“Open Heart World” has attracted attention since it was launched. It was nominated for the main competition unit of the Venice Film Festival, won the Queer Lion Award, and was even named the female version of “Brokeback Mountain”.
The film is adapted from the short story of the same name by American writer Jim Shepard. The background of the film was set in Upstate New York in 1856. Abigail and her husband Dia bought a farm to live in an uninhabited land.
With the arrival of Tully and her husband Finney, Abigail and Tully met, thus unfolding a poignant love story.
The storyline of “Opening the Heart World” is based on Abigail’s diary as narrative clues, which has a strong literary character and at the same time a very personal characteristic.
The narration of private emotions and the space in which the film is located: a barren land that has not been transformed by human civilization, forms a strong contrast, and its emotions are both rare and valuable, but also depressing and there is nowhere to vent.
In this kind of space, you are in a primitive farming life dominated by men. The value of women and the functionality of words are naturally insignificant. Men and the natural environment together form a cage that will bring the protagonist Abigail and the Tali circle together. Forbidden, the same-sex relationship between the two is complicated. It is not as simple as love. The new life and the fall coexist, and finally dissipate between the mountains and the woods.
The film continues to create the barren environment and the sense of powerlessness of human beings. This incoordination between manpower and nature causes the disintegration of secular family relations, and then turns to the inner search and the resistance and questioning of the status of men and women in the existing society.
In Abigail and Finney’s family, there is no love at all. What Finney values about Abigail is that she can help herself better complete the work of the farm.
When their daughter died, the only pillar supporting the so-called family collapsed, and the functionality of religion began to lose. The nature of their relationship was more like an alliance of farm workers.
Therefore, the family combination of Abigail and Finney is more secular and pursues the maximization of material benefits. With the death of her daughter, the secular feelings and the influence of religion disappear, and Abigail and Finney are left with each other’s survival.
As a pessimist, Finney felt more compassion for Abigail from his own pain. Whether he wanted to have a baby again or finally helped Abigail find Tali, it was all out of compassion, not Love.
So Abigail rejected Finney again, maintaining a sense of psychological distance.
Even though Finney needed Abigail, he was still influenced by the concept of men and women at the time, and he unconsciously regarded women as vassals. Abigail bought the skirt for the last time, and wanted to appear in his account book, not only to prove his own worth, but also to dress up to see the love of his heart, Tali, and try to have his own love. Freedom of choice.
It’s just that this kind of resistance is too restrained, but it also conforms to the characteristics of the film and the time and space environment.
The female version of Brokeback Mountain?
The family combination of Tali and her husband, Daya, is completely religious. Compared with Abigail, Tully’s yearning for freedom appears more externalized and enthusiastic.
This is an inevitable contradiction with the husband who keeps the “Old Testament”. In such a religious family, or the religious miniature of the society at the time, it is tragic that a woman like Tali must not be accepted.
The film does not explain what caused Tali’s death in the end, and the disease diphtheria is obviously not the argument that the director wants to make. For Tali, the death of the spirit is far more painful than the death of the body. His husband, Dai Yake, tried to form a kind of brainwashing mental control over Tali in accordance with the religious creed.
Through the death of Tully, the film rose from her husband Dia to the imprisonment and cruelty of women by society and religion at that time. It also turned the feelings between Tully and Abigail into a kind of accusation, as the film’s line said: It may only be in the drama. Here, people can face the cage with a positive attitude.
The female version of Brokeback Mountain?
In this environment and family, the emotions Abigail and Tully exude from each other are more like a kind of confidant comfort, and the two connected souls complain to each other in a barren and depressed world.
From the initial meeting of eyes, to the progressive kiss goodbye, to the poems and jokes under the woods, to the final parting of life and death. Step by step into each other’s heart, they are the pioneers of each other’s feelings on the barren land.
However, this kind of spiritual satisfaction is useless for the survival of reality, and it is even despised by the male-dominated social structure at the time. The feelings of the two are full of restraint and dreamlike like the style of the film. Aesthetic colors. For both of them, death is the best relief from this stagnant world.
Therefore, when facing Tali’s corpse that had turned green, the feelings could erupt in such an instant, and there was a flashback erotic scene in the whole film. The fusion of the body, the liberation of the spirit, the eternal separation of life and death, all the backlog of emotions in the early stage, as the rapid switching of the camera shocks the audience. Magnificent but fleeting.
The female version of Brokeback Mountain?
This poignant love naturally cannot get the footnotes made by the male historical writers at the time. Just like the fire that Abigail encountered on the way to buy a dress, the raging fire trapped the girl in the house, and the surrounding male characters stood still. It also blocked the female characters who stepped forward to rescue them, and eventually their lives were swallowed by flames, and they became nothing more than chats.
When Abigail repeated the boring and boring life of the old days, he had the hallucinations to see his daughter and Tully. It was like finding a way of self-salvation in the happy days of the past. This kind of pathological redemption made Abby Gale’s tragic nature far exceeds Tully to a certain extent. The living people are still enduring unspeakable grief, and the love they seek is even more unspeakable.
You can neither live nor die.
Abigail and Tully finally used tragedy to dilute the tragedy. The so-called poetry and romance are as heartbreaking as the blizzard in the film.
The female version of Brokeback Mountain?
The women represented by Abigail put their exploration and yearning for the world in the atlas given by their beloved, but the endless land and borders could not find a place in the soul. In the end, they could only Dreaming about the arrival of a new world, just like the last picture of the film: The world to come.
“Opening the Heart of the World” attempts to find neglected places in the past, staring at women’s spiritual pain in the patriarchal society, showing the resistance made in the closed and deserted time and space and the forgotten self-worth. It is lingering like love, but far beyond love to reach a spiritual blend that transcends the carnal desires of both sexes.
The richness of literature conveyed by the film in the form of narration and the sense of desolation shown by the images form a perfect intertextual effect, placing the inner undercurrent and outer loneliness together in front of the audience.
Under the beautiful natural scenery is a poignant love story. In front of the cage of the era that is difficult to break through, the female grief in the film is silent.
