Father Trapped In Time: Seeing The World From The Perspective Of Alzheimer'S Disease Patients

Wen / Liu Ying

"I feel like a tree, losing all its branches and leaves." Anthony in the nursing home said this, lying helpless like a child in the nurse's arms crying. He is the old man who suffers from Alzheimer's disease in the film father trapped in time, trapped between memory and reality, unable to truly identify people and things around him. There are many movies about Alzheimer's disease. The most famous one is Michael harneck's tender and sorrowful "love", a loving couple who have to face the choice of life and death because of the disease. Another way out of the novel Father in time is that the perspective of the story is completely from patients, observing and recognizing their surroundings with their eyes. The narrative logic of the film also follows a non-linear way, leading the audience into a brain world full of repetition, dislocation and blank of Alzheimer's disease patients.

Father trapped in time

The director of the film is the original author of the play of the same name, Florian Zeller. Hailed by the guardian as "the most exciting playwright of our time," he first put the story on the stage in 2012, winning acclaim in the west end of London and Broadway in New York. The release of this film version can be described as "making the best use of everything" in a script. The brilliance of the film version is that it fully ferments the tension of the play itself, and through the scene scheduling, it is more dexterous to show different space and time through the characters' appearance, entry, and camera movement. Anthony, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, is an old man with distinct personality. He is humorous and charming, but he will be merciless and hurt people around him unkindly. He is old and his memory is gradually unreliable, but he always refuses to admit his old age and insists on living alone. However, her daughter Anna, who wants to settle in Paris with her boyfriend, is unable to take care of her father frequently. However, she had to take her father to her home as a transition, and finally sent him to the nursing home, so that she could have someone to take care of his living after a long journey.

The above seemingly clear logical clue is completely broken in the film. The whole film is from the perspective of his father Anthony, and each paragraph is a patchwork of his mind's cognition of the world around him. There are memories from the past, the game between father and daughter that is in progress, and even his pure imagination. The director mercilessly disrupts our arrangement of the story line through various ways, and often changes the scene in different ways in unexpected places, leaving the audience as lost as a father. In the folds of time, Anna, the eldest daughter, has a different look. Sometimes she has short, dry hair, and sometimes combs her horsetail; on the fireplace at home, oil paintings from her younger daughter appear and sometimes disappear; the nurse workers who are painstakingly invited often have different faces. Not to mention Paris, which is constantly mentioned by her daughter. In her father's memory, she made up her mind to go to this "place where she can't speak English". At the next moment, she suddenly changed her mind and chose to stay in London to take care of her family.

These contradictory fragments are full of doubts at first. But with the development of the plot, the truth gradually surfaced. The director buries many clues in the story, which are like straw to help the audience drowning in the narrative vortex to find a place to grasp. The three spaces in the film: father's home, Anna's home and nursing home, although the layout is the same (or similar in Anthony's memory), their colors and decorative styles are totally different: one is classical, one is modern, the other is more cramped and full of rules and regulations. The watch that my father has been looking for since the beginning of the film, as an important clue, sometimes appears on his wrist, sometimes mysteriously disappears, and becomes a keepsake for the audience to judge the authenticity of the scene.

The protagonist Anthony is played by Anthony Hopkins, an old British drama. A name inside and outside the play also enhances the sense of substitution of the characters. The old man did not live up to expectations and completed a wonderful performance, becoming the most powerful competitor for this year's Best Actor Oscar. Although the film has a strong sense of suspense, "father in time" is still tender and touching. It is no longer just a simple display of the chaos of Alzheimer's disease and the trouble it causes to others, but it really leads the audience into the hearts of patients and presents their childlike soft side on the screen.

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