Chapter 162 "If You Love Me, Please Kill Me" "Love"

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 an 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-to-do 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, go to the toilet, change her underwear, and read her bedtime reading.

In order to take care of Caihua, Lao Zhang could only deliver the daily purchases to his friend who lived next door.

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

The little happiness and joy in their lives were also pulled and worn away by the pain and torture of life.

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

Caihua has always been very 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, Lao Zhang returned home after attending a friend's funeral, only to find his wife sitting in front of the open window sill, her expression revealing panic and grievance.

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

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

But Caihua kept murmuring with lifeless eyes, "Let me die"

"There is no reason to live anymore."

"My physical condition will only get worse."

"While it is still good now, let's end it all decently."

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

If he was sick, wouldn't Caihua take care of him so hard?

But in Caihua's eyes, she wanted to die not to reduce Lao Zhang's burden, but to get relief for herself.

Caihua, who has always been elegant and decent, really couldn't accept herself now who almost lost her ability to move.

Living in such humiliation tortured her more than death.

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

She insisted on practicing walking, insisted on receiving students who came to visit her, and insisted on facing the trivialities of life.

During this period, her daughter and granddaughter also came to visit her. The daughter even quarreled with Lao Zhang many times because of her illness.

But her daughter did not really help the elderly couple except for constantly pointing fingers like a bystander.

She was even worse than her teenage granddaughter. At least when the granddaughter came to visit Caihua, she would bring her some of her best cakes.

For Lao Zhang, his life was not easy.

Not only did he need to pay attention to Caihua's behavior at all times, but he also had to be prepared to take care of Caihua, who was inconvenient to move. In this repetition day after day, he began to be a little impatient with Caihua.

Love was gradually worn away in the torment of birth, aging, illness and death.

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

He was like being locked in this small apartment, and the repressed life made him breathless.

In the screening room, as the story was shown here, more than a thousand viewers fell silent.

When the beautiful outer layer of love is stripped off, what is left is always a mess of cruel reality.

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

But what is real love like?

When a marriage comes to an end, it is not about living together and supporting each other, but also about knowing and cherishing each other after the decay of the flesh, and the courage to accompany each other to death.

There is no filial son at the bedside of a long-term illness.

Death is not terrible, death is just a matter of a moment.

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 those who love her, making people want to live but not die.

Many guests have guessed what the ending of this movie will be.

It is just as they guessed.

Caihua's condition is still getting worse and worse. At one point, she was unconscious and only had a few minutes to one or two hours of sobriety a day.

After experiencing all this, Caihua has become dead in her heart and no longer wants to live like this.

But she lost her ability to move, and she couldn't even decide her own death.

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

But Lao Zhang didn't want his wife, who had accompanied him for most of his life, to die like this. He was angry and slapped her in anger when Caihua refused to feed him again.

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

Is it love for his wife to live like this?

He collapsed in front of Caihua's window with powerlessness, holding his head and crying.

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

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

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

"But is this love to make you live a life worse than death?"

All the audience in the theater were silent.

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

Is it better to let your loved one live with tubes all over his body, living a life worse than death, even if he can only live a few more days, or to face death calmly?

Is the former really out of "love"?

Is this love really what the person who is lying on the dying bed and living a life worse than death wants?

No one knows the answer.

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

Caihua groaned in surprise, and her body struggled subconsciously, but she resisted the urge to shout and swallowed the groan back.

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

Rather than letting his lover live in such pain and torture in the world, it is better to follow her wishes and let her go to another world.

Lao Zhang, who has been with Caihua for a lifetime, 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.

An elegant woman should be elegant even when she dies.

Lao Zhang changed her favorite purple dress for her and laid the beautiful flowers neatly beside 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.

I don’t know how long it took until he heard the sound of washing dishes outside, stood up from the small bed, and walked out with a staggering step.

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

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

Faintly, Lao Zhang's cheerful laughter can be heard: "You go first, I will follow."

Yes, no matter where they go, Lao Zhang can always keep up with Caihua.

This time, of course, is no exception.

The movie ends here.

The lights in the movie palace are turned on, followed by overwhelming applause and faint sobbing.

"I like this story, it's so real."

"It's so real and so heavy, just like those things we have never dared to face, but have to face."

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

"Aging, death, illness, loneliness, those things we least want to experience in life, those hidden pains that we know but keep silent about, were brought to the screen by Daniel Wu, and the cruelty has become even worse."

"No one can escape aging and death, we will all face it, isn't life more cruel than movies?"

The film critics quickly wrote down their first thoughts after watching the movie in their portable notebooks.

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

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

"It's a great movie." Gilles Jacob came forward and hugged Wu Yuan tightly, "Especially for us old people, it reveals the thing we have the least courage to face."

"Death."

"The shooting technique is like a documentary, the simple, plain, steady and powerful style is simply not like a young man in his early twenties."

"But this is your unique film aesthetics."

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

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

However, the on-site program book and the film critics from all over the world gathered in Cannes can speak freely.

The night after the premiere of "Love" in Cannes, it received good reviews from the media.

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

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

The program brochure gave such a high score, would the judges really go against the program brochure?