This is an old hermit. Society ignores him. On the other side of the horseshoe are kids looking for an adventure with tons of free time. So the uselessness on both ends becomes magnetic.
This old hermit, no one would think twice about him. He is about to die alone.
The kids come out of nowhere to bother him. It frames the kids acting as the hand of god, due to their innocence outside the mechanisms of society that abandoned him.
The style of the movie... how the shots, writing, and performance fuse. His best long takes are the ones I don't realize are long takes because I am in a trance from the storytelling.
It is the kind of film that lets you step out of your perspective and see things in a new way.
My favorite scene is when they follow him into a store and he's just... buying things. But they react like he's Big Foot or something.
Or how it's raining, and the boy runs past his mother, and she is just passed out on the sofa. Small details like this, tell a fuller criticism about the society they are in. The kids seem on their own. Their only freedom is on an ugly orange soccer field surrounded by giant buildings.
It's why it is important the context is war. It has to be destructive to send the old man into that abyss. It has to be destructive to raise these lost generations.
As always in films, it diverts to nature. The chaos, the renewal. To cut the shrubs, and master the wild. The big plot beats playing out to rain. Then it returns to disrepair.
It is making broader points about cyclical continuity, and societal karmic traumas.
We the audience are the kids, and the elder at once. We share with the kids, as the audience watching this old man. In a way that is such a gift.
It is why theater exists. The hermit, too is us, as a cautionary tale and critique at once, the ocean underneath our assumptions, that need a little nurturing to come out. That society just makes impossible with our priorities, but luckily, we have art.
