Is it a sinner or God?

The film The Life of Abandoned Pine Nuts is adapted from the novel of the same name by Japanese writer Zongshu Yamada, written and filmed by famous Japanese director Tetsuya Nakashima and starring Miki Nakatani. After the film was broadcast, it was widely praised in Japan, and won many awards such as best director, best screenwriter and best actress at the Japan Film Academy Award. Miki Nakatani, the heroine, won the Best Actress at the first Asian Film Awards for this film. The story clue of the film revolves around the life development track of the protagonist Matsuko. In the younger brother's eyes, pine nuts are rejected sinners; From the point of view of nephew A Sheng, she is a god who loves her wholeheartedly. The director adopted the post-modernism shooting technique in the film design, which made the theme of the film dual, which could be regarded as a comedy that made people cry and a tragedy that made people laugh.

First of all, look at the image of pine nuts from a dual perspective:

Narrative perspective is an important factor in narrative works. Generally speaking, there are three forms of personal narrative in movies: self-knowledge view, secondary knowledge view and secondary knowledge view. The so-called self-knowledge point of view refers to the first-person narrative, and the characters tell their own stories. The sub-knowledge viewpoint is told by an "I" who is related to the protagonist of the story, and the protagonist's story is included in the evaluation system of others. The relationship between the narrator and the protagonist, from the perspective of being known by others, is more distant. The Life of Disliked Pine Nuts adopts two secondary viewpoints, from the perspective of Pine Nuts' younger brother and nephew. "The presentation and value judgment of the story no longer have unquestionable authoritative characteristics."

Matsuko's younger brother is a key figure in the play, and he witnessed the development track of his sister's life. The formal narration of the film begins with the appearance of the younger brother. He found his son A Sheng in a foreign land, told him that one of his sisters was found dead in the park, and asked A Sheng to get his belongings. "What a useless sister", "In any case, this is a boring life". At the beginning of the film, the audience was moved with a point of view, which aroused their curiosity and prompted them to spy out what happened to the protagonist. My brother appeared five times, and every time he appeared, he was full of insoluble resentment. From his account, we know that soon after Matsuko left home, his father died suddenly and his sister was unhappy for a long time. "You ruined the whole family", "That guy broke up with you when he was alive" and "That guy ... ran away from home, became a bathing girl, and later killed someone".

From the younger brother's point of view, we rarely see the attachment between the flesh and blood, and hatred is difficult to resolve. There are three sins in his description of pine nuts: first, he ran away from home willfully, and the whole family was torn apart. Secondly, being a bath dancer regardless of shame is not only personal degradation, but also detrimental to family face. Third, this is also the most serious point. Pine nuts have killed people This is not a simple family ethics issue, but has risen to the level of social legal norms. Layers of sins are superimposed, which makes pine nuts argue endlessly. Without exploring the inside, pine nuts will undoubtedly be accused by thousands of people.

My nephew, Sheng, met his aunt Matsuko only once in his childhood, and he has no memory. When his father told him to pack his belongings, he didn't know this man existed. He explored his aunt's life experience with different eyes: Matsuko's life tragedy had already buried factors in her childhood, and her father's excessively inclined love had a deformed influence on her later choice of values. As an adult, Matsuko was originally a school teacher. He was dismissed because of misunderstanding at work, and at the same time he was scolded by his father unreasonably and ran away from home. After being abandoned by her family, she fell into a whirlpool of pain: she lived with five men, and every time she gave her heart, she never got a response from the other side. She used to be a girl who took a bath, in order to support a man who occasionally cared about herself, although in most cases she just beat her up; She killed someone on impulse, so she couldn't bear to be betrayed emotionally and cheated economically. She waited for the wrong person to get out of prison, waited for six years for the day of reunion, and waited for the end of being rudely abandoned.

Yang Long is a key figure in Matsuko's life, the criminal who has been waiting for six years. He ruined Matsuko's life twice. Pine nuts lost their decent and stable jobs for the first time and stepped into the social struggle. The second time, when Matsuko pinned all his hopes on their family life, he rejected Matsuko again, leaving her completely desperate. Yang Long likes pine nuts, but he is afraid. Pine nut's love is too dazzling, which he can't afford because of his lack of care since childhood. In order to protect pine nuts, he chose to escape. "Love for pine nuts is God's love", and Yang Long understood what God's love was under the guidance of the priest. "People's hearts are fragile and it is impossible to pray for those who should be hated. However, with God's help, forgiving unforgivable people and loving them is God's love. Therefore, in Yang Long's eyes, the image of pine nuts has completed the transformation from sinner to God.

