In life, pain is everywhere. Heaven is also like a shadow.
At the end of the film, in the green grass, there is a touch of bus and car blue. It is the color of melancholy and the color of hope. Heaven is at hand, as long as all suffering is released, as long as you do not seek death within reach.
Makoto, a bus driver played by Hiroshi Kosho, is gradually dying of lung disease, and he is still strong to survive in the loneliness of his relatives and friends. Like a father, or a role model, he carried three young people on a journey through the mountains and rivers of the earth and the wilderness of the city. Without teaching or revelation, the bus travels at will. Life continues in wandering, wandering, traveling. Numbness, pain, revenge, emptiness, these people who have experienced tragedy and lived in trauma, the hearts are slowly changing.
It's a very self-contained film, and people have almost no contact with society. Robbers kill people in a newspaper-covered bus. The siblings live in an isolated villa. The police are alone. Construction machinery operates in the wilderness. The bus is in an uninhabited village, deep in the mountains, by the sea, passing through one stop after another...
The landscape of the world kept coming and going, and a few lonely traveling companions confirmed each other's presence by tapping on the body of the car in the dead of night. Language is no longer a tool for communication, but only a vehicle for venting emotions, or a game to fill in the emptiness. It was only when the murderer Naoki missed the killing and Makoto suddenly intervened that he finally broke out. The silent sister and the branch, at the end, called out. Language is released by the mind only at the most critical moment. This kind of introverted self-closure, on the one hand, is the psychological manifestation of the injured person's refusal to communicate and lack of communication, on the other hand, it reveals the indifference and absurdity of the society that is difficult to communicate with people and cannot communicate.
Watching this movie quietly, you will be moved by many scenes and many details. The characters appear small and difficult, lacking trust. The world is vast and barren and indifferent. The loneliness and pain of the individual are profoundly expressed by this contrast.
In the search for self, in the survival of getting by and getting by, despair has always been with it. A tragedy a few years ago, like a pause in time, fixed the mind in that frozen silent fear. The driver chose to flee, the brothers and sisters chose to close, and the college student Akihiko chose to forget.
They decided to go.
The policeman is asking Makoto, who is preparing to leave: Will you return?
Sincere answer: We have nowhere to go.
For the lonely and desperate mind, the world is a prison.
Finding the starting point of the self-journey, I chose the place where the hijacking tragedy occurred. In the desert square, you can still smell faint blood.
During the trip, Akihiko uses a Polaroid camera to record the expressions of her travel companions. He is vulgar and empty. But compared to the numb Japanese branches and gloomy naoki, he is a sunny youth, as if he is the future of the brothers and sisters. Later, these vulgar photos were pasted on the car window and became a warm landscape.
Naoki continues his murderous actions on the journey. Faced with his own shattered heart, he used the blood of others to bridge it. Makoto smeared blood on his face and rode him round and round in the night. In the midst of a lung attack and a violent cough caused by a hard ride, he told Naoki in a hoarse voice that you can not experience all the beauty of being alive, you can feel that you are still alive, and you can trample life worthless. But you should keep life and don't let death take it away easily.
Life is your last capital, and if you lose it, you lose everything. To have it, but also to have everything.
When Akihiko, a college student, laughs at Naoki's unworthy life, Makoto explodes. He kicks Akihiko off the self-searching bus, and he tells Akihiko that Naoki has lost everything, but one day, he will get back everything he has lost! He will see beautiful landscapes and feel the true meaning of life at some point in this bitter life, somewhere in this desolate world.
This reminds me of the end of Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment. When Raskolnikov, who had become a slave, met his lover Sonya in the spring woods. He suddenly felt an irrepressible impulse. He knelt at the feet of this dusty woman who had fallen to the bottom, the life that had always loved him with hope. He looked at her and felt a surge of love and remorse. He finally discovered the beauty of life, the existence of heaven! And she finally waited for the day. Two skinny, pale young men in the spring of Siberia, in a belated love, ended the torment of the soul and began a new life.
Heaven is not in thought, in life, in hope.
Similarly, at the top of Daguan Peak, the girl and the branch will throw away the shells they found on the seashore, which carry the names of the people in her life, who were the ones who decided her life and everything about her. But now, they are just hurried visitors in her life, and she has become her own master! She, found herself. After the driver spat out a mouthful of dim blood, he heard the girl's loud call. The girl who stripped away all the burdens was vivid and moving, and the world that stripped away all the gray was full of life. In an instant, life has a texture, life has meaning, heaven, is discovered.
The so-called search for self is to wait for the arrival of heaven in the journey of life driven by hope. The so-called paradise may be a green meadow, a sincere and moving smile; a star shining in the dark night, a word of concern that soothes sorrow.