Siegfried Sassson writes in his poem The Dreamer:
Soldiers are citizens of the gray country of death and do not receive the dividends of tomorrow given by time.
01
In "Goodbye to Heaven", there are false martyrs' monuments, ill-sized coffins, good people can't review bad people and maintain irony, dead soldiers lose their lives and respect, and the flames of resentment and death seem to gush in front of the tombstones.
The narrative of this film is fast and smooth, and the images are very exquisite and romantic in the style of French cinema. It is not like some anti-war movies that focus a large number of shots on the tragic scene of the battlefield exposed, and directly appeal to all mankind to respect life and love peace with bitter catharsis;
Instead, it focuses on several characters with complex relationships, and focuses mainly on the extravagance of the post-war upper class and the helplessness of the bottom society, slowly soaking out a sense of powerlessness and tearing, showing the sores of the common appearance and essence of the war and the corner of the ukiyo-e of post-war French society.
02
Whenever war comes, the original rules in motion fall apart in an instant, leaving only survival and winning and losing; when the wolf smoke slowly dissipates in the scaly collective world, the original rules are difficult to rebuild, and there are always clouds of variables.
Edward and Albert in "Goodbye to Heaven" are two retired soldiers who have been traumatized by the war, and when they face the war's initiator, Captain Pragor, who made a fortune after the war, their wartime trauma is torn apart by reality, and the inner world continues to expand, and the pain is like a cut silver thread that converges to wrap up the soul of forbearance.
The first shot of the film is to follow a military dog running into the trench, the point of view falls on the battlefield where the war is not ending, and the French position exudes an uneasy atmosphere, like a true portrayal of the war, which exudes chaos and confusion.
At the first sight of officer Pragor, his character and psychology are fully interpreted by Albert's narration that "he loves war, that is what he admires", and the plot of ordering soldiers to deliberately provoke a conflict between the two armies when shooting at their own people when they check the dynamics of the German army.
Edward, whose entire jaw was blown off, the tears rolling in his melancholy blue eyes, the bitterness of losing his courage to show his true face, the life of relying on morphine anesthesia after discharge... These heart-wrenching wounds are in stark contrast to Pragor's soaring soaring.
When Edward began to design masks for himself, a mixture of strange styles made each mask a detailed projection of his inner world: the vicious mask revealed his ups and downs in the gap with obscurity and difficult survival, and the charming and funny mask was a satire on the supremacy of money in the upper class.
When Edward put on a gorgeous mask, which was his irony and ridicule of the whole social wind, in addition to keeping himself sober and not being assimilated by the world, his scars were also briefly covered by the exquisite mask at the party of the drunken gold fan, temporarily soothing the anxiety in his heart.
03
From Edward's personal experience and even subconscious, we can glimpse the pain of being expanded or cut in many anti-war movies, including the "deep impact" of war on the future.
The sniper in "American Sniper" who cannot forget the fear and pain brought about by war, the reputation of wartime myths cannot hide the collapse of individual psychology after the war and the trauma of the post-war family;
The crazy old man who talks to himself in "Ivan's Childhood", and through the intersection of the protagonist Ivan's dream and reality, outlines the heavy blow of war on human civilization, and at the same time shows the tragic inhumanity of war;
The Common Security Zone develops from the friendship between the soldiers of the two Koreas after contacting each other to the disintegration of trust built by each other in a tit-for-tat environment, making a silent indictment of political positions and human fission under the influence of political ideology;
The young child at the beginning of "Massacre requiem" has become an old man-like face at the end under the cruel encirclement and suppression of the German army and the bloody storm of the German occupation area...
These films come from different countries in different eras, and the backgrounds of the war are also different, but they all present the ideological core of "anti-war".
04
In addition, "Goodbye to Heaven" and the Finnish film "The Unknown Soldier" have similarities with the faint hope of suffering on the battlefield:
In "Goodbye in Heaven", Albert writes a letter to his fiancée Cecil in the trenches, and Edward's paintings vaguely reveal his ardent hope for an early end to the war;
In The Unknown Soldier, when a Finnish recruit asks a veteran whether the country will become a superpower because of them, the veteran replies that "I just want to live, come home alive, and hug my beautiful wife and two children who have just learned to walk." ”
The two films depict in detail the soldier's long wait for a stable life in a smoke-filled environment, showing an empathy between confusion and compassion, refining the pain into a "missing relatives" level and spreading out the desire for peace, this ideological level involving the emotional level is thrown at the same as "Farewell, Weapon" with the tragedy of love to illustrate that war deprives individuals of their freedom of love, destroys a happy future of a family, and extends to reflection on war.
05
"The image of war is bloodshed, pain and death."
The bloody violence of "Goodbye to Heaven" only exists in the opening part, and it is equally attractive as Edward sells fake monuments as the plot gradually deepens into the story. The image of war is not only superficial, but also the antagonistic contradictions between the post-war social classes that lurk behind it.
Whether it is Lieutenant Dan who relies on relief money after losing his legs in "Forrest Gump", Liu Feng, who is a "combat hero" in "Fanghua", who is treated roughly and helplessly, or edward and Albert in "Goodbye in Heaven" who are eclipsed after Pragor became socialites, they bid farewell to the threat of war, and then ushered in the cold eyes and discrimination of the upper world within the social structure, which is obvious physical and mental pain again.
In anti-war movies, there are more or less light or dark pains, that is like the red color of the sky that is stained by rain, which will always slowly spread in the inner world at an inadvertent moment, so that the twilight is four, and the light or long-term loss of the day's background.
Looking back at the serious anti-war fables, what they hope in a practical sense is that when the disputes related to nations and countries have subsided, the dawn of peace will eventually shine through the layers of haze to the earth.