In the various list of films, we can always see the "healing system" list.
Healing movies are like a fairy tale, making the audience believe that the stories and characters in it must exist, but they don't necessarily happen to themselves.
And there is also a type of film list, its keyword is "depressing".
It will lead you into tragedy after tragedy, wrap you around you, make you rethink the world, about human nature, about yourself after depression.
The feeling that this "depressing" film brings to us is the last thing Aristotle says when he defines tragedy in the sixth chapter of Poetics:
"Provokes pity and fear, which leads to the purification of these emotions".
This function is also known as "Katasis", which is a transliteration of the Latin katharsis, which means "purification".
And the film that I want to talk about below is the "depressive" film with the function of "Katasis" - "Detachment"
Released in 2012 and directed by Tony Kayer and produced and starring Adrien Brody, some viewers commented on the film:
After watching the movie, it is like a trip to hell, but it cannot be denied that it is a great movie.
After 360,000 people on Douban were depressed, they still scored a high score of 8.9.
The film's director, Tony Kaye, is a well-known British director whose work focuses on marginal characters and grey areas. He is good at combining documentaries with feature films, and his major works include "American X-Files", "Hellfire", "Blackwater Waterway" and so on.
This style of creation, which is a mixture of documentaries, pseudo-documentaries, interviews and plots, is also evident in Detachment.
The male protagonist Adrian is a famous Actor in the United States.
He is the pianist in "The Pianist", the Dali in "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "Midnight in Paris", the Chase in "Legend of the Blues"...
Adrian had a decadent and misty melancholy temperament, a kind of solitary sobriety, which made him enough to stand there alone enough to evoke a faint sadness.
If Adrian's image in "The Pianist" and "Midnight in Paris" can be described as "stunning", then his performance in "Detachment" can be said to be natural.
"My soul is so far away from me, and my existence is so real."
This sentence at the beginning of the film has already set the existential tone for the entire film.
Henry, the substitute teacher played by Adrian in Detachment, is in a state of loneliness and nausea like Mossol.
It is worth remembering a passage from Henry after he finished the word:
"Your generation of young people, in the present moment – they are told that women are prostitutes, bitches, ostracized, beaten, bullied, humiliated, and humiliated, and this is a 24-hour uninterrupted pyramid scheme spiritual slaughter! The second half of our lives are subject to this misconception, which is so intense that it blinds us to death.
So, in order to protect our minds and prevent this stupid idea from seeping into our thought process, we need to learn to read, to activate our imagination, to cultivate it, to improve our self-awareness, our belief system.
We all need such techniques to resist and preserve our pure spiritual world. ”
Remember this passage, and then we'll go back and look at Henry and his surroundings.
Henry, a substitute teacher.
In those messy flashback shots, we learn of his origins: Henry's mother died of an overdose of sleeping pills when he was seven years old.
The reason for the suicide is because his grandfather once had an improper relationship with his mother, and his grandfather may also be his own father, which is an inner haze that he can never get rid of.
This childhood trauma tormented Henry all the time, until decades later, when his grandfather was stupid and old, he was still immersed in that torture.
Henry works at a community school that hosts a large number of students with learning disabilities, and everyone here lives in a world of insecurity and love.
Students have no intention of learning, there are an average of one sentence and two dirty words, some are not well dressed and bare breasts, some abuse cats, some scold the teacher in class...
In this film, we don't see the students, we don't see the children, we see only a group of walking dead.
"Where did the kids go?"
These children, they have all the actions and thoughts that disgust us.
They are shallow, annoying, unexpiring, whimsical, disrespectful, and abuse themselves and teachers and parents with a seemingly cynical look.
It may be too cruel to say this, but this kind of life we can see at a glance, the kind of life that can only engage in the bottom profession, the kind of maggot-like life that constantly multiplies and curses.
As for their parents, parents do not come to the parent-teacher meeting, they scold the teacher when they come, and spit on the teacher's face.
The children of these adults will be like them, constantly repeating and reproducing.
The teachers in the middle, trying to save the children, can only cry after trying again and again, and shake out the naked truth without fear.
When parents don't care, what's the use of teachers caring?
Melidice, a schoolgirl, was ridiculed and disliked by her classmates and her father because she was fat, because she was not good-looking, because she could not pass the "Stanford" expected by her parents, and because she liked to create some paintings and photographic works that looked melancholy and desperate.
She ended up committing suicide in a campus that was supposed to be full of laughter and laughter.
Schools are not like schools, families are not like families, and students are hopeless.
Henry's real life and spiritual world are devastated, and he is faced with a life of despair, suffocation, and helplessness.
Yet what he chose was to bear, to redeem.
He comforted his grandfather, who was mentally tortured in his later years due to incest, and "forgave" him in the tone of his mother before his death.
He tries to save Meredith, who is on the verge of collapse, telling her that "everything will be fine", but he and she both understand that everything will not be better, everything is fooling themselves,
He brought Erica, a young prostitute who had been beaten up in the car, back home and gave her clean food, potion, clothes, and a bed so that she could truly be a child.
In the face of the children, who had long since been abandoned by all, he stood there and told them to read, to write, to think independently, to preserve the pure spiritual world.
However, in the philosophy of "existence precedes essence", morality or soul as "essence" is also created by man in existence.
Man is not obliged to observe a certain moral standard or religious belief, and man has a free choice, so Henry is often caught in contradictions.
On the one hand, Henry believed that morality should not be imposed on others;
On the other hand, he believes that the teacher himself needs to guide the child to the right track of life (which is also a kind of compensation for his loneliness and lack of guidance in his childhood).
Therefore, he fell into a deep contradiction, and in the end he could not truly transcend the world, to be an outsider.
Meursault was sentenced to death for not crying at his mother's funeral.
In the same despair, Henry handed his hand to others again and again, even though he himself was floating in the boundless sea, and no one saved him.
But the film finally gives hope, even if it is slim: Henry picks up Erica, who was originally sent away by him, and the two drifting people eventually bond.
"A person can easily learn not to care, but learning to care requires a hundred times more effort and courage."
Henry is brave, and he illuminates the darkness lurking in death with his childlike heart.
He was like a lone hero who had resisted the whole era, or a knight who rode alone on a horse on the vast steppe, lonely, sad, but full of pride.
Like the scene at the end of the film, Henry recites Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of Urshev" in an empty, rambunctious classroom:
We need such teachers, we need such parents.
Even though we are all islands apart from each other, I will still wave the flag vigorously to show you the way.
Even though I am about to be submerged by the sea, I will still push you out of the sea, let you breathe, let you have freedom.
Detachment is a depressing film and a film that gives people strength.
It slows down sadness and fleeting happiness.
It will make us always remember the pain and pressure of the chest as if it were slowly cut with a knife, let us cry, to care, to change, to reflect, to make changes.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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