When I watched "Love Letter" a few years ago, I always loved the part about the young boy Fujii Itsuki and the young girl Fujii Itsuki, and I felt that that kind of pure middle-school-age crush was indeed a very beautiful card to be inserted in the picture book of youth. Unfortunately, such a passage in Love Letter is not long enough for me to enjoy it. So I was looking forward to Shunji Iwai's movie, which is supposedly dedicated to middle school students, thinking that 146 minutes of youthful storytelling would not be enough!
However, the middle school years in the movie are very different from those of Fujii Itsuki. It seems that Yuichi, Hoshino and Fujii Itsuki don't live under the same blue sky. Their lives are not as pure as snow as in "Love Letter" or as bright as the green wheat field at the beginning of "Lily Chou-Chou-Chou," and their youth is gray.
While a lush green wheat field first caught my eye, a white boy's downcast, speechless confusion actually hinted to me that this was a movie about youthful confusion more than youthful joy. What I didn't expect, however, was that this was such a brutal tale of youth, and that Shunji Iwai would continue the noirish feel he had in Swallowtail Butterfly. If watching Takeshi Kitano's Bad Boys' Sky made me think that there was some hope for these bad boys, this movie even made me think: youth is so desperate, how can we possibly grow up? I'm literally in a bit of a trance about how I came from such difficult youthful years.
Lonely teenage souls just cry in Iwai Shunji's movie: Yuichi and Hoshino were originally very close friends, and both of them are lonely despite having families. Yuichi and his mother, stepfather and stepfather brought his brother to live together,, lack of communication, lack of love. Hoshino, on the other hand, has a young and beautiful mother, who apparently doesn't give Hoshino enough love. So two lonely hearts come together. In fact, brotherhood is also a very beautiful memory of our high school years, and having a good friend that we can talk about everything is also a rare gain in high school life, and in a sense it is no less valuable than the beauty of a crush. However, Iwai Shunji lets the main character ruin it all.
The movie begins with Yuichi and Hoshino and a few other teenagers stealing bags and CDs, already telling us that they are "bad kids". They are willing to rob people on the street in order to fulfill their desire to travel to Okinawa for the summer. If this was all there was to youth, I might have thought that youth could be turned back. However the next huge change arose. These teenagers went to Okinawa for fun and were having a great time, yet just as the trip was coming to an end, they witnessed a bizarre death. And this death changes Hoshino's character and destroys the friendship between the two. (This is the only part of the movie that stood out to me; this turn of events changes the main characters so much that I'm afraid it can only be explained in terms of individual idiosyncrasies.) And so the skies turn even grayer for the rest of the film, and the real brutality of youth begins. Hoshino begins to become more and more savage and overbearing. He insults skinny boys with impunity, forces girls in his class to engage in prostitution, and rapes Kuno, the prettiest girl in his class. Yuichi has not left Hoshino when he does this, and perhaps it has not touched Yuichi's interests yet. However, when Hoshino destroys Yuichi's favorite CD of Lily Chou-Chou, beats Yuichi up, and even forces him to masturbate in front of everyone, it becomes impossible for Yuichi to hold back any longer.
Yuichi's last piece of sky collapses but because of the virtual internet. When he no longer had love in his life, and even his only friendship, with Hoshino, was gone with the wind, he found the internet. A lot of BBS text is shown with subtitles and sound, which takes up quite a large part of the movie, and this is something in the movie that I can't stand. The same theme of these BBS*** is Lily Chou-Chou, a somewhat mysterious singer. Yuichi meets "Green Cat", who also likes Lily Chou-Chou very much, on the Internet under the ID of a non-Leah, and he thinks he has found love again. However, at the entrance of Lily Chou-Chou's live concert, where they had arranged to meet, he saw Hoshino holding the green apple used as a contact symbol, with "Green Cat" written on it.......
Hoshino teased Yuichi one last time, and Yuichi responded with a knife. As the warm afternoon sun shone on Yuichi's body, everything seemed like a dream. Stealing, robbing, raping, killing, such youth, is the teenage life of a bad boy? The movie was renamed "Cardamom Years" when it was screened at the Shanghai International Film Festival, and I think the name is a bit ironic. If such years are as delicate as cardamom, is it only cruel youth like "Jihad" ("Battle Royale")?
Shunji Iwai once again silenced me with his soothing pace, subtle images, and flamboyant music, only this time I was thinking: If bad kids are like Yuichi and Hoshino, without love and without sky, where can they fly to even if they sprout wings?
Respondent: Extra Senior Member - Child 1st Class 3-31 22:11
Worldly adults cannot understand the reason why adolescent children are willing to commit themselves to a song, a VCD, a glowing star even if they are broken to pieces. It is because they are afraid of a greater nothingness, and before the darkness engulfs them, they commit themselves to the "Ether" that represents the order of the universe.
