I think,Illumination is a must seen for audiences interested in Polish film. As we know, censorship is a rather tough limitation for any artistic expression, and the oppressive situation in the socialism societies during the cold war is well known to the world. Fortunately, there is always a weird fact that the harsher a government tends to constrain its people, the more willing its people devote themselves to bounce. Unless the censors ban all kinds of art, still,there is a hope to survive the artists'minds.
Illumination has an almost unaccessible appearance, which is due to its jumpy narration style, and which is said that that was the key for the film to avoid being banned. Though we may manage to know what exactly the man is doing, we should admit that not a single moment at which we can get the insight of what he is thinking. And the editing is kinda exaggerated, to a degree that more than half of my classmates left midway the screening. The transitions dizzingly continue throughout the film, which consistently violates logic and linearity but at the same time gifts the film a sophisticated artistic sense.
If we skip all the embranchments and only focus on the main storyline, it is easy to conclude that it's a film about CHOICE, about a university student's effort to find out the meaning of life. At the admission stage, he plans to study physics, for he thinks that discipline is about the exploration of the universe. But as the study moves further, his interest is drawn to biology. Thinking physics may not be a leading subject anymore, he finds choosing the orientation is difficult. Definitely he'd rather not to focus on more detail at that stage, since he considers that it's too early. At the same time,his girlfriend got a baby so as to his breaking off from university---he has to feed those two.
Blah........
Very ironic is that, at the end of the film he steps into his thirty, following is a doctor's recommendation that he should slow down his pace at this age. He finds it hard to stand because his ambition is merely unfolded a little bit;he has so many great things to do......Unfortunately, it's the fact of life: human is just a kind of fragile creature, and any relative radical struggle would accelerate the process to death. Thinking to be meaningful makes no sense, because more often than not the one would become nihilist. Knowing the essence of existence would lead to negative emotions and consequently devastates the well-being of the one. It's too hard to surmount the meaningless and lowliness of human's existance, so as ordinary people, all should be thankful of what they got and better to enjoy their lives for no reason.
HD中字
