What are we looking for in life as a human being?
Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2020 12:34 am
The two movies Mona Lisa Smile and And the Spring Comes depict the relationship between dream and reality. However, due to the differences of era and cultural backgrounds, the characters made different choices when facing contradictions and future.
The movie Mona Lisa Smile describes a warm story which Julia Roberts stars as a professor at a women’s college. Roberts played the role of Kathrine in this movie, who is a feminist teacher full of ideals and enthusiasm. She finds that the college's stereotypes have reached an intolerable level. While Kathrine boldly teaches the girls that they can break traditions of marriage and brought a new atmosphere to the conservative campus. And the Spring Comes tells us a another story about the pursuit of dream. Wang Tsai-ling is born with a beautiful voice, but she is ugly. She has been chasing the dream of being an artist in Beijing for many years. Wang fails to find a bosom friend in career and life. Although she has connections with men in the small town, who are Zhou Yu, Huang Sibao and Hu Jinquan, she doesn’t find her love story. At this time, Wang helps a cancer patient Gao Beibei to realize her singing dream. Gao confesses that her illness is false. Finally, Wang surrenders to her life and accepts the fate.
In the two movies, we can also find the cultural differences between China and the United States under ideology. Although they all have the main theme of making people’s dreams into reality, the American movie pays more attention to individualism while the Chinese movie focuses on the life of nobodies in a specific environment. The artistic connotation of two movies are embodied in different social forms and cultural consciousness. Despite distinct cultures, there are historical and ideological differences in the worlds of each film that lead to different character reactions to their own situations.
Back to the era background, in 1953 women fought for the legal right to follow their dreams when the second-wave feminist movement rose gradually around the United States. However, some educational institutions represented by Wellesley College still supported the notion that women should have marriage and give up career goals despite excellent results in their schools. The highlight of the movie Mona Lisa Smile is that it is not a simple feminist propaganda but a way to convey an attitude to the audience through the growth of several women: The real independent liberation of women does not lie in their social status, their unique attitudes and different ways of life, but in their potential to choose their own life without being driven by the outside world.
There are different plots in the movie which manifest the long distance between women’s dream and reality during that period. For example, Julia Styles as Joan who was intelligent and eventually had a chance to go to Yale University to study further. But she was also torn by the stuffy notion that she must be a housewife and raise a family. Kathrine was bizarre teacher who played an unusually unlikable character. There was no denying that she was perfect as the inspiring professor sitting with the students in a casual posture by their desks while sharing special moments with them. On the other hand, Mona Lisa smile is very good at using plots to make hints and comparisons. In the beginning of the film, Katherine moved out of the school dormitory because she couldn’t use the electric iron, which suggests that she was not a regular person. School nurses were forced to leave suggests the fate of people who don't comply with school regulations. When it turns to the shooting techniques, Mona Lisa Smile shows the style of oil painting. The protagonists dressed in the retro clothes of the 1950s to perform the scene. There are also some color matching and composition elements in the movie.
In the 1980s and 1990s, China was opening to the outside. Thus this country was inevitably impacted by the western culture as the economy recovered. For the first time, all kinds of cultural thoughts and arts forms flooded into China. In the movie And the Spring Comes, there were two shots showing the charm of art to normal people in that period. At the beginning of the movie, there was heavy traffic on the street. The mass seemed to be unconscious. They did not care about the beautiful songs on the radio. The daily necessities were the top priority in their minds. In the murky sea, Zhou Yu stopped and appreciated the opera carefully. He woke up and was attracted by singing, which proved that he was longing for art in heart. Another is that the KTV waiter was influenced by Wang’s singing and wanted to follow her to Beijing. I believe that everyone has a dream of art in his heart, just like a seed. When the sun, air, water and soil conditions are sufficient, the seed of artistic dream will break out. And the Spring Comes use a unique photography. On the train, Wang Tsai-ling was in the middle of the crowd alone, which describes her own depressed mood and tired body. This is also a kind of contrast. Wang was indulging in the joys of the music while other passengers around were asleep. The shot expresses Wang’s extraordinary character and creates an atmosphere of repression in such dim light and sleepy environment.
In fact, what Mona Lisa Smile tells us is not that women should be completely free from the shackles of family and all the stereotypes. All we have to do is to be ourselves and do what we want to do. Choosing to be a housewife or a career woman totally depends on their own minds. And the Spring Comes has no ups and downs and even no particularly touching plot. It only contains people’s pursuit of their artistic dreams despite the cruel reality. Their life actually represents all people who spare no effort to pursue dreams. To sum up, both of these movies are worth watching more than once to figure out their inner connotations.
