by Joseph Tsai
Speaking of death, The Sweet Hereafter by the Canadian director Atom Egoyan is a cold spell challenging the ultimate depth of humanity in a snowy, dead winter. In addition to the jump cuts, a signature of Egoyan, the delicacy of visual aesthetics and the smooth music make the film a masterpiece. In every beautiful painting-like image, Egoyan skillfully presents the fragility of humankind. It is winter 1995. Owing to a school bus accident that kills almost all the children of the town, everyone is bathed in deep despair. A lawyer, Mitchell Stephens, visits one house after another, persuading all the parents to believe that the accident is actually a conspiracy. When he cleverly provokes the mother of Bear, one of the dead, “Let me express your anger! You lost your son, and you’re feverishly angry. Don’t hide it. Leave it to me,” he knows well that how incapable people are of facing death. He tries to find an outlet for their sadness and rage; however, he still falls into the impetuous presumption of an outsider. After all, others’ wrath and sorrow are the last things one may understand. At the same time, behind Stephens’s calm, analytical tone soothing the sad parents, he has serious communication problems with his own daughter. Two years later on a plane, he bumps into Alison, an old friend of his daughter’s, and some heartaching memories emerge in their conversation. As Stephens tells his own story, a father carrying his little daughter with breathing trouble in one hand and a knife in the other ready to cut her throat to help her breathe, what we hear is a kind father’s fearful meditation. Prepared as he is to go for the last, he can never resist the anguish aroused by the approach of death. As his daughter tells him about her getting AIDS, she can no more conceal her fear and need for care. Finally, after parting with Alison at the airport, Stephens can do nothing but cry alone. Such hidden emotions are all released in the film. Egoyan cruelly points to the most vulnerable part of life, which constitutes the theme of The Sweet Hereafter. Such exposure of feelings is truly astonis hing. Bathed in the grief of the bereaved parents, the pure snow-covered land smells bloody, and the whole film is like a journey in every audience’s inhibited zone. As for the only two survivors, Nicole and Dorothy, Nicole’s final line shows her preference for an alternate outlet. “The dead children, Dorothy, and I all live in a different town now. The water gushes … everything is strange and new … people in the town live in the sweet hereafter.” Is it true that life can never be sweet? Short and painful, filled with tortured emotions, especially when we have to face death, life is nothing more than a condemnation! Is afterlife the only way to sweetness as the title indicates? Nevertheless, Egoyan eventually embraces all living people with his unique hug full of unexpected warmth. When Nicole steps to the window at the end of the film, light bursts out of darkness, and a theme song called “Courage” follows. Although Egoyan repeatedly exposes the inability of humankind and looks forward to a sweet hereafter, where everything is strange and new, surprisingly he demands us to have some courage! Ordinary as we are, we are still able to enjoy the lovely sunshine, another sort of sweet hereafter. Such are the sweet notes left for us after pondering the line between life and death. In the end, freezing white is dissolved by Egoyan’s optimistic heat. A little boy in the film once wonders about Robert Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin that Nicole reads to him: “Since the piper could drive away all the rats with his magic, why didn’t he use that power to make the adults pay?” The hole in the mountain where all the children fall is just like the crack in the lake that swallows the school bus. All these accidents result from a kind of power, which also leads us to go on with our lives filled with inevitable happiness and sorrow. Every one of us voluntarily follows the guide of desire while our fragile souls keep suffering. We know, however, there must be a sweet hereafter after we yield to death. The sweet hereafter waits for us loyally, like the sounds of a pipe that the children expect and accompany them throughout life, even into death. On this ground, Egoyan offers the living a way out. Concerning the Chinese title意外的春天which means either the accidental spring or the brighter side of the accident, everyone is able to possess his/her own spring of life before a nameless death, not accidentally at all. a
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May 2024
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