In "Desire to Live", Akira Kurosawa subverted the main narrative of the two paragraphs before and after the film. The second half of the film pieced together the sad process of Watanabe's request for the government to build a park through everyone's memories. In this film, the main characters before and after are completely exchanged. The entrepreneur played by Mifune is the absolute core of the first half, but in the second half, the core has become the police detective played by Tatsuya Nakadai. There are puzzles in the front, and secrets are revealed in the back. This narrative structure won Kurosawa Akira's heart.
The film begins with a scene of intrigue between entrepreneurs. A board meeting was held at Kwon Teng's house on the national shoe industry to discuss the quality of the new shoes. Quan Teng felt that he could not just focus on reducing costs and increasing profits, while ignoring the quality of the shoes themselves. Such a view runs counter to the idea of other shareholders who do not seek quality but only profit, and eventually everyone breaks up. The image of Quan Teng's righteousness was clearly presented to the audience at the beginning. Quan Teng was afraid that he would be kicked out of the board of directors by other shareholders, so he mortgaged all his property and obtained the company's largest share. As a result, that night, Quan Teng received a call that his son was kidnapped. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of 30 million yuan from Quan Teng. In order to save his son, Quan Teng agreed immediately. But after a while, their son came home. It turned out that the kidnappers made a mistake and kidnapped the son of driver Quan Teng. Quan Teng immediately called the police, but the driver had no money. Under this moral dilemma, Quan Teng hesitated. If he gives money, his career will be over. If he doesn't give money, Liang Zhide will feel bad about it. The film portrays his entanglement and helplessness very real. In the end, out of conscience and his wife's ideological work, he decided to pay the ransom to the kidnappers. Accompanied by the police, he threw the bag full of money from the moving train to the designated spot. Eventually the child returned to his father. This is the first half, the entanglement of human nature is vividly displayed under the dramatic turning point. When he decided to pay the ransom, his men sold him to other shareholders. His wife persuaded Quan Teng to pay the ransom. Quan Teng said that his wife did not understand the taste of poverty, but his fortune depended on his wife's dowry... When Quan Teng heard that his son was kidnapped, he refused to call the police in order to save his son. , because the police may anger the kidnappers, but when Quan Teng learned that he had kidnapped the wrong child, he immediately chose to call the police regardless of the safety of the child. The rapid changes of human nature make the audience hooked in the first half. And almost all the scenes in the first half were in Quan Teng's home, I thought the first half was more interesting than the arrests in the second half.
The second half mainly tells how the police detectives collect clues and formulate plans to arrest the kidnappers. The kidnappers killed their accomplices with high-purity drugs and wanted to pocket huge sums of money. In the final arrest operation, the police followed the kidnappers to the dirty, filthy bottom world. There are prostitutes and drug addicts everywhere, in stark contrast to the villa on the mountain where Kwon Teng lives. At the end of the film, Quan Teng was invited to meet the kidnappers in prison. The kidnappers expressed to Quan Teng his hatred for the rich and his anger towards the rich who lived in the villas in the highlands. Between the high and the low, the class gap, I wonder if Feng Junhao was inspired by this film...
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