Read disc | Eighteen gifts

The Italian film "Eighteen Gifts" begins to tell the story like this: after Alyssa and her boyfriend Alessio lived together and became pregnant, during an obstetric examination, she was informed that she had terminal cancer and died on the day her daughter Anna was born. Before her death, she chose eighteen gifts for her unborn daughter, which were given by her father on each birthday until she was eighteen years old.

This is the mother's wish, she can not accompany her daughter to grow up, but let the daughter know that her mother is with her. The camera moves from Anna's one or two to eight years old, and we see her defiance: she vents her dissatisfaction with the piano, the gift of the year, on a boy, and holds his hand down with the lid; and on her eighteenth birthday, she deliberately allows herself and her companions to venture from a height to dive, or even run away from home. Her mother's gift made her feel confused and lonely without her mother's company, and even angry: "I don't want my mother's gift anymore." "Her stupid broken gifts are always waiting for me."

It's a film based on true events, but the director makes it appear in a surreal appearance: Anna, on the night of her eighteenth birthday, smokes, drinks, and after escaping from home, is hit by a car; and it is her mother Alyssa who knocks her down, and her mother takes her home, and the time goes back to the three months before her birth— the pregnant mother and the eighteen-year-old daughter are in the same frame, and different time and space are magically combined. Finally, we know that all the scenes of the daughter and the mother together are the hallucinations and dreams of Anna after being knocked unconscious by a car. The director asked the daughter to approach the mother, to be close to the mother, to understand the mother. Anna travels back in time, all in a logical normal narrative, and at the end of the film, all the elements are arranged in a logical way.

At the beginning, Anna is rebellious, lying, arrogant, such as lying to Alyssa that her mother is sick and hospitalized, and her father is in Africa; Alyssa finds a job for her, saying that she will leave; asking Alyssa to accompany her to the supermarket, Alyssa will randomly ring the car horn when she doesn't go; and even offend Alyssa with language, causing Alyssa to slap her... But as Anna and Alyssa make further contact, Alyssa's strength touches her. Everyone will be touched by Alyssa: choosing to leave a life between her daughter and herself, she chose her daughter; in order to continue her concern for her daughter, she left eighteen birthday gifts for her daughter. Alyssa told Anna about her expectations for her future daughter: "To be beautiful inside, to be a strong, determined person, a positive person." Alyssa asked Anna to be her assistant and choose a gift for her daughter. There is a scene in the movie: when Anna is in the hospital and sees a concussion patient dying, she rushes to Alyssa, hugs her mother, and kisses her mother. She also encouraged her father, Alessio, to express her strength and show it in front of her mother.

It's a tear-jerking movie: in the pool, the daughter kisses her mother's belly, where she has her unborn self; the mother teaches her daughter to fry apple slices by hand, and they snuggle up to each other, their heads resting on their heads, their faces both happy and sad—days that will soon pass; Alyssa and Alessio's father makes the wedding seem warm and sentimental with a touching greeting; and the mother's last gift is a letter to Anna on her deathbed:" Living with anger and sadness is not worth it. I know you must be thinking, it's a gift again, it's annoying. But you don't know how happy I am to do this, pondering these gifts, thinking about you, thinking about what makes you a better person, giving me great strength. If there are gifts that don't suit you, I'm sorry, but that's the only way I can get close to you. You have to remember that even on the brightest days of the sun, you can see my star. ”

Anna wakes up from her coma, and the film returns to reality: she plays the piano that she originally hated, and the piano sounds like a complaint; she goes to the pool, jumps off the high jumping platform, the posture of a person in the water, and looks like a mother's womb when she is a baby; she wears a purple dress—a gift from her father, which is also an eighteen-year-old gift that her mother was going to give, because she is afraid of obsolescence, and regrets it, but my father has always kept it. "What about obsolescence?" Anna said so. She wore gifts from her parents and showed them generously in front of everyone, eighteen years old means adulthood, she hopes that from now on, she can become the person her mother expects, so that she can live up to all her mother's gifts and painstaking efforts. (Liu Weixin)