Reason for recommendation: the restrained beauty on the screen; the vast love on the connotation.
If I watch a movie by myself, I never pay attention to the names of the directors and actors, which allows me to better integrate into the plot. I especially appreciate films from non-Chinese and non-English speaking countries.
"On the Other Side of Life", aside from the awards this film won, if you've been fortunate enough to read several literary works from Turkey, Israel, Poland and other countries, it's not hard to find that the things that novel writers and film directors care about are In the same way, in the Babel Rebellion, how to find a way for the people to face the future. (Babel Rebellion: "Bible, Old Testament, Genesis" records that human beings united to build a tower that could lead to heaven. God was afraid of human beings surpassing God, so he messed up the language of human beings and made the plan to build the tower fail.)
The film is divided into three segments, the first two being two events that almost happen at the same time in different locations. The first paragraph is that Nayat's widower father finds an elderly prostitute Yeat who can't bear the loneliness of his old age, and asks the other party to serve him alone. On that night, his father can't hide his happiness and drink too much alcohol and cause a heart attack (or High blood pressure?) was hospitalized suddenly. During this period, Nayat gradually learned that Yeat's husband was killed in a violent conflict in Istanbul, and she moved to Hamburg to work as a prostitute to support her daughter. After his father recovered and was discharged from the hospital, he always suspected that his son was having an affair with Yate. The sentence "I paid and you are mine" made Yate angry and ready to leave. His father accidentally killed Yate and went to prison. Nayat returned to Istanbul, hoping to find Yeat's daughter to help him continue to school, but failed, so he bought a local German bookstore.
The second paragraph skips to Yate's daughter Aita, who joins a local youth radical socialist organization that attempts to create violent riots during a peaceful demonstration. During the conflict, Aita picks up her companion's gun, Chased by police. After that, Aita went into exile in Hamburg, Germany, in an attempt to find her mother Yeate, but Yeate kept tricking Aita into working in a shoe store, and naturally she couldn't find it. After that, Aita met Charlotte, a German girl at a German university. Charlotte let Aita live in her own home and fell in love with Aita, hoping to help Aita apply for political asylum in Germany, but ultimately failed. Aita was deported back to her country and locked up in a local women's prison awaiting sentencing.
In the third paragraph, Charlotte bid farewell to her mother and went to Istanbul to work hard to rescue Aita, and rented an apartment in Naiat in between. When visiting Aita, Aita asked Charlotte to help her retrieve the gun hidden on the roof of a building. Charlotte complied. Charlotte chased the child, the child touched the gun and his companion "What is it?", shot unconsciously, and Charlotte died. Mother Xia's four-year-old daughter also came to Istanbul and lived in Nayat's house. At the same time, Mother Xia also stated that she would continue to help Aita to fulfill her daughter's last wish.
At the end of the film, Aita expressed remorse for her past radical political behavior and lived with her mother Xia, while Naiat's father was repatriated to China. Finally understand the importance of love, go to the countryside to find his father.
Whether each piece of the story is looked at individually or combined together, it is a common story. Then some people might say, as you mean, "On the Other Side of Life" is completely unqualified for the Best Screenplay Award in Cannes? On the contrary, what I am going to say next is what is unusual about the ordinary story of a movie. In fact, almost all good movies, and even all good novels, succeed in this. Unlike music or painting, which is often the first sense to determine the viewer's preferences, and poetry that is often more difficult to understand, the more praised it is, the criteria for determining excellence in movies and novels are relatively uniform. First, there is enough respect for facts, even if it is fantasy The novel must also be based on this. If you don't believe it, you can imagine anything, and you will find that it is still an image composed of ordinary people and things in your life; the second is the poetic depth of facts, this is a novel The criteria for judging the ideological value of novels, because, in fact, the stories that can happen in this world are limited, although history has progressed for many centuries, what is new is not still limited, love, conflict, understanding, incomprehension, tolerance, hatred ...to wrap up all the stories in a few words, why don't we do that? Why do we think that "Dream of Red Mansions" is 10,000 times better than "Jin Ping Mei" for the same description of the life of a commoner? Is it just because the naked sexual descriptions in "Jin Ping Mei" can't be on the table? The reason lies in the depth of a fact, which can also be said to be the perspective of the author (director) to see the problem.
The height of a work depends on the height of the eye of the person who created the work. Where is the height of "On the Other Side of Life"? Is it because it expresses the alienation, the incomprehension between Germany and Israel (between different cultures) - such as a conflict between Aita at Charlotte's house and Charlotte's mother in the kitchen? Or is it the expression of every aspect of human nature—like the old prostitute Yett, who only played for twenty minutes? I don't think it's either. The director will highly arrange it at the end of the film, that is, the conversation between Naiat and Charlotte's mother:
Naiat: "Allah tested the loyalty of Aham (God! Forgive me subtitles), and asked him to put He offered his own son as a sacrifice. Abraham did as he did, and Allah was moved by his piety and gave him a sheep, which he sacrificed instead of his own son."
