Millennium director

Chapter 162 "If you love me, please kill me" - "Love"

"What does our ideal love look like?"

In the movie palace, Wu Yuan stood in front of the screen with a microphone.

He spoke eloquently in front of more than a thousand moviegoers and film critics.

"In our ancient Chinese saying, perfect love should be holding hands and growing old together, that is, staying together happily until old age."

"That sounds wonderful, doesn't it?"

"However, these poems praising love only tell us the beauty of growing old together, but they don't tell us what love looks like after we grow old."

"Believe me, reality is definitely not as beautiful as poetry."

"This "Love" tells a story about what happens when love grows old."

After briefly introducing the movie, Wu Yuan did not talk too much about other irrelevant topics. After bowing to all the guests, he walked back to the seats in the first row and sat down.

The lights in the movie palace went down and the screen came on.

The familiar dragon logo and the logo of the light and shadow era appeared one after another, and the movie started directly.

The screen dimmed and then lit up again, revealing an apartment door.

With a "duang" sound, the door of the apartment was suddenly knocked open from the outside.

A group of police and fire personnel walked in through the door.

A pungent and unpleasant smell made them frown and couldn't help but cover their noses.

The leading plainclothes detective rushed into the bedroom of the apartment, only to see an old man wearing a decent skirt, lying quietly on the double bed with his hands on his abdomen.

It was obvious that the old man had passed away.

Her skin has long since shriveled and lost its luster, and the flowers surrounding her have shriveled up and withered.

Just when the audience was wondering about the development of the story, the scene on the screen changed and the story returned to a year ago.

The old man, who just a moment ago had been lying on the bed with a corpse, was greeting her husband at the entrance of the theater.

The old man's name is Caihua, a name with a sense of age.

Her husband didn't have his full name, but others called him Lao Zhang.

After Caihua picked up Lao Zhang, the two walked on the street and got on the bus.

During their ordinary conversation, the audience learned that Caihua and Lao Zhang were a pair of music teachers. They had just finished attending a concert held by their students in Beijing and were still discussing the performance on the bus.

Over eighty years old, they had similar interests, lived a well-off life, and spent a relatively long life together.

Although they are no longer as passionate about love as they were when they were young, their ordinary old age is still exciting.

Lao Zhang will still praise his wife for being as beautiful as she was when she was young when he comes home.

Caihua will also prepare fried river clams for Lao Zhang, which he still never gets tired of eating all his life.

It was quite a heart-warming love story that lasted until old age, which made many audience members smile, looking forward to themselves and their significant other. When they grow old, they can be like Caihua and Lao Zhang, plain but happy.

However, happiness is definitely not the main theme of this movie.

After a seemingly happy day, everything started to go wrong the next day.

During breakfast, one second Caihua was chatting normally with Lao Zhang, but the next second her eyes were dull and she was completely frozen. No matter how Lao Zhang shouted or wiped her face with a wet towel, there was no response.

The frightened Lao Zhang immediately found his mobile phone and called the hospital.

But when he changed his clothes and returned to the kitchen to take Aihua to see the doctor, Aihua returned to normal, as if nothing happened just now.

Lao Zhang was very angry and thought Caihua was making fun of him. However, when Lao Zhang questioned her, Caihua looked blank. She didn't even realize that her collar was soaked with tea.

Lao Zhang did not dare to be careless. He knew that at their age, death would take them away at any time.

At Lao Zhang's insistence, Caihua followed him to the hospital.

The film ends here suddenly.

Wu Yuan did not continue to focus on medical treatment, diagnosis, crying, entering the operating room, and various straightforward and sensational routines like most movies.

It was just a scene change. Several workers entered Lao Zhang and Caihua's home and replaced them with a bed that could be folded up and down.

Lao Zhang used a wheelchair to push Caihua back home.

Their daughter, who is also engaged in music education, also rushed home.

During the conversation between the father and his daughter sitting face to face in the living room, the audience knew what happened between this short shot.

Caihua was diagnosed with carotid artery embolism. The operation had a 95% chance of success, but she happened to encounter the 5% failure and ended up with hemiplegia.

Caihua, who has lived a decent life all her life, is really unable to accept her current hemiplegia.

Lao Zhang was also a little embarrassed, not knowing how to face Caihua, who had always been arrogant, but now needed to be fed even to drink water.

