This article is written by Zhi Tianrui
A girl in a snowy landscape, as if asleep, and as if experiencing the feeling of snow hanging on her face, she woke up like an alarm clock in the north wind, got up, walked, and slowly strolled down the gentle slope completely covered by snow.
Then in the camera is the snow covering the ground in Kansai, and the face and hair of the person standing on it, all dressed in muscular. It is a Shinto-style cemetery.
Everyone gathered together, but the westward wind seemed to have long since blown away the sorrow and reluctance, and the rest of the people looked at each other and treated life with numb feelings about life or expectations now. After the memorial, sip tea and wine, tell about life.
Only Hiroko Watanabe, the girl who woke up in the snow——— still missed the face of her former lover, who had been washed away by time. The snowstorm and the cold on the top of the mountain destroyed the lover's body, destroyed his face, and gradually destroyed the traces of his existence in this world.
The short life history of the young boy Fujii Tree, but because of the two girls' because of him, they met in the staggered time and space and the dim memory, composing a dramatic story about retrospection and remembrance such as "Love Letter".
Recall how cruel this word was to modern Japan.
This country, which has experienced chaos and suffering, and has also brought deep disasters to other countries, after the bloody cocoon has become a normalized country, has returned to the true "quietness" in the national soul, and this static aesthetic that accommodates the local Shinto ideas and the meaning of Buddhist Zen Buddhism has almost become an important label for us to look at the appearance of Japanese culture, but often ignores that the aesthetic characteristics of presenting a static state are the result of two, or three or even more cultures and ideas, desires and complaints, conflicts and entanglements, fusion and exclusion.
As an island nation with an extremely weak core concept, that sense of wandering that has no place to rely on permeates all corners of the national spirit of this country.
Therefore, we will see Hiroko Watanabe saying goodbye to the previous relationship, and in a state of confusion and wandering in a new relationship that seems to open a new chapter in her life. The flickering glances on the screen convey the paradoxical emotional reaction of worrying about whether it can be truly obtained again because of loss. The sorrows, joys, doubts, and thoughts that were originally in the course of life become scars accumulated into dreams, and become pain points entangled in life. It becomes an eternal dark spot in the spiritual marrow of female life.
It is also the strong thunder resonance of this extreme feeling, guiding Hiroko to examine the former lover in the memory of the sad nostalgia, and then use paper and pen to talk with the mysterious Fujii tree, outlining the memory that has gradually faded, expanding the resilience of life, the dust and mist brought by thin time, and then penetrating the extreme situation of cognitive resistance, and another woman together recalls the first half of the distant male Fujii tree.
The structure of the film imitates Kieslowski's famous work "Two Flowers", which is used to use the visual effects of the refractor to bring out the school era that the female Fujii Shu herself has almost forgotten, and the shadow carved in the mind of this simple but brave girl whose father died early.
The father's figure and memory in the more than two hours of the film, just like fragments flashed in the eyes of the sick and weak Fujii tree, and the scene is based on the hospital rescue corridor and the memorial ceremony at home, where the father's role is defective and weak, and the male role of the father and boyfriend contains another important pole in the gender structure of "father" is blurred, which leads to the fact that we always intentionally or unintentionally, actively or passively place the female characters in the film without the powerful reliance of "father". They either died in an avalanche or died of the common cold. Leave the girl alone to wander and walk on the road of the world.
So much so that the "they" we see actively or passively reflect the strength and persistence of women. It is this vitality that characterizes the life of a woman who is radiant, and it is this vitality that becomes the source of the film's deep humanitarian significance.
In "Love Letters", when the female Fujii tree in the opening film sees the portrait of herself painted by the male Fujii tree behind the bookmark, we can also clearly identify the true face of love——— one person misses another person. The heartfelt creation of restoring the face of love through the camera is often the most difficult to express clearly, because in East Asian culture, our various feelings are always suspended in complex and fluid social situations, so that the love we often see on the screen is refracted and deformed by the curved mirror, which mixes the dependence, thoughts and misses of the human heart and soul on someone into the social ecological reaction bottle, resulting in our inability to directly touch sincere feelings and carrying other heavy shackles.
Shunji Iwai cleverly uses the absence of one of the male and female relationships, thus using a light text structure to strongly promote the powerful writing of the other party ——— female perspective ———.
The two identical-looking girls in "Love Letters", Hiroko Watanabe and Fujii Tree, like lonely but proudly open flowers in the cold autumn wind, use letters to string together and then resonate with the memories of the same man, explaining their respective sketches of a shy boy, this common memory is like a weak little flame in the wind and snow, swaying, but with their own strength to resist the erosion of time, retaining a deep vitality, using this strength as the fundamental point of departure, examining their own views on love and memory.
Therefore, in this film with an extremely strong petty bourgeois aesthetic, the choreographer Shunji Iwai has made the greatest efforts to expand his exploration and thinking about the spiritual world of young people, not only limited to the depiction of the simple spiritual world of love, but also using love, the emotional gripper that can most arouse people's psychological resonance, to feedback a grand picture of the flow of the spiritual world of young women.
Here, weak women have the most powerful spiritual and spiritual perception ability, sensing the coldness of love and its ease of passing, but using their warmest newly created memory nest to store the love and love that remains in the human world.
(Image from the Internet, copyright belongs to the original author)