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Most of us may have had a dream like this when we were little:

One day your parents suddenly tell you,Kid, my family is actually very rich. I pretended to be an ordinary person just to test you!

But I watched it these two days.Shen Teng and Ma Li's new film "Catching Dolls", I suddenly realized that if this joke really came true, it would not be a dream at all, but aChinese horror movie.

My viewing experience was very mixed. There were several times when I was amused but also felt creepy, and when I came to my senses I was even a little disappointed with myself for laughing out loud.

You ask me, do I recommend this movie? I definitely recommend it.

It may be the funniest domestic film I have seen in the past one or two years.

But if you think about it carefully, you will findBehind the comedy lies a very East Asian and terrifying tragedy.

The title of the film "Catching Dolls" actually has a profound meaning. The most direct meaning is naturally“Education should start from childhood”。

Shen Teng plays the role of the wealthy Ma Chenggang, who discovers that he has "ruined" his eldest son. He feels that children raised in wealth are likely to grow up in the wrong direction, so he decides to raise his younger son in poverty with his wife, and replicates for him the various hardships he has experienced since childhood, in order to train the child's mind and raise a qualified successor.

In order to achieve this goal, he took his wife and a whole education team to pretend to be poor in a dilapidated house, so that the children could experience what it means to be poor."My hard-working father, my virtuous mother, my sick grandmother and I who must be strong", immersively experience the various blows of poor life.

But after all, pretending to be poor is to educate children, and no matter how hard it is, we cannot make education miserable. So you will see teachers pretending to be poor neighbors showing off their talents.Seize every opportunity in life to instill knowledge points in your children, focusing on the principle of "silently and subtly nourishing things".

For example, when the aunt downstairs is blow-drying her hair, she will read out loud the heating principle of the hair dryer as if she is taking a physics class.

For example, a Chinese teacher who pretends to be a bookstore owner will laugh while reading "How the Steel Was Tempered", and then take the initiative to share the book with the children, explaining in detail how wonderful and interesting it is.

I think the most typical and funniest thing is that children will "accidentally" meet foreigners on the way to school, and then the foreigners will ask for directions one-on-one according to the textbook content, so that the children can practice speaking and prevent them from learning "dumb English".

Many of the laughs in the film come from this absurd setting, but as long as you connect it to reality a little, it is easy to have the kind of complicated feelings I mentioned at the beginning.

Because from a child's perspective, this is really suffocating and hellish.

Everyone's life should have an open-ended answer, but this child's life has been set up by his parents as a precise calculation problem, waiting for him to work out the standard answer.

The second meaning of "Catching Dolls" has just surfaced.

The child became a doll in a claw machine, trapped to death in that fake, narrow space.The father, who was controlling the claw, was watching his growth with pride, ready to catch him in his hands when he finally grew up to the point that he was satisfied with.

The further the film goes on, the more the audience can see the lingering daddy vibe of Ma Chenggang, the man who planned all this.

He felt that his success was not due to the times or luck, but because he had suffered enough in his childhood.And he firmly believed that as long as his son went through the same hardships, he would be able to become a "successful person" like himself.

There is a detail that I find very interesting, which is that he even asked someone to play his deceased mother, just so that the child could be like him when he was a child, and have to decoct medicine for his family every morning and evening.

It is difficult to say how this kind of detail can help children in any specific way, and the reason why the father chose to replicate this detail is simply because he experienced it as a child.

Many successful middle-aged men really like to "sanctify" the small details of their lives, trying to find the inevitability of their own success in their lives.

Ma Chenggang tortures his child in the name of "love", but what is hidden behind this is actually a deep-rooted narcissism.

However, although the "daddy" of my father is suffocating, it is far from the most terrifying thing in the movie. After all, as long as you can see through this daddy vibe, you can get rid of its control.

What really made my hair stand on end was the child in the film finally deciding to rebel against his father's manipulation during the college entrance examination, and my first reaction was -

Is there anything that can’t be done later? The college entrance examination cannot be delayed.

I asked several friends who have seen the film, and each of them was like me, worrying about their children's college entrance examination during this period.

In fact, each of us has experienced the pain of being forced by our parents to attend "interest classes", the pain of having our dreams cut short, the sadness of being interfered with in making friends, the anger of having our diaries read...

What kind of Chinese kid is he if he has never been troubled by his parents!

However, when we see someone put the pursuit of freedom before completing the college entrance examination, we still so naturally integrate into the thinking that "the college entrance examination determines everything" and put ourselves in the shoes of parents who want their children to succeed.

You know, I haven’t even taken the college entrance examination, but my subconscious thinking is still like this.

All the education we received from childhood to adulthood has become the bullet shot at the center of our eyebrows. Some things have long been written into the DNA of all Chinese people.

On and off the stage, it finally became a closed loop.

I must emphasize that there is nothing wrong with the college entrance examination. Until now, it is still the most important opportunity and the fairest exam in most people's lives.

I just feel sad that even though the college entrance examination has been over for so many years, we are still so easily brought back to the fear of "thousands of troops crossing a single-plank bridge".

After watching "Catching Dolls", I felt really complicated.

I saw many people compare this movie to "The Truman Show". Of course, there are similarities in the settings, but I still laughed in my heart. Come on, the stories of white people are still much simpler than those of East Asians.

Everything in "The Truman Show" is fake. Of course, the hero's escape in the end can be very decisive, and it can be considered a happy ending.

But the most complicated and most East Asian aspect of "Catching Dolls" is that the ones who create this fictional world for the child are his real biological parents.

This mixture of truth and falsehood, and the fact that parents kidnap their children's lives in the name of love, truly touches upon many of our unspeakable pains.

I can firmly denounce Ma Chenggang in the film for not having any real love for his children and that he loves himself the most. But I know from the bottom of my heart that in real life, there are actually very few parents as extreme as him. Most parents truly love their children but want to control them at the same time.

When love and control coexist, how should we deal with it?

I don’t like the “dumpling-making” ending of the film, but I’m sorry, I can’t give a better answer.

There are too few parents who reflect on this. Even many of my friends went to see this movie with their parents, and the feedback they got from their parents in the end was not "It's not easy for this child either", but that being a parent is too difficult, and even rich families have to devote all their family's efforts to raising a child.

Let me add one more thing here. If you don’t want to have conflicts with your parents in this regard, you should either try not to watch the movie with your parents, or don’t discuss the plot after watching it, as this is not conducive to family harmony.

But if you want me to forget the hidden pains of growing up and become a child who truly obeys my parents in everything, I really can't do it.

Perhaps everyone will gradually find a way to deal with love and control in the course of their life.

I'm still working hard, let's work hard together.

(Picture from the Internet)

Author: Hai Di