If this film is only regarded as an alcohol challenge, or director Winterberg's performance of the midlife crisis, then it will indeed be slightly boring. From another perspective, perhaps this movie can be understood as something that each of us is experiencing or thinking about. It can also be seen from the famous quote of Kierkegaard at the beginning of the movie that this movie actually has some Philosophical connotation.
What is youth? It's just Nanke Yimeng;
What is love? It's just a legend in a dream.
Kierkegaard is considered to be the founder of modern existential philosophy. The opening quote of this passage also implies that the whole film will start with a sense of nothingness. This sense of emptiness corresponds to the four teachers in the film who have lost passion for life in their middle age.
It seems that in a country with a higher quality of life like Northern Europe, people have more time to think about more profound things. As far as the Nordic directors I have seen, whether it is Bergman, Aki, or even Larsvon, they always feel that their expressions and thinking have a unique mark that belongs to the Nordic countries.
I have been to several countries in Northern Europe a few years ago. In addition to the really beautiful natural scenery, the melancholic temperament of this land caused by various reasons also impressed me. The fact that high welfare states have high suicide rates seems to be telling the absurdity of this world. As in the film, when the students chose Hitler, who was not alcoholic, as their leader, Martin said meaningfully: "This world has never been what you expected."
"This world has never been what you expected." For me, this sentence is the one that resonates most with me in the whole movie. With the increase of age and experience, the more I feel that there are too many absurd things in this world, and the external absurdity will indeed bring me some confusion inside as an individual.
Interestingly, the rise of existentialism originated from the European people’s suspicion of rationalism and science and technology reduced to tools of war after the two world wars. If the whole movie is regarded as a manifestation of existentialism, then perhaps Winter Berg is also saying that our loneliness and self-doubt as individuals in this era are not much different from that desperate era.
Existentialism believes that the meaning of life should be defined by the individual, and we should accept the absurdity of the world and freely choose our own value in our own meaningless lives. This process of defining oneself is the process of finding essence, which is the so-called "existence before essence". Just like the series of experiences of several teachers in the film can also be seen as a process of finding the essence.
Kierkegaard has a famous theory of "three stages of life", namely aesthetic, ethical, and religious. Aesthetics is the first stage of searching for the essence. It represents middle-aged teachers regaining their passion from boring life through alcohol projects. They find their meaning through alcohol.
Ethical represents that Martin and others regained their responsibilities and changed their lives after the alcohol plan was stopped and the physical education teacher committed suicide. The scene of the children singing the national anthem at the funeral here really touched me. It was the physical education teacher's behavior that affected the children, and his death and the spiritual legacy left by him also made Martin and others have an epiphany.
Religion is the final stage of searching for the essence. It frees people from the shackles of desire and morality and faces their own beliefs. This represents the last scene in the film. If you regard the whole movie as Winterberg’s philosophical essay on Kierkegaard, then the last shot can be said to be a perfect ending, because it is the final stage of the three stages and the famous phrase "faith "Zhiyue" is the most intuitive performance.
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