After knowing all the stories, A Sheng rebelled against his father's views and came up with his own judgment standard for menstruation: "Just like my menstruation, it makes people laugh, makes people feel refreshed and loves, even if I become scarred, lonely, unprofessional and even stupid." I think this god is worthy of belief. "A Sheng's point of view is the recognition of Yang Long: Aunt is no longer an unforgivable sinner, but a god who sacrifices himself to make others happy.

Second, the connotation analysis of pine nut image:

Although the dual perspectives of younger brother and nephew run counter to the definition of pine nut quality, there is no doubt about some personality characteristics of pine nut: she used to be an innocent and happy girl, eager to create happiness. So why can't such girls recognize the reality, make mistakes repeatedly, or even be "stupid"?

The lack of fatherly love is the internal source of Matsuko's life tragedy. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, according to Freud, people will form a complex in childhood because of the repression of Libido's impulse, and boys will inevitably go through an Oedipus stage in the process of growing up, and subconsciously have the desire to kill their father and marry their mother. And all the girls have "Erica complex", that is, they love their father and envy their mother, killing their mother and marrying their father. If this complex is not solved reasonably, it will lead to psychological disorder or mental illness. The film weakens the image of Matsuko's mother, not mentioning her spiritual communication with family members, but repeatedly mentioning her father's core position in the family. Like all ordinary girls, pine nuts are eager for their father's care, but his father gave almost all his care to his sick daughter Kumei, regardless of pine nuts' feelings. When my father came home from work, Matsuko greeted him excitedly, but my father silently left his briefcase and teased another daughter with the only gift. My father's eyes have always only seen Kumi, and he is also thinking about how good it would be if Kumi were dressed like this. Pine nuts accidentally found that making faces could make his father laugh, so he used it to please his father from an early age until his father called her "Stop it" in adulthood. Pine nuts can't untie his father's knot about his nine sisters. Too inclined love makes pine nuts' inner desires unsatisfied. So her life has been looking for, looking for a love that belongs to her and comes from men.

Beauvoir put forward a famous point in the book The Second Sex: "Women are not born, but made." This book reveals how men use their dominant position in social life to transform women in the historical process of human social development, forcing women to be in a subordinate position and keep it for a long time. In traditional Japanese society, men are in an absolute dominant position. Although Japan has absorbed the ideas of equality between men and women in Europe and America in modern society, women are still in a passive position as a whole. In the film, pine nuts always look for self-identity in the male evaluation system, but they don't realize the significance of looking for individual independence. She has been in contact with five men. In every relationship, she is exactly the same man-centered, providing them with sex, providing them with money, being their partner when they are lonely, and coping with constant injuries with perseverance and no regrets. This mentality of catering to men is due to women's recognition of their weak ideas. In Regret for the Past, Lu Xun discussed the theme of love and marriage, which also involved thinking about women's living conditions. When Zijun shouted "I am myself", it was not really independent. True independence should be to live with men without accessories and always adhere to the spirit of freedom.

Schopenhauer divides tragedies into three types: one is caused by "the characters in a certain play are unusual and vicious", such as The Merchant of Venice. Secondly, due to "blind fate" and accidental mistakes, the most typical one is King Oedipus. Third, "the roles of the characters in the play are different, which is caused by their relationship." 352. The tragedy of A Dream of Red Mansions belongs to this category. Compared with Matsuko's life track, most of her tragedies are attributed to the first kind of factors. The tragedy of pine nuts is largely influenced by other people's factors. None of the five men who completely degraded her life really loved her. Instead, it dragged Matsuko's life into a deep quagmire. The first man who lived together was a writer with mental disorder, and his crazy suicidal behavior dealt a heavy blow to Matsuko's mind. The second man is the competitor of the last writer, and he only wants to get the satisfaction of abnormal victory through the possession of pine nuts. The third man betrayed Matsuko emotionally and cheated her of her money, which made Matsuko commit murder on impulse after knowing the truth. When Matsuko finally met an honest barber and thought he could start a down-to-earth family life, he was arrested and imprisoned. The barber is the only good man among the five men, but he stayed with Matsuko just to fill the void of widowhood, and finally got married and had children early before Matsuko came back. Yang Long, the last cohabitant, was also the one who hurt pine nuts the most. He made young pine nuts unemployed and middle-aged pine nuts lovelorn-the last Mars on a cold night.