"I don't want to go to the hospital anymore, it's not a good place." Caihua's tone was low, but extremely firm.

Lao Zhang, who wanted to retort, could only sigh.

At this point, Lao Zhang became Caihua's exclusive caregiver.

He worked tirelessly to help Caihua switch between the wheelchair and the bed, help her wipe her body with a towel, help her wash her hair, use the toilet, change her underwear, and read her bedtime reading.

In order to take care of Caihua every step of the way, Lao Zhang could only hand over the daily shopping at home to his friend who lived next door.

However, this also made Lao Zhang unknowingly trapped in this small apartment with Caihua.

The little happiness and joy in their lives have been pulled away by the pain and torture of life until they are completely gone.

Caihua gradually changed from that elegant and generous little old lady to an irritable, impulsive, and very emotionally unstable patient.

Caihua has always been concerned about being treated as a patient by others, and she tried her best to forget this.

But countless voices from the outside world reminded her all the time that she was a patient, a poor person who had lost most of her mobility.

One day, after attending a friend's funeral, Lao Zhang returned home and found his wife slumped in front of the open window sill, her expression revealing panic and grievance.

Lao Zhang could tell what happened at a glance, but he didn't say anything. He just helped his wife back to the wheelchair.

He told Caihua some interesting things that happened at the funeral, hoping that she would be happy.

But Caihua kept muttering with dull eyes, "Let me die."

"There is no reason to live anymore."

"My health is only getting worse."

"Let's end this with dignity while the time is still good."

But Lao Zhang didn't think so. He retorted excitedly. He didn't feel tortured. He had no objection to taking care of Caihua. Instead, he felt it was a happy thing.

If he was sick, wouldn't Caihua take care of him like this with all kinds of hardships?

But in Caihua's eyes, she didn't want to die to relieve Lao Zhang's burden, but because she wanted to be freed.

Ayaka, who has always been elegant and decent, really can't accept herself now that she has almost lost the ability to move.

Living in such humiliation was more tormenting to her than death.

Just seeing Lao Zhang's loving eyes, she understood Lao Zhang's thoughts. For Lao Zhang's sake, she thought in her heart, "Then try hard to live well."

She struggled to practice walking, struggled to meet the students who came to visit her, and struggled to face the trivial matters of life.

During this period, her daughter and granddaughter also came to visit her, and her daughter even had many quarrels with Lao Zhang because of her condition.

But besides being a bystander, her daughter never really helped the elderly couple.

Not even as good as her teenage granddaughter, who at least brings her some of her best pastries when she comes to visit Ayaka.

For Lao Zhang, his life was not easy either.

Not only did he need to always pay attention to Caihua's behavior and always be prepared to take care of Caihua who had difficulty moving, but as he repeated this day after day, he also began to become a little impatient with Caihua's attitude.

Love is gradually worn away in the suffering of birth, old age, illness and death.

Sadness and despair rushed towards Lao Zhang like a tide. Caihua's capricious emotions and the desperate future that could be seen at the end made Lao Zhang feel suffocated.

He seemed to be locked in this small apartment, and the depressive life made him breathless.

In the screening hall, as the story came to this point, more than a thousand viewers fell silent.

When the beautiful coat of love is stripped off, what is always left is a messy and cruel reality.

Most movies about love tell the beautiful side of love, which is romantic, aesthetic, and romantic.

But what does real love look like?

When a marriage comes to an end, it is not just about living together and supporting each other. It also requires understanding and cherishing each other after the body has decayed, and the courage to accompany the other person to death.

There is no filial son at the bedside of a chronic illness.

Death is not scary, it is just a momentary thing.

What really tortures people is the horror of Caihua's inability to take care of herself. The torture of life will be in her body, torturing her day after day, torturing the people who love her, making people unable to live or die.

Many guests have already guessed how the movie will end.

Just as they guessed.

Caihua's condition continued to worsen, and she was already delirious at one point, with only a few minutes to one or two hours of wakefulness a day.

After experiencing all this, Caihua was already heartbroken and no longer wanted to live like this in the world.

But without the ability to move, she couldn't even decide her own death.

She told Lao Zhang what she wanted by tightening her lips, refusing to eat, and even spitting out the water Lao Zhang fed him.