Mother Xia said, "There are also some in the Bible. The same story."
Nayat: "I was afraid of this story when I was a child, my mother died very early, and I asked my father, if Allah asked him to do so, would he give me away too?"
Xia Mu: " What did your father say."
Nayat: "My father said that even if he betrayed Allah, he would never let me hurt."
There are two points in this dialogue, one is "the same story is in the Bible", and the other is "even if I betray Allah, He will never let me be hurt". I will talk about the latter first. At first glance, what is touching is the value of family affection. Of course, this is unquestionable, but on the basis of family affection, the director arranged this passage to the end and let him Neyt's search for her father, while also asking Aita to repent of her past excesses, is what the film is really about: love is the only way to resolve disputes. Same as the novels "The Story of Love and Darkness", "Witness: Love", etc. ("Witness: Love" is about the life of the second generation of post-Holocaust concentration camps, and has the same problem with Turkey) , For these historically suffering people, the important thing is not which political force can win, the important thing is that their lives can have the necessary guarantees, rather than being killed on the side of the road like Charlotte. . (The little boy the director arranged at that time also had a deep meaning, don’t forget what the detective said to him when Nayatt went to the police station to find Aita’s information in the first paragraph, “Here, there are children who can’t go to school everywhere. , they are ignorant and can only associate with violence", this is another topic, and I won't repeat it here.)
Look at the first point, what's the point? This involves political conflicts in Turkey. Leaving this aside, the Bible and the Koran, respectively the highest books of different religions, have the same fables, which attacked those racists and nationalists. Humans have the same origin, but because of the Babel Rebellion, the language has changed. Since they have the same origin, what can't we talk about? Do you have to use violence?
Violence is a violation of human nature.
The division of human nature, in my opinion, consists of both naturalness and morality. The factor affecting the situation in today's world is the economy, which is understandable, but if you consider that the economy is composed of each individual individual, it is not difficult to find that the economy is a result of the dispute between religion and politics - the difference between religion and politics is that , Religiousists and politicians often talk to themselves about human morality, thinking that what they represent is enough to be called true morality, and the reason why economic results sometimes constrain religion and politics in turn is because Man's morality is not isolated from nature, and often the discussion of morality extends to the realm of nature, and in this field, neither religious nor politicians can deny - everyone has something to eat The need for sleep, everyone has the need for "mating" - Buddhism, which advocates "asceticism", is an exception in this regard.
In this case, all people have to admit that the material Tower of Babel was indeed prevented by God, or rather, it was the morality of human nature that prevented the material Tower of Babel. But the naturalness of human nature still exists, whether theist or atheist, take myself as an example, I am a theist, I think "love" is a very interesting question worth pondering: God (or Bodhisattva or Allah) ) created the world, but the ancient Greek era has passed away, and now man and god are different after all, so God places the truth of the world around us, but does not let us discover him, just as God destroyed the Tower of Babel, After all, people long to be close to God, so there is the word "love", because love is not man-made, it is created by God, and regardless of its reproductive commonality, it is only "love" itself, it is The most accessible non-artificial thing in this world! In this sense, the only thing we can do in this life is to forgive the power of God, find love through forgiveness, and through love, ask God to light up our eyes to see the light of the world.
Some people say that the film is too abrupt in its handling of the characters, which, in my opinion, does not exist. Every thought change in life is abrupt, not just in movies. Of course, if anyone insists on discussing the possibility of such a coincidence in real life, go and discuss it with the screenwriter.
Some people say that movies are movies and life is life, and in my opinion, this is still difficult for me to accept. In fact, for countries I haven't been to, my understanding often comes directly from movies and novels, not LP or National Geographic Channel, not only because, but also because at that time film directors and novelists were rooted in the local brewing with local of humanized products. Because of this, in my eyes, "On the Other Side of Life" can score 80 points even if it is not 90 points. In ancient China, there was a compliment of people called "sympathy for the heavens and the people," and I think this movie basically does that.
Others said the film's ending was too "harmonious". It's not that I sing triumphantly for the Communist Party. Isn't the word "harmony" bad? Perhaps you, like the woman who spat at a repentant Aita, thought it unforgivable to betray your own youth. Well, we're all young, and as Salinger said, short-lived mistakes when we're young, we all love being young. But please treat mature people with tolerance. Youth can drive the world, but it is these mature people who maintain the stability of the world.
In addition, the director's restraint in this film is enough to move the viewer, if not to the point of breathtaking. Different from the young directors who advertised the experimental school, the steady, tepid, and calm enough shots gave me a shock that matched Yang Dechang's one by one. This is exactly the mature attitude of a 30-year-old man. And the deep and beautiful long shots of that summer afternoon at the beginning, as well as the exquisite scenery that flies through the camera twice while Nayat was driving in the countryside of Istanbul, were interspersed with them, which made the whole movie look like a bland all the time. .
Finally, another reason why I love this movie is that it gave me a reason to watch "I Am Red", which I always thought was too big and the words were a bit awkward. It feels so useless.
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