Alzheimer's diseaseFar more than forgetting
65-year-old daughter is lying in the bathtub, and the 85-year-old mother is sitting on a short wooden chair, patiently helping her wash her body. My daughter held a bubble machine in her hand and blew out the bubbles. The colorful bubbles fell and burst. After a while, she smiled at her mother.
This is the movie "Mom! 》. The story takes place in an intellectual family composed of a mother and daughter. Not long ago, her daughter Feng Jizhen (played by Xi Meijuan) took care of her mother Jiang Yuzhi (played by Wu Yanshu), accompanied her to the hospital for injections and examinations, took care of her three meals a day, and read poems for her before going to bed. Changes occur due to a sudden onset of disease.
"Mom! 》 shows how the 85-year-old mother and daughter face loss at the end of their lives after her single 65-year-old daughter Feng Jizhen was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and how they cured each other.
"Mom! 》Movie Stills Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee
A complex character
After getting sick, Feng Jizhen's first thing to face is the mother-daughter relationship that has a switch, and her mother changes from being cared for to being cared for. But the disease has caused the mother and daughter to return to their own position, and the mother becomes the mother and the daughter becomes the daughter.
But their lives were restarted.
Mom needs to teach her daughter to write her name again, watch over her taking medicine, and worry that she will be lost. The condition of Alzheimer's disease is far from being forgotten.
She carefully observed her daughter's various diseases after she fell ill, and tolerated her out of control and forgetfulness from her daughter's perspective to the greatest extent. The daughter gradually showed changes such as hallucination, incontinence, forgetting her mother, losing control of her behavior, and anxiety and irritability.
Disease has become a carrier, and the mother and daughter look back on the past, sort out their emotions and even face death through this proposition. There is a detail in the movie
. Feng Jizhen answers physics questions to students on a university campus where she has worked for decades, but as she talks, she forgot her thoughts and the location of the school exit, and she has to follow her mother.
Xi Meijuan's expression was very delicate when dealing with this scene. She not only performed the embarrassment of realizing that she was powerless, but also felt unwilling to rely on others.
It is touching that Alzheimer's disease makes a person's mental state unstable, and university professor Feng Jizhen is not spared. Occasionally recovered in forgetting, repeatedly pulled and alternated, and over time, he eventually lost his self-awareness completely.
This is not an easy role. Although the movie is called "Mom! 》, but the daughter is the promoter of the plot and the creation point of conflicts. Yuan Dengyu, former chief editor of " Movie World ", told China News Weekly : "The difficulty in interpreting Feng Jizhen's role is to show her different emotional levels before and after. She is calm and rational in the early stage, fragile and helpless in the middle stage, and crazy in the later stage. It is difficult to truly play a patient with Alzheimer's disease well, and Xi Meijuan's performance is convincing."
Two years ago, when receiving the invitation from director Yang Lina, Xi Meijuan hesitated whether to play such a difficult role at the age of 67. Taking on the role means restarting herself again.
When China News Weekly proposed the question of "Why are you still worried after acting for so many years and having a representative work?", Xi Meijuan replied: "If I act in a way that goes with the flow and past experience, it is a simple repetition. A role like this is a simple repetition is absolutely impossible to complete. This is also the most complicated role I have received, and I need to restart myself."
Feng Jizhen is not just a patient with Alzheimer's disease. Her father's death and absence are her heart knots and trauma. The superposition of physiological diseases and heart diseases makes her destined to be a complex person.
movie uses a vague way to show that the father's death occurred in a special era. From Feng Jizhen's confession to her mother, the audience learned that her father had been criticized and had not been understood by her daughter, and Feng Jizhen regretted it for the rest of her life.
Feng Jizhen quietly remembers the past picture by the lake/photo provided by the interviewee
Because of her father, Feng Jizhen has always lived a restrained and even hard life, volunteering, framing her girl on bail, and her relationship with her mother is also relatively cold. Deep inside her, this is a long period of self-judgment and self-salvation.