Whenever I watch a good movie, I often feel a kind of trance-like emptiness, a kind of doubt about my true state of life, a kind of questioning of the value of my own pursuits. Or maybe that's what really fascinates me about movies, that they keep me awake in some way, and while it's hard to say whether this wakefulness brings me more pleasure or pain, I think I'd like to be so awake that I don't fall into an unconscious numbness.
The Collapse of the Ego
The pain of youth often comes from being overly sensitive or even beyond the pale in terms of enlightenment. Hoshino is definitely a smart and brilliant kid, but that's not at all equal to being carefree, and he's probably under far more pressure than the average kid. When a person grows up as a child and is educated by parents and society until he or she finally develops his or her own view of the world as a teenager, he or she is often confronted with a collapse of confidence in the adult world at the very edge of that growth. The process and the result varies from person to person, and an intelligent and sensitive child may go to extremes because of the lack of answers to his struggles. After Hoshino experienced the breakup of his family and the impermanence of life, a certain string that had been holding up the entire spiritual world inside his body in the past, after enduring too much tension, snapped at a sudden moment, without warning. This completely destroys Hoshino's normal personality, destroying Yuuichi's CD allowing him to masturbate in front of everyone, forcing a girl in his class into prostitution, instructing his henchmen to rape Kuno all of these kinds of almost perverted and horrific behaviors are his ignorant counterattacks after he loses his faith in this world. His inner pain is greater than any other, and you only have to see his cries of despair in the desolate wilderness as he exhausts himself to no avail to feel that despair.
Hoshino's sudden change naturally affected Yuichi, who almost idolized Hoshino, who was so much better than himself. So Hoshino's breakdown also broke Yuichi at the same time, only his breakdown was internal, silent, and slow, which also meant a stronger outburst was brewing. Yuichi is a kind boy, but has a very introverted personality resulting in powerless cowardice. That's why he tries to help a girl forced into prostitution get a boyfriend instead of stepping up to the plate himself, and he cries out in pain when Kuno is being torn apart and raped instead of stepping up to stop it, but like watching Junior in Rolling Street, we know it won't end there, and too long of a silence will eventually lead to a shocking outburst.
The absence of the adult world
The concept of the adult world is very blurred in this movie, and no longer has the same undeniable influence on minors as it once did. The female characters are still relatively positive and kind, they just can't do anything about their children's upbringing. Hoshino's mother is young and beautiful, but it's clear that she can only take care of Hoshino in his life and has no access to his inner world. When Yuichi's academic performance drops drastically, the young female teacher can only say, "As a teacher, I can only encourage you to do better," but can't help solve any substantive problems. Perhaps the problem is psychological rather than substantive.
As for the role of the father, he is completely absent. Yuichi followed his mother to the new family when she remarried, and even her last name was changed, which can't be said to have no effect on him. And Hoshino's family doesn't see a father either, only a vague mention from someone's mouth that their family was broken up when their factory was burned down by fire, and that the father may have left the family, or maybe couldn't handle the failure and committed suicide is also a possibility. This can't help but remind me of what Brad Pitt says to Edward Norton while sitting in the bathtub in Fight Club, "We were all raised by women, will finding another woman solve the problem?" It is evident that the problem of growing up exists in human society as a whole. As for the two middle-aged men appearing in the film, they are both moralistic, accepting female high school students to aid sex lewd image, such adults you let the children how to trust?
What does Lily Chou-Chou stand for?
Lily Week may be imaginary or real, and the Ether is the virtual real world. Lily Chou-Chou is the support that Yuichi and the others found in the Ether, just a support, because there is nothing else to support. The reality of the "Ether" is a strong irony of the real world, where the non-existent world becomes the reality that the teenagers desperately try to defend, while the world that exists is nothing but hypocrisy and despair. The teenagers are only sensitive to all this because they have not yet had time to be assimilated into the adult world, and their resistance or abandonment ultimately ends up hurting themselves. The more fervent their trust and pursuit of Lily Chou-Chou, the deeper their disappointment in the real world becomes, and it can be said that it is the disappointment in the real world that causes them to fervently pursue the image of the unreal to the mythological, and so this is destined to be a tragedy. a tragedy.
What is Lily Chou-Chou? It is the bright green rice paddies under the endless blue sky, with Yuichi listening to his hopes for the world from the waist-high rice paddies; it is the red kite flying freely in the boundless sky, with the young girl saying to the kite, "I want to fly to the sky"; it is the piano music flowing out of Kuno's hands under the hazy, bright light, echoing in his ears for a long time; and it is the young man's first and most beautiful wish for the whole world.
Good movies often bring us more sadness than happiness, because sadness is a longer and more penetrating force. I can't forget the bright blue sky, the quiet rice paddies, and even more so, the blood that flowed from the knife that plunged into the green apple. Perhaps there was a slight thrill in our hearts when Hoshino fell into the crowd, but the emotion that immediately took precedence was resentment; no teenager should be forced to leave this world in such an extreme way. The adult world never heeded their cries.
Who really killed the boy? Movies can only raise questions not answer or solve problems, and it is always ourselves who can do that.