By Karen - 02 August 2021
The novelist Camus said: "Mother is dead, I can't shed a single tear..." Henry and his environment, his family, and even himself fell into the same solitary situation. . Detachment, that is, absolute isolation, disconnected from everything.
The film does not shy away from placing Henry in the position of an outsider, and the identity of the substitute teacher is so clear that he does not even need to stay with the students for another semester before leaving. At the beginning, he quoted the sentence of Albert Camus: "and never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world."
Henry's close-up was facing the camera, and facing the camera in the dark room to make a statement, but in fact no one listened. The film is full of babbles between narration and monologue. The inner voice is like poetry, but it describes the terrible reality.
Henry struggled with witnessing his mother's suicide in his childhood, and the flashbacks of several paragraphs were no more than repeating the old cliches of psychology, trying to find a logical reason for his situation. According to Freud, all interpersonal relationships in adulthood are derived from the replication of the intimate relationship model of the same year. Since childhood is facing "disengagement", adulthood will be on the edge of the abyss of being unable to move forward.
So the focus of this film is not to accuse the demonic children of how the world is destroyed, but to try to express that being a person is not emotionally, but consciously, no longer feels the need to connect with people, and is no longer able to interact with others. The problems that arise when we find a way to define ourselves in our relationship. The so-called: "The truth about the world and us is most clearly reflected in the moment of dazed psychology and fear."
The word 'see' in the film has appeared many times, and it has the meaning of paying attention, seeing, paying attention, understanding and so on. Henry saw the colleague behind the barbed wire saying hello to him. He was surprised and said: "Ah, when you see it, I feel connected with things again..." This is probably a very important line, only relink to it then can I get some kind of conscious connection with others, and I can breathe smoothly as if I got air. In the scene where Henry and the fat girl Meredith were in the classroom, M also cried in pain that he could not be Seen. Obviously there is alive, the heart is beating and blood is flowing, and it is not thin and takes up a lot of physical space, but in any case it cannot be seen by people, how painful and absurd.
This kind of consciousness and existence is not a distorted state of reciprocal development, and no one can understand it better than adolescent children. For example, Meredith's father who has no image from beginning to end, but a voice-over, descends from the sky with a kind of God-like, abstract and rude and irresistible command. He should also be a person who absolutely cannot "see" his child, and just wants his child to follow a certain They grow up in a limited pattern that they can understand. There are too many such parents, they are completely blind in front of their children! Most of the loneliness and suffering of adolescence come from feelings of alienation and despair. In this sense, they are all young existentialists, struggling in this hell of the other.
Although Henry as a teacher is an adult, he should have already understood the tricks of this world. He is clearly aware of everything, but in fact, he is extremely powerless. Not only Henry, but almost all the characters in the film are stuck in a quagmire. The female principal faces the dilemma of being forced to close the school. Teacher Yuling Liu, who aims to shape her personality and instill knowledge, is defeated, and the children who can't find a way out in the growing dilemma turn to Crazy violence... the various flashbacks of the film, the various collages of different textures of film and handheld documentary style lenses also seem to repeatedly prove that the world is so fragmented, fragmented and incomprehensible.
The school closed, Henry was faced with a total mess in fact and spirit. Poe's gloomy and bleak story was like a misty cobweb covering his heart and lingering. As Henry telling the story to the camera, even if he repeatedly To pour out love such a thing, but in this almost wasteland world, no one has long understood.
What makes people feel doubly sad is these two lines: "The child's intelligent heart can flatten the death of many dark places, I can not find any kind delicated moment at its own attachment. "