But after getting sick, the image of my father as a child continued to emerge.
She woke up at night and looked at her father who was not real in the living room. Then she spoke to her father while taking out a raw egg from the kitchen and trying to hand it to him, but accidentally threw the egg at the door of her mother's bedroom.
There are not many movies focusing on the theme of middle-aged and elderly women suffering from Alzheimer's disease. If Julian Moore starring The focus of " Still Alice " is how a patient fights the cruelty of losing his self-awareness and learns to get along with his strange self and the world every day. Then "Mom! 》 uses intimate relationships as the bond, and observes the inner world of Alzheimer's patients again and again, but ultimately points to an unsolvable ending.
Disease changes more than intimate relationships
"Mom! 》 is a film written and directed by Yang Lina. It is the third part of the "Women's Trilogy". The first two are "Spring Dreams", " Spring Tide ", and "Mom! 》The original name of the movie is "Spring Song". The three movies focus on the pain and happiness of the three different stages of youth, middle age and old age.
Yang Lina talked about the opportunity to make this movie in an interview: "After determining the theme of the elderly, I will focus on a mother and daughter like 85 and 65 years old. Such a pair of screen images are quite rare. With Alzheimer's disease, no matter now and in the future, according to our various medical surveys and statistics, it will be a very severe test for our country, society and family. At the same time, it has a very terrible feature, which is the disappearance of memory. What does memory mean? If you don't remember anything, do we count as here?"
The just-passed September 21 is the 29th World Alzheimer's Day . Data released by the National Health Commission shows that there are 10 million Alzheimer's patients in my country aged 60 and above.
The common population of Alzheimer's disease is those over 70 years old. When the condition worsens, patients often get disconnected from their family or society and gradually lose physical functions, eventually leading to death.
cognitive impairment diseases physician of the Neurology Center of Beijing Tiantan Hospital Zhang Wei is "Mom! 》, medical consultant, said: "This disease is related to aging. The brain will undergo degenerative changes, and anxiety and depression will also increase. Some people may completely lose control in 3 or 5 years."
Xi Meijuan is no stranger to Alzheimer's disease. Before making this movie, she read related books from home and abroad one after another to learn about the cases of the disease. Among them, what she is most concerned about is what kind of changes it will bring to the family in the face of high-demand nursing work?
Feng Jizhen also looked through books related to Alzheimer's disease after being diagnosed. Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee
She remembers that a friend of her often told her about her mother's symptoms. Her mother's memory has declined year by year, and her physical functions have also undergone irreversible changes. Sometimes family members are not considerate enough to their mothers and even quarrel. Even the closest family members will have gaps due to the stress of illness.
What is even more cruel is that physical loss of control will cause patients to experience a collapse of dignity and thus lose themselves. At a screening, Xi Meijuan heard the audience share a story. Before retirement, the father of the bank president cried during his first urinary incontinence. Such a scene also appeared in the movie
. Director Yang Lina originally wanted to show urinary incontinence in a more obscure way, that is, the camera is aimed at the urine stains and footprints on the ground, and her daughter ran into the bathroom and stopped coming out. Xi Meijuan suggested taking another photo to show her daughter’s reaction after urinary incontinence.
So, there is the picture presented in the final version of the movie.My mother took a tissue to wipe her daughter's footprints, but she saw the urine stains mixed with the rain. She looked up and saw that her daughter came out of the bathroom, with a large wet pants. Xi Meijuan was delicate and accurate when performing this scene. She stood in the corner, lowered her head, wiped her tears with her sleeves, and cried out like a child who had made a mistake. Mom walked over and hugged her, and she cried even harder.
"Feng Ji is really a university professor, and she is usually a person who respects and wants to save face. At this time, her body and spirit are struggling until her first urination. She is completely helpless and helpless and can only rely on her mother, just like a helpless girl." Xi Meijuan told China News Weekly.
