Elizabeth was gone

"Elizabeth Is Gone" is not a suspense film, it is a drama film, Maude, who is in her 80s, has just been with her only friend Elizabeth, digging in the garden in search of something, and meeting in a store a few days later, and in the blink of an eye, Elizabeth is gone.

The British film, based on Emma Healy's novel of the same name, was directed by Ashleen Walsh, whose critically acclaimed films include Mo Di and House of Sin. No one would have thought that she would hire Granda Jackson to play the heroine Maud. We may not be impressed by the 25-year-old actor, but in the 1970s, in just 5 years, Granda won two Academy Awards for Best Actress ("Woman in Love", "Golden House Dream Trace"), and twice nominated for Best Actress ("Bloody Sunday", "Haida"), which shows her strength.

The film, like the novel, unfolds from Maud's point of view, only this time, The old man played by Granda suffers from Alzheimer's disease. The walls of Maud's house are covered with reminder labels, such as: "Go to Elizabeth's house today to garden" and "Don't forget to lock it." And her behavior is also a little strange, such as: every day to buy canned peaches, so that it piles up; often call the doctor, sometimes more than ten times a month, but she does not know... Later, he could not recognize his daughter and granddaughter. During the days of Maud's worsening illness, the only thing she remembered was that "Elizabeth was gone." The search for Elizabeth became her obsession: she crossed the garden several times and peeked out of the window to see if Elizabeth was at home; like a detective, she put the labels about Elizabeth in chronological order; kept going to the police station to report the crime; called elizabeth in the middle of the night to harass Elizabeth's son; even went to the newspaper to publish a search notice - in fact, Elizabeth was not missing, she just stayed in the garden with Maud last time, fell and suffered a stroke and was hospitalized, and Maud did not know, even if he knew, Maud's brain was already confused, and, It will confuse the present with the past.

Maud stubbornly searches for Elizabeth, in fact, in the depths of her memory, for her sister Suji, who suddenly disappeared 70 years ago. The film, going back and forth between the present and the past, alternates between the search for Elizabeth and the search for Sudhime, all determined by Maud's consciousness. Sometimes, Maud was just talking to her granddaughter about Elizabeth, talking about Suji, and thinking that she was talking about Suji, in fact, Maud had already turned the topic to Elizabeth. But Maud is getting closer and closer to the truth of the unsolved case of decades ago. In the trivial editing, you can roughly see what happened at that time: Maud envied her sister Suji, wanted to be like her sister, and had a crush on her brother-in-law Frank; the tenant doug of the family and his sister Sugy were relatively close, and the two often went to dance, causing Frank to be jealous; a crazy woman often peeped in front of the window, and in how to treat her, Suji and Doug fell out; one day Sueji disappeared, only by the railway, and found one of her boxes. Where did she go? If she was killed, who was the murderer?

Granda's appearance in this film, whether it is the appearance or the performance, is exquisite: wrinkles crawl all over the circles of the eyes and the bridge of the nose, the corners of the mouth hang down; walking in small steps, shaking; looking for Elizabeth, persevering; amnesia, desperate for her own memory; wanting to scream, but not screaming; howling at unfamiliar environments; sometimes, humor, self-deprecation, cuteness... Thanks to her conscious guidance, in Elizabeth's garden, Suji's body was found.

Maud said in response to a police question: Frank would force Sue to the mantelpiece, she fell, and then the glass cover shattered on her head, and he put her in a large box and buried her in the garden. It is worth mentioning that Maude uses the future tense. Did Frank really kill Su ji by mistake? In the original text of the novel, Maud said: "These are not true, nor can they be true." But when her daughter said, "Maybe it was really him who killed her," Maud turned to herself: "I buried Suji there." "It scared my daughter a lot. Maud means that when she and her sister play a game of sand burial, they "pile up layers of sand on her and shoot them so densely that they can't move." There are also shots of sand buried in the film. Is it really a game? Could it be that the real murderer was Maud? Whether it is a novel or a movie, telling a story from the perspective and tone of an Alzheimer's patient, what we are left with is a kind of vagueness, a truth that is difficult to determine, and perhaps, this is the wonderful thing about movies and novels. (Liu Weixin)