The movie Mona Lisa Smile describes a warm story which Julia Roberts stars as a professor at a women’s college. Roberts played the role of Kathrine in this movie, who is a feminist teacher full of ideals and enthusiasm. She finds that the college's stereotypes have reached an intolerable level. While Kathrine boldly teaches the girls that they can break traditions of marriage and brought a new atmosphere to the conservative campus. And the Spring Comes tells us a another story about the pursuit of dream. Wang Tsai-ling is born with a beautiful voice, but she is ugly. She has been chasing the dream of being an artist in Beijing for many years. Wang fails to find a bosom friend in career and life. Although she has connections with men in the small town, who are Zhou Yu, Huang Sibao and Hu Jinquan, she doesn’t find her love story. At this time, Wang helps a cancer patient Gao Beibei to realize her singing dream. Gao confesses that her illness is false. Finally, Wang surrenders to her life and accepts the fate.
In the two movies, we can also find the cultural differences between China and the United States under ideology. Although they all have the main theme of making people’s dreams into reality, the American movie pays more attention to individualism while the Chinese movie focuses on the life of nobodies in a specific environment. The artistic connotation of two movies are embodied in different social forms and cultural consciousness. Despite distinct cultures, there are historical and ideological differences in the worlds of each film that lead to different character reactions to their own situations.
Back to the era background, in 1953 women fought for the legal right to follow their dreams when the second-wave feminist movement rose gradually around the United States. However, some educational institutions represented by Wellesley College still supported the notion that women should have marriage and give up career goals despite excellent results in their schools. The highlight of the movie Mona Lisa Smile is that it is not a simple feminist propaganda but a way to convey an attitude to the audience through the growth of several women: The real independent liberation of women does not lie in their social status, their unique attitudes and different ways of life, but in their potential to choose their own life without being driven by the outside world.
There are different plots in the movie which manifest the long distance between women’s dream and reality during that period. For example, Julia Styles as Joan who was intelligent and eventually had a chance to go to Yale University to study further. But she was also torn by the stuffy notion that she must be a housewife and raise a family. Kathrine was bizarre teacher who played an unusually unlikable character. There was no denying that she was perfect as the inspiring professor sitting with the students in a casual posture by their desks while sharing special moments with them. On the other hand, Mona Lisa smile is very good at using plots to make hints and comparisons. In the beginning of the film, Katherine moved out of the school dormitory because she couldn’t use the electric iron, which suggests that she was not a regular person. School nurses were forced to leave suggests the fate of people who don't comply with school regulations. When it turns to the shooting techniques, Mona Lisa Smile shows the style of oil painting. The protagonists dressed in the retro clothes of the 1950s to perform the scene. There are also some color matching and composition elements in the movie.
In the 1980s and 1990s, China was opening to the outside. Thus this country was inevitably impacted by the western culture as the economy recovered. For the first time, all kinds of cultural thoughts and arts forms flooded into China. In the movie And the Spring Comes, there were two shots showing the charm of art to normal people in that period. At the beginning of the movie, there was heavy traffic on the street. The mass seemed to be unconscious. They did not care about the beautiful songs on the radio. The daily necessities were the top priority in their minds. In the murky sea, Zhou Yu stopped and appreciated the opera carefully. He woke up and was attracted by singing, which proved that he was longing for art in heart. Another is that the KTV waiter was influenced by Wang’s singing and wanted to follow her to Beijing. I believe that everyone has a dream of art in his heart, just like a seed. When the sun, air, water and soil conditions are sufficient, the seed of artistic dream will break out. And the Spring Comes use a unique photography. On the train, Wang Tsai-ling was in the middle of the crowd alone, which describes her own depressed mood and tired body. This is also a kind of contrast. Wang was indulging in the joys of the music while other passengers around were asleep. The shot expresses Wang’s extraordinary character and creates an atmosphere of repression in such dim light and sleepy environment.
In fact, what Mona Lisa Smile tells us is not that women should be completely free from the shackles of family and all the stereotypes. All we have to do is to be ourselves and do what we want to do. Choosing to be a housewife or a career woman totally depends on their own minds. And the Spring Comes has no ups and downs and even no particularly touching plot. It only contains people’s pursuit of their artistic dreams despite the cruel reality. Their life actually represents all people who spare no effort to pursue dreams. To sum up, both of these movies are worth watching more than once to figure out their inner connotations.
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