A LOVE NOCTURNE
--My Unconventional Review of 2016
Being in love can be torturing; and even your marriage that comes sooner or later is no salvation. Marriage, for quite sometime to my understanding, is your atonement at its best.
Those who claim they love selflessly are surreal. So I thought, being a Chinese man unmarried.
Out of my great curiosity, I watched Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. But for the first time, I could not even finish. Don’t get me wrong. It is fantastic. So powerful and so beautiful at every second: polished to its best yet breathtakingly attractive. You will have to watch it even for enlightenment of choosing the right colors for you.
But Nocturnal Animals is simply lustful with words and visual hints. The gloomy setting of a Los Angeles affluent couple no longer loving each other or at least desiring so, and the sunny West Texas murders of a wife and a teen daughter. Nearly every scene of the movie is filled with the most interruptive nature of love and relationship: the awkward moment that we are fueled with desires yet speaking love.
The abandoned ex-husband authored a devastating homicide fiction dedicated to his ex-wife; by visualizing the fiction, the ex-wife was deeply touched and even set up a dinner date with wonderful details only proved to be the conspiracy of the ex-husband. The theme, revealed by one of the modern art on site, was revenge. But feeling somewhat blue, I was wondering, how even the revenge of a stone-cold marriage is also filled with clear lustfulness but not love? Not even hatred?
Only the second time that I was watching, I suspected that the stress on the movie title, is not “nocturnal,” but“animals.” We can only be animals to be so wild and ferocious even to our own kind. Still, most unfortunately, we are only human. Therefore, we are hopelessly unforgiving and resentful. We just do not forget.
At the moment, I feel like that I have figured out some of the most puzzling global events of the year of 2016 but I need not to waste any space to explain. The fact that at certain points we always get mixed up by our lust and love reveals the understated fact that marriage is to tame us from becoming even wilder and more dangerous. We ain’t looking for families and miniatures of our own selves, we are looking for leash.
Ever wondered why sunsets are more colorful and astonishing than middays? Because the sun is done with its working hours, it is on its edge, it is about to be out of its boundary, it is running off, and its charms all coming back. When we are out of our boundaries, we love and we hurt.
To put a mark on it, Tom Ford’s second movie is easily the winner compared to Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn story. Both based on original fictions, Ford’s lecture on human nature is effective and effortless.
And I envy those who are older but stronger and more powerful both mindfully and emotionally. I suppose I know their secrets. I also suppose that I should get mine.
To the love that leashes us.