Third, the influence of narrative style on the theme of the film:

Nick Brown discussed the viewpoint of film narration in the article "Audience in Text: Rhetoric Suitable for Mountain", and he put forward the term "Audience in Text" [4]. The so-called "audience in the text" means that the audience is in two places at the same time in the process of watching movies. On the one hand, they can experience the image of the characters in the play from the perspective of the lens; On the other hand, shift to the perspective of the watched character, imagine yourself as the watched character, and try to figure out the inner feelings of the character. How to define the image of pine nuts, the audience is confused in two views, and morality and law are inseparable dilemmas. However, from the perspective of human nature, pine nuts also have another side worthy of admiration and sympathy. Maybe after watching the movie, the audience can't agree with any of these views, and they don't admit that Matsuko is a sinner and that she can be called a god.

In the history of literature, moral dilemma has always been a difficult problem. In Chekhov's short story Longing for Sleep, the exhausted little nurse Valka strangled her master's baby. Because the child in her charge kept crying, she was not only beaten for it, but also couldn't sleep well all day. Tess, a beautiful and kind girl in Hardy's novel Tess of the D 'Urbervilles, just wants to live with the person she loves, but she is destroyed by the wicked and has to kill someone. Anna karenine pursues love. Morally speaking, she should stick to her marriage, but she went to have an affair. There is no doubt that there is a dilemma between moral law and human nature in the evaluation of characters.

As far as the film is concerned, it is undoubtedly a bitter and sad story. Songzi pursued love almost obsequiously all his life, but he was repeatedly rejected and hurt. But the highlight that the director tries to play is not the suffering of life and the crisis of women's survival, but the goodness and beauty of human nature, which is the hope that people will never give up. Matsuko is a selfless giver: she should hate the subversive of life, but every time she knows whether it is a fire pit or a purgatory, she tries to forgive and fantasize about influencing each other with her whole-hearted love, and only a little response is enough to satisfy her. Desperate pine nuts once thought about suicide, but each time they gave up in a strong desire to survive: the first suicide was to turn around and grab the window handle when jumping off a building, the second was that the river was too shallow, so forget it, and the third time they swallowed a mouthful of medicine and spit it out. In order to forget the past misfortune and start a new life, pine nuts stubbornly began to sing and wait again. "Only those who struggle for freedom and survival every day have the right to enjoy both", "I would like to see such a group of people living next to free people in a free land". Seeing the hard life of pine nuts, won't the audience send out Faustian feelings?

In the bitter story, the director inserts warm and happy paragraphs from time to time, which dilutes the tragic color of the film. In the picture shooting, exaggerated colors and artificial scenery similar to Disney animation are used. Every time pine nuts are beaten to the point of collapse, the pictures behind them are romantic and warm to the extreme. When Matsuko witnessed the death of the first cohabiting man and thought her life was over, the picture switched to the song and dance performance, exaggerated movements and cheerful lyrics brought by Matsuko, and she ushered in the rebirth of life. Matsuko's Life in Prison explains the theme of born to love with a music video. The ending of pine nuts' death is also quite fairy tale. She kept the most beautiful years and charming smile. The man she loves hummed a sweet song, colorful clouds filled the sky like a dream, ladders were erected and pine nuts were introduced to heaven. When watching a movie, the audience is easily attracted by the pictures and music and pulled away from the sadness of the story.

The revelation of the characters' psychology also reduces the sense of distance to a certain extent, and makes the audience have a psychological sense of identity with the characters' behavior. The film adopts the narrative mode of knowing separately, and Matsuko's language and actions represent her psychological characteristics at that time. As a child, Matsuko "always tries to make his father look back at me and hope that he likes me" and "strives to be his daughter", which leads to her life development always following the trajectory set by her father, attending the school that her father wants her to attend and choosing the career that her father wants her to do. After every relationship fails, pine nuts always ask "why, why". After eight years in prison, Matsuko never thought of giving up, and there was no trace of confusion in his eyes. She said "live for love" and "only for one person, only for you, I will persist in living". Knowing that it is a wrong relationship, or sticking to it. "As long as I am with this person, hell is good, and I will follow him. This is my happiness. " My good friend Zecun Hui said that the pine nuts that said this sentence were beautiful. Embracing suffering with love, the audience was moved more than criticized after understanding the inner mirror image of pine nuts.

The theme of the film has been sublimated in the post-modern shooting technique. "The world kissed me with pain, but I responded with a song." The audience's hearts shone with warm sunshine and even shed tears of sympathy for pine nuts. In his theoretical work "Golden Rose", the former Soviet literary master Kang Bao Si Tosky wrote: "Our creation aims to make the beauty of the earth, make people struggle for happiness, joy and freedom, and make the broad mind and rational power of human beings overcome the darkness and shine like the sunset." 13 The film The Life of Abandoned Pine Nuts completed the transformation of values. Whether it's a comedy with tears in her face or a tragedy with a smile, the film undoubtedly brings us a baptism of truth, goodness and beauty.