What can we give up in order to maintain our interest, to pursue happiness that we can really feel when we are small?
--Han Song
There are not many Korean movies that my wife and I have watched together, "Lucky Key" let us see the absurdity of fate, we drank chicken soup, and believed that good people will get a good ending and harvest a happy life journey.
And the "Little Princess" watched last night is another style that Korean directors are good at: using a very literary but cleverly interdependent approach to reality, showing the state of life that we yearn for but have never really had.
The film source of "Little Princess" is not sufficient, and the domestic subtitle group also mistakenly translates "Little Princess" as "Little Princess", which almost makes us rub shoulders with this Korean film masterpiece because of this wrong title.
The heroine of the film is named Smile, a 31-year-old domestic worker who is still wandering in the big city of Seoul, South Korea. The daily housekeeping work can bring her an income of 45,000 won per day. This income could support her to rent a modest studio in Seoul, South Korea, where she and bed bugs accompany each other. Every month, she pays the rent with a quarter of her income.
As the New Year approaches, prices in Seoul skyrocket, and a smile with bookkeeping habits finds that her daily income can no longer support her life, and her daily expenditure has clearly exceeded her income.
It turns out that after three meals a day, smiling every day to drink whiskey, smoke a lot of women's cigarettes, but also drink a kind of medicine to slow down their hair whitening. These overdrafts all the income from Smile.
She was unwilling to give up the two hobbies that brought her simple pleasure, such as cigarettes and alcohol, so she chose to give up the house and began a wonderful journey of "finding a house".
In the large city of Seoul, there are only five friends who may be supported by Smile Housing, all of whom are smile's former band teammates, and it is interesting to note that these five good friends are no longer the same as when they formed a band.
Someone became a workaholic, taking a lunch break to replenish the sugar needed for life by taking a drip;
Someone became a housewife, repeating all the chores of yesterday in a cramped room;
Some people suffer from depression, divorce after eight months of marriage, and cry under the pressure of mortgage;
Some people become macho, think they have seen through life, and frivolously propose to Smile;
Others marry into the rich by erasing "black history", roaring and smiling.
The six men who once came together for their love of music live separately in busy big cities, and they can only be reunited at a funeral after a friend's loved one has passed away.
It is lamentable that the funeral of a friend's relative is also a "good time" that another friend should not miss.
You read that right, the so-called good timing is a good time to send a wedding invitation. The city is so big that I missed the funeral, and I really don't know when I will have the opportunity and courage to send this wedding invitation to friends who are slowly losing contact.
"Little Princess" is the first directorial work of the Korean Jeon Gao Yun, which uses a very special perspective to tell the life status of a generation floating in a big city. To be honest, this state, I could not understand at first, let alone empathize.
But in the process of watching the movie, we are slowly substituted by the plot, and we also find that the heroine smiles and her friends, and does not show us the stage of life that everyone will have to go through, directly in front of us.
Most people will leave a familiar city in their 20s and experience a hard life for a long time in a foreign country or even a foreign country. In these days, we are like a piece of duckweed, constantly hypnotizing ourselves: after surviving this difficult period, we will eventually get a stable period of time, and then see the light.
What is the stability we seek? To be honest, isn't it just a house, and a material wealth that allows us to live freely and decently?
We give up a lot of things to get this, like when we go to work and watch our freedom go. It's fine if we're doing the work we love, but how depressing are the lives of those who are forced to work just to survive.
Many literary and artistic works, on behalf of these busy and unearned new urban people express their hearts, hear the roar of "I live here, also die here", we will not feel resonant at first, but the more bound by urban life, the more we can find that we have lost the pride of self-confidence in urban life, and the freedom that makes us crazy and addicted, we are indeed needed by our company, but we have begun to eagerly want to escape, A trapped beast who is not willing to be tied to work 24 hours a day.
The preciousness of the movie "Little Duchess" lies precisely in its reverse thinking.
Just like when we first came to the big city, we didn't really think about what we had to lose in order to achieve our ideals. What we lose is slowly lost in the wear and tear of the day, and we will even adapt to our life and work state day by day.
Now, the movie "Little Duchess" lets us think backwards, let's see what a person can give up for what he really likes.
Smile chose to give up the house, so she had to choose a life of displacement.
Isn't this the best alternative trial?
I believe that everyone who lives in the city, at a certain moment, will be like me when watching the movie, eager to shout: "This work is too suffocating, I don't want to do it." ”
And smile for us to experience this anger and leave the life after leaving.
Smiling is unwilling to engage in a stable job, he is satisfied that he can even say that he likes the kind of life that makes money today and spends today, she does not have to cater to others all the time, but in the end she finds that in order to keep herself alive, she has to look at others.
She wants to live a special self, and she wants to be satisfied with simple little pleasures of life. She wanted simple love, she wanted cigarettes and alcohol, just three simple things. But in the end, she found that it was not easy to have these three things for a long time.
The word "betrayal" appears many times in the movie, friends betray friendship, every person living in the city betrays his most simple yearning, and even tobacco and alcohol, which have accompanied him for many years, are restless. However, in contrast, the betrayal of tobacco and alcohol is the most powerless, they only exalt their own value; And the boyfriend of this thing, but with the extreme method of going to Saudi Arabia to test love, men think that two years of hard days for 50 million won, can give the best life for a smile, do not know that this method of cutting first and playing later, is a betrayal of love; Friends used to be very close and like-minded, but to live with smiles and live with smiles, they are very realistic, and they are cramped and uneasy.
So, Smile gave up the house, gave up her boyfriend, and gave up friendship, and because of giving up all this, she didn't have to take the drugs that slowed her hair graying, and finally her life became simple.
We saw the 31-year-old smiling, all-white hair, drinking whiskey and smoking a cigarette every day, she shook her goblet gracefully, with a cigarette between her two fingers, let her eyes be drunk, let herself empty, and when she walked out of the bar, she wrapped herself in the night. In a tent by the river, a man lives freely.
This is not the urban life we expect, smile tells us in her story: maintaining their own little hobbies, not pandering to people, enjoying at least 14 hours of freedom every day, is actually not so good.
So, this is the real reason why the movie finally makes our viewers feel sad.
We may seem to have the option to stop living the life we don't like at any time, but we have no choice.
The smile is very kind, and she also loves to laugh, just like us who have just come to the big city to chase our dreams.
We've now reached the age of smiling in the movie, and we've lived the life of the five band friends who smile, some unbearable, some unwilling, but we don't struggle anymore.
There is still a flame in my heart, and I am grateful for the inspiration that the smile has given me, and I have decided to continue to live the life I am in now, and the people I love, each doing the work I love deeply, until the ideal is truly realized.
Even if the ideal is not realized, it is very beautiful to grow old and fall down in the place closest to the ideal.