Although "Mom! 》 focuses on Alzheimer's disease patients, but the movie also reflects how singles without offspring face the problem of pension. In the face of the trend of social aging, how to place the elderly also means how we can place ourselves in the future. And love is still the core force in facing this problem.
indispensable empathy
Xi Meijuan has a contradictory temperament. She has a weak sense of age, but she also has the indifference and elegance of seeing all the sails.
director Yang Lina once said in an interview: "Teacher Xi Meijuan is an actor who is 'not like an actor'. Because she is too simple, not flashy, and is also very beautiful. They (Xi Meijuan and Wu Yanshu, the actor who plays her mother) have a kind of bookish atmosphere, which is the image of an old intellectual mother and daughter I want to create in the film."
Before making this movie, Xi Meijuan began to pay attention to the group of patients with Alzheimer's disease. But she has not specifically observed or interviewed patients with Alzheimer's disease. Because she thinks this is a very sensitive topic, she doesn't want to talk to patients in detail with utilitarian purposes. She naturally showed impatience and empathy towards this type of people.
Empathy appears more than once in the experience of the character Xi Meijuan portrayed.
In 1992, she starred in Lu Changqin, the wife of Jiang Zhuying, an associate researcher at the Changchun Institute of Optics and Machinery, who dedicated her life to the optical career in the movie " Jiang Zhuying ". Xi Meijuan remembers that the crew invited Lu Changqin. Lu Changqin talked about her husband's experience, but as she spoke, she said this: "I actually don't want to say anything at all. I am trying to cooperate with your work."
Xi Meijuan still remembers that at Lu Changqin's house, there was no photo of Jiang Zhuying, and the photos were put away and placed in the box, because I would be sad when I saw it. These details changed Xi Meijuan's stereotype of the heroes and their families, and she realized that such retelling was cruel to the parties involved.
While resting, she sat next to Lu Changqin and asked, "How did you face the life after Jiang Jiang's death? How did you raise your children in these ten years?" She remembered Lu Changqin saying this: "For ten years, all reporters came to me to ask about Jiang Jiang, and no one had ever asked me what I had experienced."
This made Xi Meijuan realize that the essence of life is not conceptual imagination. She wants to put the character Lu Changqin back to her original position and experience her real joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness. There are thousands of ways to get close to a character, but it is the most sincere path to get closer to the character's heart through thinking from others.
We cannot prevent the occurrence of disease, but we can give patients enough attention and care. Understanding and paying attention to the disease is an important step.
recently released the "Survey Report on the Current Situation of Alzheimer's Disease in China" shows that the total awareness rate of Alzheimer's Disease in my country exceeds 90%, but the active medical treatment rate is only more than 10%.
and "Mom! 》What I want to do is that it is seen by more people. In the Weibo topic #Handl1, Alzheimer's disease process shown by Movie Mom#, most of the discussions about topics are that people are prone to misunderstandings about the disease, and Alzheimer's disease is far more simple than forgetting.
in the movie "Mom! 》In the end, the daughter and mother walked towards the high tide sea, dancing and embracing each other by the sea.Water is a recurring image in the movie. The surface of water is calm, but in fact it has endless vitality. It can cover the past and carry the present.
Everything has come to the end, and it seems to have returned to the beginning of life. The gait of the daughter when she walked towards her mother was like a toddler when she was a child. The line "Mom is the sea, I am a drop of water, Dad is a whale who can't swim" is a metaphor for the mother and daughter to be like a drop of water, blending into the arms of the mother of the sea, which also contains a hope of rebirth.
A viewer with Alzheimer's disease at home said this was one of the details that touched him the most. When Alzheimer's disease degrades an elderly person's intelligence and words and deeds to the level of a child, should we still use the code of conduct in the adult world to demand her? This shot presents her action logic from the perspective of the sick person, and her mother is cooperating with her, full of emotion and strength.
Author: Yin Wanni
Source: China News Weekly
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