are buried in daily trivialities, many people will have a feeling of both cruelty and healing when they watch their films.
But such healing is premised on the opening of wounds.
And the wounds uncovered in "Monster" are too shallow.
The principal visits her husband in prison, and she folds candy wrappers into small boats.
We can guess that the husband went to jail instead of his wife in order to keep her position as principal.
If you look at the increasing number of elderly people in Japan, you can see why husbands are doing this.
In the end, the principal appears in the heavy rain, but her sadness only stays in the movie for a few seconds, and even her ending is unpredictable.
Most people are concerned about whether the two boys, who still have good intentions, will survive the mudslide.
Will that old carriage give them a chance to be reborn?
But it is these characters who seem to have been brushed off that are what we really care about.
In an aging society, after losing their granddaughter, the way of survival of an elderly couple, the sacrifice made for the happiness of the other person cannot save two people at the same time.
Back to the parent-child relationship.
What is the reason why the son would rather be treated like a monster than confess his pain to his mother?
These parts that are not presented in the film are what the film is worth exploring.
As the principal said, "If only some people have it, then it is not happiness, and happiness is something that everyone can have." ”
In "Monster", the teacher is wronged, the principal endures humiliation, and the powerlessness of a single mother......
Everyone is a good person.
But because they are trapped in a limited perspective, they have become "monsters" in each other's eyes.
In the end, the film breaks down the barriers between different people from God's perspective.
The cruelty that still cannot be eliminated is that adults struggle to survive alone.
There is no innocence and purity of childhood.
There is no real relief either.
The story flew away in the end, leaving us in the same place to savor it, not moving.
The picture in this article comes from the Internet