Some time ago, the Internet set off a wave of "Chinese-style father-son literature".
What "the father's eyes are the most feared thing in a man's life, and the father's praise is the most desired thing in a man's life".
"The son is the power of the father, and the father is the gut of the son" "The Chinese-style father and son are kings, ministers, enemies, and brothers, and only the moment when the father lies on the hospital bed is the father and son."
These copywriters are hypocritical and funny, after all, Father's Day is a holiday where even capitalists are reluctant to market leeks.
And the European and American film I want to talk about today is also about the criticism of the role of "father" -
Raymond and Ray
Raymond&Ray
Directed by Rodrigo García.
He once won the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival and the Cannes Un Certain Regard Award for "Nine Lives" and "Things You Can Know by Looking at Her" respectively.
PS: He is also the son of the world-class literary master García Márquez ("One Hundred Years of Solitude")~
But what attracts the audience more in the movie are the two male actors below.
One is Ewan McGregor.
When he was young, he swept the world with "Big Fish" and "Trainspotting", and won the Emmy and Golden Globe Awards for leading actor in the first two years.
The other is Ethan Hawke.
The "Love" trilogy and "Boyhood" with Richard Linklater made him famous, and he won the leading role in more than a dozen film festivals with a "First Reformed Church".
I thought that the famous director and two sexy and melancholy middle-aged handsome guys would stage a high-IQ crime action blockbuster.
As a result, "Raymond and Ray" is about ordinary family themes, which may be the reason for IMDB's mediocre reputation.
Raymond (Ewan McGregor) and Rey (Ethan Hawke) are half-brothers.
That night, Redmond went to Rey's house to inform him of the death of his father, Harris, and asked to go to the funeral together.
During this process, there was no trace of sadness on the faces of the two of them, and even Rey's first reaction when he heard that he was going to the funeral was a strong refusal.
The director used white space and did not use flashbacks to show how their father abused them as teenagers.
However, from the conversation between the two of them, it can be known that their father is not only a typical "cheating domestic violence" man:
When his father was young, he was amorous and merciful.
Redmond and Rey were born to their father's wife and lover, respectively.
They went to the home of Lucia, their father's last lover, and she bore him a son.
But that wasn't all, when he received his father's last wish that they would dig the grave with their own hands, two more men came to the cemetery claiming to be the father's son.....
and "European and American versions of Jia Zhen's behavior", where his father and Redmond's ex-wife got involved.
This series of absurd and bad behaviors, Redmond and Rey were deeply affected and fell into a dead cycle of life.
This is also the only "correct" negative in "father-son literature":
I hate you, but the ability of genes is powerful, and in the process of growing up, I was desperate to find that I slowly became a second you.
The director uses a lot of joking lines to try to make the overall atmosphere of the movie lighter, but if you look closely, the damage caused by his father will stay with him for the rest of his life.
For example, Rey asks Redmond, "Have you ever abused your child?" and Redmond replied with silence.
Redmond pretends to forget about the bad things he had done, but Rey's "loser in life" is enough to make him angry, and even scuffle with Rey.
And Rey inherited his father's flowers, and he didn't seem to care about anything, but when he was sorting out his father's belongings, he found the saxophone that his father had discarded.
When he was in high school, the two had a big quarrel because his father did not agree with him to study music, and since then they have been strangers.
Lucia helps: Your father had the saxophone fixed a few weeks before he died.
But people will eventually be troubled by what they have not obtained in their youth for the rest of their lives.
This is why the spiritual core of patriarchal oppression is often expressed in movies that grow up in youth:
In the eyes of outsiders, the father may be a humorous and humorous "good person", but in the family, it is the root cause of the child's lifelong pain.
In a family, the vast majority of fatherhood is often "deified", to the point that a father who is in a position of power and a mother who "disappears" in the narrative.
Li Play in "Dog Thirteen" was beaten by his father in order to find a dog,
In "Wading through the Sea of Wrath", the old blonde is crazy to find the murderer of her daughter, but in the end, she doesn't understand why her daughter killed herself.
In "Calm Waves", Song Jianfei is willing to let officials snatch his son's college quota for the sake of his future and interests.
Not to mention that in "Do You Know", Minglan saw through that her father didn't care about the death of her little mother, and she didn't investigate who poisoned her grandmother, just to save her face:
"I understand your hypocrisy and indifference, and only the most core interests can move you. Father, our family is so confused to live our lives, why bother asking so much."
All of these father roles are negative and annoying to the audience.
In their eyes, a child is not even a living "person", but just a "work", and if a work is scrapped, it is a big deal to "create" another.
The so-called "father's love like a mountain", which has been silent for many years, is probably a cheap self-touch, and more often it should be "motionless".
The plot of "Raymond and Ray" is nearing the end, ushering in the burial of his father.
Raymond angrily fired several shots at the coffin, while Rey played the saxophone.
Raymond hated his father for ruining his original life, but he was powerless to change the current situation, and only dared to complete the spiritual "murder of his father".
As for Rey, he was by no means forgiving to his father, but "forget it".
In real life, when parents show weakness to their children, it means that they are beginning to age.
At this point, all kinds of injuries suffered in the past in the original family can only be turned into a sentence of "forget it".
At the end of the film, Raymond listens to Lucia summing up her father's life, perhaps the "son" and the "father" have never really understood each other.
"He loves women, but doesn't understand them. He's a racist, but he likes everyone.
He was as insignificant as a speck of dust, he had eaten 10,000 meals, slept 10,000 nights with sweet dreams and nightmares, he had a hundred jobs, and in the end he still had no money, he wanted to know about the world, life, everything, but he didn't, who could?".
The story begins with Raymond driving on a rainy day and ends with Rey driving on a rainy day.
In this chaotic and deformed family relationship, the two finally found their place, those who stayed stayed, and those who left left.
The world is like a tide, people are like water, and only a few people in the rivers and lakes are back.
After the rain, the weather will finally be clear.