This movie is full of physical joy, but it writes endless sorrow

Screenshot of the movie "The Two men at the mouth of fire"

Love is colder than doom

Text/Yang Shiyang

Published in China News Weekly on August 10, 2020, No. 959

Love is colder than death, sex is close to death, and every orgasm is a VR experience of death and rebirth, a collapse and reconstruction of the intracranial world. Before everything was obscured by volcanic ash, when everything would be buried, they decided to prove and recall everything with their physical bodies. This is the story presented in "Two Men at the Mouth of Fire". It is desperate but timeless, cold and affectionate.

More people may be interested in "Two Men at the Mouth of Fire" because of the large parts of the nudity and wanton bed scenes, those shots are so real and unadorned, sex becomes the backbone of the story, and the program fills the audience. However, director Haruhiko Arai seems to have no intention of making people's blood boil, and the repeated impacts of the flesh did not make the temperature rise, but let the cold come down in a large area.

The story has a doomsday twist from the beginning, even though people didn't know at first that Mt. Fuji was about to erupt and seal the island. If you think about it, where does the sense of doom come from? Perhaps because from beginning to end, the camera locks on the male and female protagonists, everything around them is silent as a mystery, and people are like being sucked away, leaving the shell of the world in vain. Naoko and Kenji are like the last humans in the world, even if they walk on the road and sit in a restaurant, there will be people around, but those people are like insignificant backgrounds, in order to set off their loneliness, intimacy and alienation.

Naoko and Kenji were once lovers, and there was no contact after breaking up, and many years later Kenji returned to his hometown, met Naoko who was about to get married, Naoko's fiancé did not return from the field, the two immersed in the old past, and completed the memorial and nostalgia for the past and the future with sex again and again. The story sounds like a scumbag scumbag's dog blood drama, but in reality it's definitely not. The synopsis eliminates the details, and the beauty of the film is hidden in the atmosphere. It is like a huge dream, the two conspire to drill into it, originally agreed to return to reality after the end of the dream, but found that reality has become a longer illusion and a larger void.

Naoko and Kenji's memories begin with a photo album full of traces of their former privacy. They began to copy everything they had in their youth, and again and again they fell into madness, as if there was nothing else in the world. This became their barrier and high wall to block and isolate the world from attacking. They hugged and talked about home, had a good meal, and Kenji took good care of Naoko when she was accidentally ill... It all happened in the renovated matrimonial house, except that the fiancé had a different actor. This almost becomes a kind of role-playing of family life, and it continues to complete an unexpectedly interrupted plot, but they know that there is no reunion at the end of the play, or perhaps they do not need such a rotten reunion at all, the process is enough, there is no wear and tear of time, no daily consumption. What role sex plays between them, who can say. Is it the evidence, the beginning, the end, or simply nothing to do with love? The two of them work together to eliminate all meaning, only to complete the action, with instinct and temptation, and all this automatically produces endless meaning, the most desperate hope, the most fierce cold... They ran to each other like wild horses that had lost their reins and died. Therefore, this film achieves an impossible paradox, full of lust but incomparably pure emotion, the camera is full of physical pleasure, but it exudes endless sadness.

In the film, the other people involved do not really appear, only in their conversation, or on the other end of the phone, or in a person's paraphrase, you may even wonder if Naoko's fiancé really exists. Did she invent a person in such a way as to reassure Kenji so that she could be unscrupulously infatuated? Isn't that even more chilling? How can we truly get and have each other, never let commitment become a burden, never let intimacy become a bondage? If so, attachment will be attached? Naoko and Kenji choose a tangential line, and if they are separated, they give rise to carnal desires that do not care, confirming the feelings that do not need to be declared.

They are all unresolved people, facing the unresolved world, choosing a life that is unresolved for several days, coveting a moment, and holding the climax of a few seconds into eternity. The world is really coming to an end, and the silent volcano is going to erupt, becoming a metaphor for a grand sexual affair, and the end is the smoke and dust after the fact.