"Father Trapped in Time": Love and tenderness can resist the black hole of the spirit

In 2000, Christopher Nolan's film Memory tells the story of the protagonist Leonard's inability to save more than 5 minutes of memory. The audience locked in Leonard's mind by the director can only rely on fragments of information from the east and west claws to understand the plot, while at the same time looking at other characters with a skeptical eye. 21 years later, Florian Zeller used a similar directional approach in the film Father Chinese, based on his stage play of the same name, and achieved equally astonishing results. Even more surprising is that this is the first film directed by Zeller.

Unfold the narrative from the patient's point of view

Making a film about an Alzheimer's patient is tough enough, and it's even harder to unfold the narrative primarily from the patient's point of view. The heights and achievements of "Father" in this regard make it hard to imagine that it will be presented in other forms. Zeller may not know exactly what his real experience looks like better than someone who hasn't experienced dementia, but Father presents a compelling simulation and a unique experiment. It presents a man whose mind has become a prison, and we are trapped in it with him, or we are drifting along exactly the same path as him in the sea of his memories. We know no more than the old man, and there is no way to figure out what is happening. Perhaps the only difference is that we know it's a movie where we're hunting for clues and assembling a coherent narrative, and he seems to need to be reset in every new scene, because each new plot destroys the previous one. This makes "Father" both a psychological detective story and a quiet thriller movie. And what makes the film so disturbing is that it brings us into the subjective experience of the elderly.

This sense of horror is exacerbated by the film's physical instability. The entire production design and post-editing were so subtle that I wanted to take the film back a few seconds to appreciate the subtle changes. The lamp on the table is gone, the paintings on the walls are inexplicably gone, the piano has become a wine cabinet, the bedroom has been renovated, and the designer has created different versions of a prison-like environment. And the editor is like a magic trick in front of the audience's eyes, dazzling but simple and low-key. The basis of the story seems to shift randomly from scene to scene, while the watch that gives Anthony solace and control is always lost. It's a theme that runs through it, and it's a Nolan metaphor. He wants to live his life step by step, but he is always in a state of ups and downs. In the trance, we are as dazed and helpless as the old man, in a fragmented reality, unable to discern what is real, what is memory, what is imagination, and we cannot be sure where he is and when he lives. The physical labyrinth of the film complements the psychological maze of the characters, and the director never draws an easily recognizable line between what the old man sees and what really exists.

The audience is in the nightmare, but also outside the nightmare

Films often use a number of means to present another state of mind of the characters, such as swirling and distorting shots, psychedelic special effects, and wild montages, but perhaps never before has the use of sound and light techniques as "Father" has fascinated the audience to place the protagonist's deteriorating mind and decaying mind. The 97-minute film is presented in a situation that is almost exactly similar to real time, but the story time should be at least a few weeks or months, and the story location is not alone. The completely disappearing event interval, the inverted chaotic time order, and the scene arrangement that is difficult to distinguish between the virtual and the real highlight the physical and mental conditions of the old man's six relatives who do not recognize and distinguish between right and wrong.

In a way, a person who has lost his memory is no longer himself, and his former acquaintances are also acquainted. For most of the film, Anne, the daughter of the elderly Anthony, seems to be played by Coleman, but sometimes she seems to be played by Williams again. Or maybe there's no williams character at all, she's just a woman who is mapped to her father's eyes but can't be immediately identified. Her husband, Paul, is played by Rufus Sowell in some scenes and By Mark Gatis in others. It's a devastating manifestation of people with dementia who can't recognize their loved ones. It was a frightening and confusing torture for the father and a frustrating and heartbreaking ordeal for the daughter. In the chaos, however, Zeller maintained narrative coherence. Because even if we are as ignorant as the old man, we can track the reactions of our daughters and those around us from the outside. So we are in the nightmare and outside the nightmare. We know what he looks like and what it's like to be with him.

Hopkins' performance is stunning

It's worth noting that Father's dazzling technology doesn't destroy its core emotions. In order to present the mental state and psychological condition of Alzheimer's patients, the film's narrative looks chaotic and suspenseful, but it also has a heartbreaking simplicity. A man is old and incapacitated, and his daughter, after a lifetime of love and devotion, must begin a long and painful farewell process. In a six-decade career, Hopkins seems to have exhausted his ability to surprise us, but his performance in "Father" is still amazing. He lit up every dark corner of an 80-year-old man who had lost his mind to dementia. He let us feel the old man's old look, and clearly saw what he looks like now.

Hopkins has to play both a man who is losing his personality and a series of defense mechanisms to convince people that he is all right. He behaved elegantly but with a shabby mentality. He is sometimes paranoid and unreasonable, sometimes cute and charming. He masked the sudden rise of confusion with a smiley face, and cleverly switched between bluff and fragile apprehension. He muttered to himself and was overwhelmed. Anthony may not have been a person to feel warm in his heyday, but Hopkins' performance suggests that dementia is eroding his dignity. He constantly presents the frustrations of aging, blending the feeling of powerlessness and the chaos of both truth and illusion. He navigates the delicate and changeable psyche with ease, from righteous anger, to withered resentment, to childlike vulnerability. The feeling of weakness is presented in tiny increments, as the film slowly moves from day to night. At the end of the film, the scene of the elderly snuggling in the arms of the nursing staff and sleeping is moving, it reminds the audience that love and tenderness can effectively resist the darkness and spiritual black hole of the heart of the Alzheimer's patients.

Reveal the sadness of man's twilight years

The director tailored Hopkins' name and birthday to the characters, and the latter's soul-possessed interpretation did not live up to the expectations of the former. In terms of the authenticity of the performance, Coleman plays the daughter more than hopkins plays the father. The two can be described as chess opponents. At the same time, the father who struggled in the past and the present is unpredictable in mood and uncertain in psychology, and correspondingly, the helpless daughter is like a roller coaster in the case of continuous collapse, with tears in her eyes but with a smile, confused and depressed, still struggling to cope, and also holding the dark fantasy of suffocating her father in her sleep. Regardless of how their relationship had been before, the father's current situation only further deepened the rift between them.

The narrative structure of "Father" is elliptical, but its trajectory is linear. Anthony is a man trapped in time, the past is vague and difficult to recall, and the future is fleeting and cannot be preserved. And its lost watch is a metaphor for people with dementia who live largely outside of time. For man, though he is alive and dead, he may even be worse off alive than dead. In the twilight years, people are already like thinning mountains, losing their grasp of reality due to the degradation of memory, and their erosion of the self is even worse. This catastrophic effect gets such frightening reflection and heartbreaking testimony on screen that it gives Father an inner sense of pathos.