The works of female directors are usually able to depict women's emotions and sorrows with gentle and delicate brushstrokes.
For example, The "Falling Red" by Ang Lee's sister Ruan Fangying, although the story is based on the suffocating feudal patriarchy, it also makes us feel the strength and bravery behind the hidden tolerance of women.
The same is true of the "Dead Girl" that we are going to talk about today, written and directed by female director Karen Mengkov.
The film revolves around the murder of a young girl by a serial killer and is divided into 5 chapters.
The first chapter, titled Stranger, tells the story of Adam, who finds the female body and calls the police.
Adam looks mediocre and grows up in the shadow of a strong mother, who strictly controls her every move, and if she is not satisfied, she will carry out hoarse insults, and even if she wears makeup, she will be humiliated by her mother as a prostitute.
But despite this, Adam, who is accustomed to resignation, has never rebelled, and carefully takes care of his mother's living and eating every day.
After the girl's body was found and called to the police, the police and the media came to their home one after another. In this regard, the mother naturally remained the same, throwing vicious and cruel words to Adam.
However, because of this incident, Adam's life began to change.
She suddenly became a celebrity in the community, and a boy at a convenience store took a fancy to her, hoping that she would be able to date her.
This made Adam, who had never been in love, inevitably have a trace of throbbing in his heart.
However, after the mother found out, she immediately humiliated her with a split head, and laughed at Adam's upside-down sticker, and satirized the boy for not having eyes, and poured milk into her face.
Adan was so angry that he couldn't bear it anymore and finally killed his mother.
After this, Adam plucked up the courage to come together with the boy, and the two had a loving interaction in the wilderness.
But there is a small episode in the middle of this, and in the face of the boy's kiss, Adam does not know how to respond, making the boy think that Adam is a masochist.
The reason for this is actually because Adam has been suppressed by his mother's personality for a long time, forming a psychological tendency of passivity, obedience, and even masochism.
Fortunately, after finally listening to the little brother's thoughts, Adam finally realized his problem, she defeated the demons and began to actively cooperate.
The second chapter is called "Sisters" and the protagonist is a female coroner named Lil.
15 years ago, her sister disappeared unexpectedly, and since then she and her family have been trying their best to find her sister and have never given up. As a result, she became silent and depressed, and needed to take medicine every day to reduce stress.
Recently, at work, she encountered the body that Lil found.
Based on the birthmarks and tattoos on the body, Lil believes that the deceased is her long-missing sister.
Although her mother refused to accept the speculation that her sister was dead, Lil believed it. Because as long as there is a result, even a tragedy is a relief.
She can finally let go of her baggage and start a new life, not only in a much more relaxed mood, but also in love with boys.
Unexpectedly, however, the police found the identity of the deceased, named Krista, and contacted the other party's mother to determine that the body was not Lil's sister.
This news made Lil's mother's obsession with finding her sister erupt again.
But Lil didn't want to go back to the desperate life she had before, and she burned all the search notices and called her boyfriend crying. What happens next, no one knows.
Because this chapter just mentioned that the girl who was killed was found to be Krista, it is not difficult to guess that in the later plot, the story of Krista or her mother will definitely be staged.
However, the director did not tell us about the experience of another woman before this, and the chapter is called "The Wife".
The protagonist of the story is a young woman, Carl, who takes care of everything in life for her husband, Jim.
Unfortunately, the husband spends his days out drinking and drinking and doesn't take her seriously at all. There was nothing she could do about it, except to quarrel and cry silently.
One day, she stumbled upon blood-stained female belongings and related documents in the storage room, including the murdered women in the newspaper. She realized that Jim was the serial killer the police had been looking for.
And it was clear that Krista had also been killed by him.
But instead of calling the police, Carl hinted that Jim himself knew about the bad things he had done, taking the opportunity to express his displeasure with Jim.
This is because, in her opinion, Jim is not false to kill people, but he is the most important person to himself.
The reason why she is so angry is actually that she hopes that Jim can love and care for herself and no longer be left out in the cold.
So we see that after the argument, Carl continues to cook for Jim and take care of everything for Jim, as usual.
Even after Jim was asleep, she burned all the evidence in the storeroom, so as not to lose the man she was attached to, even if the future life would continue to be saddled with humiliation.
And the plot has developed to this point, the dead and the murderer have been clarified, and Krista's mother has been found.
The director first reveals Krista's life - "Mother" through the experience of Krista's mother after receiving the murder of her daughter.
It turned out that Krista was born to her mother and ex-husband, and their mother-daughter relationship has always been at odds, and after the age of 16, Krista ran away from home and never contacted her mother again.
Her mother thought she was going to Hollywood to pursue her dream of stardom, but in fact she later moved to Los Angeles and became a prostitute.