But Lao Zhang didn't want his wife who had been with him for most of his life to die like this. He was so angry that when Caihua refused to feed her again, he angrily slapped her.

This slap hit Caihua's face, but it also hit Lao Zhang's heart.

Is it love for my wife to survive like this?

He collapsed weakly in front of Caihua's window, crying in his arms.

"I know that one day this will all end."

"But before that, I can neither share your pain nor end your pain."

"I can only feed you, drink water, and change diapers day after day."

"But making your life worse than death, is this love?"

All the audience in the screening hall were silent.

Not only in love, but also in family relationships, many people have faced such a choice.

In the end, should we let our loved ones have tubes all over their bodies and live a life worse than death, even if they only live a few more days, or should we face death calmly?

Is it true that those who choose the former do it out of "love"?

Is this love really what the person who is lying dying on the hospital bed, who is worse than dead, wants?

No one knows the answer.

On the big screen, one bright morning, Lao Zhang told Caihua a story from his childhood. After calming her restless emotions, he reached out and picked up the pillow next to him and covered her face.

Caihua let out a groan in surprise, and her body struggled subconsciously, but she resisted not shouting and swallowed the groan.

Lao Zhang's entire upper body was pressed on the pillow, crying bitterly.

Rather than letting your lover live in such pain and torture in this world, it is better to comply with her wishes and let her simply go to another world.

Lao Zhang, who has been with Caihua all his life, made this painful decision.

When all the struggles subsided, he dressed neatly as usual, went out and bought a bouquet of flowers for his lover and came back.

An elegant woman must be elegant even when she dies.

Lao Zhang put her into her favorite purple dress and neatly laid beautiful flowers around Caihua.

After doing all this, he walked into the study with a smile, wrote a suicide note seriously, took a whole bottle of sleeping pills, and lay on the folding bed in the study with a smile on his face.

He didn't know how long had passed until he heard the sound of dishes being washed outside. He stood up from the crib and staggered out.

Caihua was busy washing dishes in the kitchen as usual. She turned back and smiled at Lao Zhang: "Quickly put on your shoes, we should go out."

As usual, Lao Zhang obediently walked to the entrance and put on his shoes, helped Caihua put on her coat, and then put on her own coat. She followed Caihua happily and went out together.

Vaguely, you can hear Lao Zhang's cheerful laughter: "You go first, and I will follow soon."

Yes, no matter where he goes, Lao Zhang can keep up with Caihua every time.

This time, of course, is no exception.

The movie ends here.

The lights in the Cinema Palace came on, followed by overwhelming applause and faint sobs.

"I love this story, it's so true."

"It is too real and too heavy, just like those things that we have never dared to face, but we have to face them."

"It's still what Daniel is best at. Minimalist narrative, a straight-up perspective, and a pseudo-documentary style, but it makes people feel real and powerless."

"Ageing, death, illness, loneliness, those things that we least want to experience in life, those hidden pains that we know very well but keep silent about, were put on the screen by Daniel Wu, and they became even crueler."

"No one can escape aging and death. We will all face it head-on. Isn't life crueler than movies?"

Film critics quickly wrote down their first thoughts after watching the movie in the notebooks they carried with them.

There is no doubt that this is another very "Wu Yuan style" movie, minimalist, real and cruel.

But it's definitely a good movie, isn't it?

"A very good movie." Gilles Jacob stepped forward and hugged Wu Yuan forcefully. "Especially for us old people, it revealed the thing that we least have the courage to face. .”

"die."

"The shooting technique is like a documentary, and the simple, down-to-earth, calm and powerful style doesn't look like it was shot by a young man in his early twenties."

"But this is your unique film aesthetic."

Compared with Gilles Jacob's full of praise, the other members of the jury were concise and to the point. Some even just nodded to Wu Yuan and left politely.

The festival has a rule that judges cannot publicly discuss any film shortlisted for the main competition until all awards are announced.

However, the live program and the film critics from all over the world gathered in Cannes can speak freely.

"Love" received good reviews from the media the night after it premiered in Cannes.

The next day, the program was updated. With a comprehensive score of 3.25, "Love" temporarily ranked first among all the main competition units that have been scored so far.

Now, it was Wu Yuan's turn to be anxious.

The venue magazine gave such a high score, so the judges wouldn't really want to go against the venue magazine, right?