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The Oscar PR has reached the sprint stage, and compared to other outstanding awards, the Oscar Lifetime Achievement Awards have long had their own masters, including Grandma Varda, the mother of the New Wave, and Donald Sutherland, who is well known to domestic audiences for his role as president in "The Hunger Games".
In fact, as early as more than a decade ago, Donald Sutherland had a stunning appearance on the domestic big screen, and he was the hollywood big name director who had a long-term friendship with Uncle Ge in "Big Shots".
Big Shots (2001), Donald Sutherland, Kwan, ge you
However, I am worried that at this year's Oscars, Donald Sutherland will most likely not appear on the scene because of his memory loss and forgetting that he has won the award. Because, he played an old man with amnesia in "Love Before Memory Fades".
In this film, Donald Sutherland, along with Helen Mirren, who won an Oscar for "The Queen", drove a motorhome out to travel when his life was dying, and began a "leisure journey". The Oscar Lifetime Achievement Award winner + film queen can also be regarded as a non-strict "empress" work.
The reason why it is called "leisure journey" is because the 75-year-old Warrenberg motorhome they drive is called "the leisure seeker", which is also the name of the film.
The two laughed continuously along the way
In the film, Ella (Helen Mirren) is terminally ill, and her husband John (Donald Sutherland) suffers from severe amnesia, despite the plans of her children to send her husband to a nursing home, Ella sneaks out of the house with John and begins the last journey of their lives.
The two are like two children who have run away from home, the mobile phone has been turned off, and when they go to the roadside restaurant to relax, they think of calling their anxious children, but the words are full of indomitable willfulness.
John was plagued by Alzheimer's disease, and he sometimes forgot the names of his wife and children, and he could forget where he was every few hours of the day, but he was able to pick up Hemingway's famous sentences.
These wayward settings make their road trip look like a child's play, with the mentally erratic John sitting behind the wheel, maneuvering the bulky dilapidated motorhome with only muscle memory, and Ella needing medication to prop up her state from time to time.
John was sometimes lost in memory, and Ella patiently woke up
They dispersed several times, and then slowly bridged the distance brought by the accident and reunited.
When the plot seems to slide into the "sunset red" of chicken soup for the soul, we see the true side of life revealed by this journey. John has always been angry with Ella's first love boyfriend, believing that she and her first love boyfriend are still in contact, and the secret of John's "affair" that John has hidden for decades is unexpectedly revealed as the journey progresses.
These foreshadowings and twists bring out the most realistic issues of marriage – aging love relationships being broken by some kind of complex in the past. This is reminiscent of "45th Anniversary" starring Charlotte Lamplin and Tom Contenell.
In "45th Anniversary", on the occasion of the marriage anniversary, husband Jeff suddenly received news that the body of his girlfriend who died in a mountain climbing accident 50 years ago had been found, and his face frozen in the ice had not changed over the years, but he was dying of old age. So Jeff is caught in nostalgia for the past, while his wife Kate is caught in the vacillation of self-identification, constantly doubting the falsehood of his 45 years of marriage.
"45th Anniversary" Tom Contenell and Charlotte Lamplin were awarded the Berlin Film Queen
Compared with the introverted and deep "45th Anniversary", "Love Before memory fades" uses cold humor to dissolve the ruthlessness of time, and the theme they collectively reflect is the helplessness in the passage of time.
Absent from the husband/wife's initial relationship, for the wife/husband of the absent party, in addition to the jealousy that haunts their minds, what is more profound is that for themselves, the other party's past is closed, and they are not involved in it. As decades passed, that initial relationship seemed to hint at a youthful, corresponding reminder of the aging of today's emotional relationships.
Fortunately, time is constantly passing, and we also see that whether it is Jeff in "45th Anniversary" or Ella in "Love Before Memory Fades", in fact, there is not much nostalgia for the ex, they are just looking back or imagining the young past in the moment of aging. On the contrary, John, who is more absent from the side, is stuck in the frozen memories, and after breaking through the fog of time, both of them finally have to face aging.
