Recently encountered a movie famine, there is nothing worth watching. Fortunately, "Forty-nine Days of the Wilderness" was found on Douban yesterday.
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi and based on the original work by Tadaoji Naito, the film tells the story of Mitsunan Suzuki's death at the age of 92, and his scattered children return to their hometown of Ashbetsu. The film was released in Japan in 2014 and won the fourth place in the "Top Ten Films of the Film Magazine" that year.
I thought it was Kore-eda and "Walking Non-Stop" and "Deeper Than the Sea", but I didn't expect to accidentally discover the New World.
<h1>#1</h1>
The film begins with a stage performance. Thick fog filled the woods, smoke was thick, and 15 people were performing, playing different instruments. Then a white line began to stretch out, drawing into a rectangle with "A Movie" written in the middle of the rectangle, which was strange.
The one-minute opening already shows that this is a different kind of film, and watching these different movies is a pleasure in itself. Seeing the back, I found that "15-player band" and "line" appeared repeatedly.
More than one Douban comment read, "Obayashi Nobuhiko has become an immortal." Of course, this may just be lazy rhetoric that does not know how to comment, after all, this kind of extreme emotional rhetoric is the most popular. I also partially agree with this sentence.
Too lonely, I had never heard who Obayashi Nobuhiko was before. After checking it, I found that it was a senior director. Born in 1938 in Omichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan (note the time and place), he was nominated for the Japan Academy Award for Best Director in 1989 for his film "Strange Midsummer". Four years later, he was nominated again for "her reasons for not marrying". However, the award was still not won.
Probably from a bygone era, the highest-rated films were created around the 1990s. Just like Grandpa Mitsunan Suzuki in "Forty-Nine Days in the Wilderness", although he has enough respect from his grandchildren, he can't get enough understanding.
<h1>#2</h1>
There are many members of the Suzuki family, but there is a fault in age. The surviving members include: Grandpa Mitsunan Suzuki, aunt Hideko (Mitsunan's younger sister), and the rest are grandchildren such as Pedestrian, Shinto, and Heavy Granddaughter Shigeru. Two of Mitsunan Suzuki's sons and daughters-in-law, parents and uncles and aunts of the pedestrian and Kamiko, have all died.
A generation has disappeared, on the one hand, it can be understood as the destruction of the war highlighted later in the film, on the other hand, it is precisely because of this fault that the grandchildren cannot understand Grandpa, and at the same time cannot understand the war that Grandpa experienced in 1945.
The film has a strong Buddhist color, and one of the characters is a monk, but it does not delay the love. His girlfriend asked him, "Where did people come from?" He replied, "When one person dies, another person is born, and that's what reincarnation means." The director thinks the same way, and he expresses the same meaning in the opening subtitle.
Death, though sad, often contains the power of new life. It is Suzuki Mitsunan's "death" that will recall the scattered family members to their hometown, just like saying to pedestrians, "We will definitely see you again in the cemetery." This sentence has two meanings: one is that he will definitely come back to visit the grave, and the other is that he will sleep here one day in the future, even if the pedestrians are alive, they choose to run away from home.
<h1>#3</h1>
As the children reunite, Grandpa's secret is gradually discovered. In fact, the story is not complicated, but the director chose to structure the film in a stream-of-consciousness way, so the narrative becomes scattered and needs to be pieced together to understand, but this also just increases the fun of watching the movie.
At the age of eighteen, Suzuki Became Friends with Ohno and Ayano. Ohno and Ayano fall in love, and Mitsunan has a crush on Ayano. At that time, Ayano was just 16 years old and had not even drunk coffee. Her favorite poet Nakahara Nakaya, especially the "Summer Song": the blue sky is not moving, the summer noon...
It may seem like nothing more than a love triangle story, but war changed everything. Ohno travels to Sakhalin Island to fight the Soviet army, and Hikari takes Ayano with him to look for it. The day they went was after August 15, 1945, and even on the other side of the river we thought the war was over. But on Sakhalin Island, this is not the case.
Hikari and Ayano arrive at Sakhalin Island, only to find Ohno long gone. Only in a corner of the fortification stands a painting by Ohno for Ayano. Ayano is dressed in a beautiful costume and sits on a wicker chair, graceful and luxurious. Guangnan disagreed, "Because of the war, he has also become bold", saying: If I paint you, I must paint your nude, because that is the most authentic you.
Prior to this, in some surreal space, the elderly Mitsunan and Ohno's soul had also discussed the problem of "painting". Mitsunan criticizes Ohno that living people cannot be drawn in two dimensions with lines, and that the authenticity of people is flesh and blood.
Ayano was greatly moved and hugged Mitsunan. Hikari nan later said, "This is our youth, everyone is ready to die for the sake of righteousness, and my youth is only in the moment when I hold Ayano tightly." Here, love becomes the most powerful argument for the injustice of war. Thinking of the time and place of Nobuhiko Obayashi's birth, he must have felt the disaster brought about by that war.
Misfortune came suddenly, and the Soviet soldiers did not leave. He injured Mitsunan and raped Ayano. Ayano begs Hikaru and kills himself.
<h1>#4</h1>
A few years later, Shimizu Nobuko entered the world of Kwangnam. She died in a car accident at the same age as Ayano, and perhaps due to some role in Mitsunan, she was recalled.
And under the cultivation of Hironan's consciousness, she became another "Ayano" (I forget which character once asked Nobuko if she lived with stories and ideas imposed by others). There is a scene in the movie where Nobuko and Ayano sit together, drinking tea and plucking their hair in surprisingly unison, and then Nobuko leaves her seat and leaves the stage for Ayano, with a certain smile on the corner of Ayano's mouth.
Either way, Nobuko became Ayano's replacement. She also completed the nude painting that Kwang Nam wanted to paint as a model. However, unfortunately, this scene was seen by the Sun Tzu pedestrians, and in the eyes of the pedestrians at that time, Nobuko was the mother, or some other emotion. It is for this reason that the pedestrian chooses to run away from home because he feels that he will get lost in his hometown.
The film finally shows us the mysterious painting: Shinko's naked body with bright red blood flowing. Guangnan said: That is war.
<h1>#5</h1>
The film's anti-war intentions are obvious, but there is another meaning: to encourage people to live hard and erase the blood on the paintings, and Aunt Hideko has made her words clear enough. Another piece of evidence is that Grandpa Mitsunan Suzuki died at the time of the "311 earthquake" in Japan, and the film obviously wants to encourage people to work hard to live, after all, such a disaster as the war can survive.
The last two scenes are indeed too preachy, a little wordy, and tasteless. But the first fourteen acts are really mesmerizing to watch, and the unconventional photography and exquisite soundtrack make "Forty-Nine Days in the Wilderness" feel like "The History of the Demise of Romanticism".
The title "Forty-Nine Days" actually refers to the seven-seven-forty-nine days of mourning after death. Just like god's unspoken saying: After forty-nine days, there will be no more wandering.