Yi jia zhi zhu

I really enjoyed watching it. It's about a self-sacrificing woman. She always considers all her family members more important than herself and still, it seems, she's worried if she's not sacrificing enough. The film depicts how a woman's wrecking herself with sacrifice is considered very normal to everyone and even to the woman herself.

This poor, selfless woman is the perfect mother and wife to a very undeserving family. Watching her good-for-nothing self-important husband in the movie's opening scene is very aggravating. And it only gets worse from there, as we watch everybody demand things from her and her relenting, and agreeing to help. The daughter making her pay for the tablet that is being delivered, the son asking her to pay for his flights, the husband demanding all sorts of things and giving nothing in return.

But it gets very messy in the last half hour with these long dream-like sequences, some of which upturn everything that appeared to have happened by then, especially as regards her financial decisions, that I became annoyed. It had been a mildly annoying watch up till then due to this woman being trampled on by the people she loves the most, but those sequences were too much all of a sudden. Had they been dispersed throughout the movie, like the ones of her mother before, maybe they would have worked better. But all lumped together I started to wonder what was the reality and what was imagination. Apart from the interactions with her very mobile mother, of course. That one is very clear. What did her daughter do in the end about her business? What happened with her former pupil turned investor? Cause before that half hour things had started to take a tragic turn. And although I liked the lesson that she taught her husband, I still couldn't shake the bad taste of that montage. Or the scenes just before that, which shifted the mood dramatically. And even without that it still would not have made it to four starts for me because it's too diluted, or not strong enough. It certainly could have been tighter.

To the age of retirement, has done the "daughter", "teacher", "mother", "wife" ...... She has worked all her life for family and friends, but she has never been herself. She took responsibility for everyone around her, but only ignored herself. The final point of inspiration to resolve all conflicts is the "mother" lying in the hospital room with amnesia.