Introduction: Give you a chance to go back in time with your current body, will you still fall in love with her?
Nostalgia is a human instinct, and there are many classic creations about going back in time and returning to childhood in literary and artistic works from ancient times to the present. It's just a pity that this reversal can only stay in the fantasy of human romance and cannot really be achieved in real life. With the improvement of the material foundation and science and technology, many fantasies seem to be imitated by making movies today, and the movies "Party A and Party B" and "Private Customization" are one of the screen practices of this brain hole. Under this screen setting, the film expresses a certain social irony or highlights the warm truth of the characters from fiction to reality through character swapping and "dream creation".
The film "Good Dreams Day Trip" tells the story of a midlife crisis illustrator Victor who receives the customized crossing service of "Memories of The Beautiful Company" with the help of his son and friends, and returns to the day when he met his beloved at the bar. After a period of time outside the play, everyone seems to have a new understanding of love. The film discusses the complexity of love to the audience through several people who are deeply confused by feelings, what is love? What is love? When we drag our aging bodies back to the past, is the flame of love still there? The ambiguous ending of the film, which leaves room for the audience to think playfully, premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival on May 20, 2019.
Different from Feng Xiaogang-style comedies such as "Party A and Party B", the film does not adopt a series of sketch structures for narrative, but takes the protagonist Victor as the focus of the story, and connects the emotional relationship between the characters through the development of multiple clues. The film shows us four people in an emotional crisis, the Victorian couple and the director couple. The film opens with Victoria's messy middle-aged life, frustrated and depressed in his career, having no say in front of his wife, and even being kicked out of his home. Originally at the low point of his life, he joined the game of rejuvenation under the planning of his son, and this good dream experience has also become a growth of his concept of love. In this activity, Vido underwent three mental shifts that intertwined with the emotions of the two women associated with Vido, all of whom were motivated by an "imagination."
When he first entered the set, Vitó showed a harsh side for many details. This behavior destroys the immersive sensory mechanism, and he actively creates a distancing effect under the premise of knowing the "script", which is the embodiment of his questioning the utility of the game and, more deeply, the doubt of finding the heartbeat. However, the actress's subsequent departure from the script began to change Vido's mentality, and she changed from "the imitator of Vido's wife" to "Polish female pianist".
This character ambiguity opens up a space for Vido's imagination, and Vido's inner feelings are mobilized between real history and virtual improvisation. The two people seem to find the lack of love in each other under their respective hurt feelings, but in the end, this ambiguity that seems to have authenticity is stranded in the actress's "performance", and Victor's dream is shattered like a bubble. When Vido confronts his wife and friends for cheating, Vido does not show more emotion, and a conversation at the dinner table shows Vido's delusional understanding of love. When Victor handed the hand-drawn painting to his wife, who rekindled the memories of her youth in the manuscript, this romantic fantasy was undoubtedly heartwarming for women. The last heartbeat died out in the snoring of Victor's friends, at which time Vitó's wife gradually felt that the shelf life of passion in love was short-lived, and found Vido with old love and youthful fantasy wife.
Entering a good dream again, Vido becomes the person in his wife's dream, which also means that his wife is walking into an imagination. The memories of their youth when they met again were reinterpreted, the wife seemed to enjoy the reproduction even more, and Victor's attitude changed from before, watching the performance with a more relaxed and relieved attitude. At the wine table, the two no longer completely repeat the dialogue of that year, but express their views on the line of love to this day. Victor has a pessimistic attitude towards love, passion is real but eternal love is illusory, as Victor said, "because after 25 years, you still can't stand me". The wife, on the other hand, thinks that 25 years is long enough, and when she can no longer bear life, part of the reason is actually from herself. Although it is the dream of Victor's wife, the film is actually described in the end of the film from The perspective of Victor, when the wife gets up and drops the scarf as she did then, it also means that she has left Vido with the choice of whether love will continue.
The pleasant conversation between the two seems to tempt the audience's thinking that Vido will pick up the scarf again, in fact the film makes a cunning flip, Vido does not make a choice immediately, and the sudden appearance of the actress in front of him adds a touch of playful color to Vido's heart. Is it the embodiment of his wife's youth or is Vido's inner feelings surging involuntarily? The film uses this lens to quickly reveal the complexity of love, two people's seemingly revelatory words become unconvincing in the face of human nature, what is love, must it be responsibility and companionship? Where is the boundary between love and passion at the time of first love? Are there any distinctions between them? When I fall in love with you again, what do I love? All of this film throws questions at the final open-ended ending to the audience, or perhaps these questions are about the answer to love itself.
The narrative of the film constantly jumps between virtual and real, and this feeling of reality and virtuality is also very much like love itself. One second two people still feel the harmony of love, and the next second they may be destroyed by the possession and suspicion of love. The director symbolizes the beginning of love through the "good dream game", while the outside scene is the evolution of love in life. The film's interweaving of romance and reality is not intended to shed some kind of conclusion, but to trigger reflection on reality. Whether people are real or role-playing in love become an unanswerable existence, but the seeds of passion also seem to burn on the firewood of people's beautiful imaginations.