Following the clues provided by the police, the mother went to the house where Krista lived and met Krista's black roommate.
From her roommate's mouth, her mother learned that Krista had been raped by her stepfather, but her mother's cowardice made her not believe what her mother could do for herself, so she ran away from home in despair.
Later, Krista also gave birth to a daughter, who had to find a way to raise her, so she went to the road of selling herself to make money.
After hearing this truth, the mother regretted that she did not start and decided to take good care of the little girl from then on to make up for her lack of maternal love for her daughter.
Heart-wrenchingly, tracing back to krista's encounter with serial killer Jim, maternal love is also a crucial keyword.
And this is the cruel truth that the director presents to us in the last chapter of the same name as the title, "Dead Girl".
The day before her daughter's birthday, Krista carefully selected gifts and wrote small cards full of love, thinking that she must give them to her on her birthday.
Originally, she planned to let a prostitute send her to the orphanage to see her daughter, but the prostitute rebelled, and the two broke up unhappily.
So she had to go back to her apartment and borrow a motorcycle from her landlord. Unexpectedly, the motorcycle broke down halfway through, and she had to wave her hand in various ways.
And it was at a time when everyone refused to take her that a man accepted her request, and that man was None other than Jim.
Just before she was killed, Krista was happily describing her daughter to Jim.
The whole film comes to an abrupt end at this moment, without showing us the specific details of the crime.
Overall, through the lead of Christa's murder, the film borrows these 5 different chapters to outline a three-dimensional and rich female group portrait from different perspectives.
This narrative structure is not uncommon.
For example, the classic "Crash", with a seemingly ordinary crash accident, intertwines multiple characters involved, and then explores the heavy racial discrimination behind the accident.
Another example is "Assassination Stronghold", which tells the story of the president's shooting, through multiple perspectives such as female directors, presidents, bodyguards, terrorists, etc., the complex layers behind the incident are pulled apart, and an event of about 20 minutes in reality has become a tense and exciting feature film.
Unlike these two films, Dead Girl focuses neither on setting up suspense nor digging into the deeper causes behind the events themselves.
It discusses the emotional tragedy and survival dilemmas faced by women as a whole.
In the process of watching the movie, you will not have the appetite to guess who the murderer is (in fact, it is easy to think), nor will you speculate on the murderer's motives, but will be firmly held by these various women and lament their fate.
Each chapter in the film corresponds to the different social roles and life difficulties of women.
For example, as a daughter, Krista has long been neglected by her mother, and Adam has been tortured by her mother;
As a sister, Lil always lives in the shadow of her missing sister, and her life is swallowed up;
As a wife, her husband is a scum of prostitution and murder, but Karl can only endure in silence and spontaneously handle the incriminating evidence for her husband, just because she can't give up her inner feelings;
As a mother, Lil's mother is trapped in the pain of finding her sister, and Krista's mother once snubbed her daughter, but now she can't get it back;
As a hitchhiking passerby, Krista is brutally murdered by Jim...
The film tells the suffering of these women, and the camera always carries a sentiment of compassion, which not only portrays the sensitive and helpless hearts of these women, but also guides us to reflect on the complex causes of women's suffering.
Among them, there are betrayals and oppression from male groups, as well as from women's dumping and violence against each other; including the full malice of the social environment for women, but also some of the psychological characteristics of women's own compromise, cowardice and sensibility.
It is gratifying that under such a tragic story, the director still arranged some plots full of sunshine and warmth, allowing us to see the greatness of women.
For example, in the story of the dead girl chapter, it is not only Krista's heart for her daughter that moves, but also her fiery passion for her black roommates.
Krista loves her roommate deeply, and when she learns that her roommate has been beaten by a man, she is so distressed that she decides to avenge her roommate first and then to see her daughter.
The car also carried a gift she had bought for her daughter
Afterwards, Krista called her roommate and expressed her vision for the future, saying: Tomorrow after picking up the children, we will leave here and go to a place with green trees and blue skies, where you can breathe fresh air, not so dirty.
What a moving passage!
Thinking about it carefully, behind such a moving paragraph, in addition to showing Christa's love and sincerity, how can it not be a director's expectation for today's world?
Today, women's social status has indeed improved, but women's suffering still exists on a large scale, and we naturally cannot turn a blind eye to this.
In particular, those structural oppressions and institutional persecutions should be paid more attention to, such as the anti-abortion laws and "heartbeat laws" that appear in some states in the United States, which are wanton deprivation of women's body autonomy. We must resolutely oppose such anti-humanity, even if it happens elsewhere.
I really hope that one day, the world can stop being so dirty and women won't have to suffer so much anymore.