I Lost My Body
It seems to me that few films tell their stories through the body's immediate sensations. More often, a thought, an external change, or an emotion drives the plot forward. Bodily sensations seem less narrative: they are full of montage, subjectivity, spontaneity, and association. Within a story, they are always fleeting and do not propel the action; yet for the individual, they have the most lasting and profound effects.
Aftersun
There is an intriguing connection and tension between the father and daughter: a father concealing his depression and his remarkably well-behaved daughter. The camerawork and sound are delicate, with breathing deliberately amplified and many shots of the characters underwater or in mirrors. These seem to suggest a kind of fragmentation and distance. The world from a child's perspective, an early understanding of love, a longing to grow up.
The film suddenly brought me back to that strange childhood state of not quite understanding so many things. Before our inner world and values have 'matured,' the world we see and experience is always covered by a thin veil. As that veil gradually becomes more transparent, our perception of the world begins to change.
Blow-Up
What is real? What we see ultimately forms only impressions: a combination of an object seen from different angles. If what photography captures is not necessarily real, what about painting, memory, and what we witness with our own eyes? If memory can distort reality, is what we see now necessarily real? And what is the present? Haven't our present sensations already been processed by the brain and our subjective consciousness?
The World of Love
I don't know why films about trauma always leave me feeling inexplicably distressed. By telling the story of trauma through individual experience, this film breaks away from a broader, overarching narrative. Trauma is no longer portrayed in extreme, terrible, or generalized terms; instead, we see its subtle, clinging presence. Trauma never simply sits on the surface, nor does it consist of consequences that can be listed. It is made up of feelings and thoughts that are difficult to escape.
Political language such as 'causing lifelong harm' overlooks an individual's efforts, but is it really wrong? Perhaps the question is more about how we should understand and define harm, and how we can acknowledge the possibility of individuals striving to escape trauma and grow from it.
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Lovely, absurd, lonely, real. Like a more delicate version of American Beauty, with many small, inventive details: the goldfish in the car, flirting with glue, the collapse after a fantasy.
Through the internet and a lack of ordinary relationships, everyone forms strange, misguided connections with the world: teenage girls who seek confidence through being looked at; a child who treats the adult world as an opportunity to communicate with strangers; a little girl who, influenced by her mother, has been collecting a dowry from an early age; a self-contradictory contemporary art curator. Misguided social conditioning makes everything seem so absurd. Compared with these supporting characters, the two protagonists, though equally lonely, seem relatively the most normal.
The Wedding Banquet
There is a subtle tension between the individual, the couple, the family, and society. Through deception and performance, they try to resolve and balance the contradictions among these four. Everyone knows the truth, yet everyone is enveloped in a larger social structure. At the same time, this is a 'voluntary' form of being enveloped. This willingness comes from love, from time, and from entrenched patterns of understanding.