"Love Before Memory Fades" and "45th Anniversary" still have some detailed echoes, and the tool "photo" occupies a lot of scenes in both films. In "45th Anniversary", the photo is a photo of Jeff's ex-girlfriend, which also records their state of love, a kind of frozen and hidden past.
The flowers on the table are still blooming, adding a touch of light to the lives of the two
The photo in "Love Before the Memory Fades" is more like an entertainment project, John and Ella will put up a simple curtain almost every day, using a slide show machine to loop the old photos, of course, John needs Ella's patient reminder to piece together the memories of the past. On another level, the two directors may have tacitly made a small tribute to the film through the medium of photographs.
In addition to the passage of time, "Love Before Memory Fades" also puts the difficult choice of facing life and death in front of us, a theme that we can also glimpse in Haneke's Palme d'Or work "Love", both films show a kind of determination in the treatment of the ending, but their background is completely different.
In "Love", the wife due to carotid artery embolization surgery failed, the body deteriorated, depression became the main tone, Haneke will be the decline in physical function, mental memory decay, loss of human dignity and other unbearable details one by one, without shying away, let people almost feel the same as the husband, from loss to despair until destroyed, at the end of the film when the husband covered his wife's head with a pillow, my breath seemed to be cut off.
Ella reminisced with the clerk on the side of the fun of previous trips with John
"Love Before Memory Fades" is handled in a relatively bright way, and John once told Ella when he was conscious, holding the gun in his hand, putting his thumb on the trigger, kissing him and leaving, not watching the final bloody scene.
Then he added, "Kiss me twice."
At the juncture of life and death, love seems to become the shackles of the relationship between the two, and "Love Before the Memory Fades" has both a warm moment that makes people feel faint pain in their hearts, and a sense of humor that flashes in the face of the final moment.
Finally, let's return to the biggest trait of "Love Before Memory Fades" – "Highway". The main plot of the husband and wife driving a caravan, although it has the form of a road movie, is also different from the traditional road movie. It's neither as absolutely anti-order as classic road movies like "The Runaway Knight"; nor is it like the usual "journey-style" healing film, which brings people back to family and traditional happy ending.
"Love Before Memory Fades" is somewhere closer to youth culture, with two elderly people fleeing the existing family order and heading to Hemingway's house, a symbol of the "American national spirit."
It is an escape from "rebellion", but to the end of a "tradition".
At the same time, on the road of the two people, we can also see the background of many youth cultures. For example, the knife-wielding gangster was scared to the brim with a gun by the prepared Ella, or John, a staunch Democratic supporter, joined the march of Trump supporters and shouted "america!" When the couple finally arrives at Key West Island, they find that the spiritual home has evolved into a playground full of entertainment.
John, who did not know why, joined the lively crowd
However, the intellectual overtones of the old couple are destined to make them traditional "evangelists". John meets anyone who can talk endlessly about Hemingway, which is a dissemination of traditional ideas, while Ella talks to the passengers who meet pingshui about their previous travels, and in the constant "external" narrative and education, "internally" bridge the gap with her family.
In this setting between "youth-style rebellion" and "traditional order", "Love Before Memory Fades" breaks the open principle of road movies while returning to the classic Hollywood narrative, and returns to order while opposing order.
The unique temperament of "Love Before the Memory Fades" and the Italian director Paolo Velzi are obviously inseparable, his last work "Crazy Love" was screened at the North Film Festival, two girlfriends abandoned by life escaped from the insane asylum, driving a convertible on the road, the film from time to time to a nerve knife-like comedy section, the end of the beach ushered in light and love, it is not difficult to imagine where the warmth and heart in "Love Before the Memory Fades" come from.
As Paul Velzi's first English-language film, "Love Before Memory Fades" not only makes its own interesting exploration of the classic Hollywood theme of road movies, but also creates the vivid image of two old people and the inseparable twilight love between them. The film is coming to theaters on Feb. 23, but don't get confused with Linklater's "Love in Trilogy," though they're all about love.
Of course, the superb performances of Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland are the most remarkable, as the director himself once said in an interview -
"Just by looking at them sitting shoulder to shoulder, you can feel the magical atmosphere of love."