超完美男人

The movie centers around a single-parent family whose members try to seek love in the relatively alienated society. All through the film does one sense the “painful pleasure”, the same way as Hemingway’s heroes share “despairing courage”. It’s painful, because single-parent families do suffer a lot, especially the lack of love and fun of a traditional nuclear family.

To go back to the film, the children, be they young or old, have to adapt themselves to new environment every time they move around. The children are innocent, but they seem to be reconciled to reality, whether they don’t want to lose friends, or have to repeatedly outperform themselves in order to be recognized. Even the mother in the film suffers tremendously. Her unhappiness and depression cast a shadow on other family members in turn. On the other hand, we can still get pleasure from watching this movie, for it does have a happy ending. The happy ending comes from the fact that all family members don’t los e faith, no matter how indifferent the world is towards them, and the “perfect man” isn’t un unreal thing.

The shining point in the film is its conceptions. E-mail, one of the means for communication in the modern world which has been condemned since its appearance, serves as a thread for the film and shows its positive aspects for interpersonal relationship. In the movie, for instance, the Father-and -Mother relationship improves thanks to the e-mail. What else can be seen is men’s inability and impotency to deal with each other, which accords with the characteristics of post-modernism or modernism. The most interesting or rather touching plot in the film is when the truth comes out, mother forgives father as expected, but mother follows suits by pretending to be somebody else behind helping her daughter find the perfect man, which is unexpected.

The title of the film has many interpretations. Firstly, on the surface, the perfect man is the one found by daughter to be exactly the man for mother. Because of his same interest with mother and his “magic power” to understand mother, he is referred to as the perfect man. Secondly, the daughter, who understands mother’s need and agony, turns out to be the perfect man. In this sense, the perfect man never exists but is made up by the “perfect” daughter. Thirdly, regardless of daughter’s efforts and all chance encounters, the perfect man in reality is the one who is around us but hasn’t been noticed by us. This notion is both encouraging and despairing, for we can be sure that there is a right man or woman for us, but it seems to be difficult to recognize him or her.

From the movie, the playwriter’s attitudes towards love is traceable as well. The contrasts between the perfect man and the colleague (baker) serve as a good example. Like knows alike. The perfect man likes doing word puzzles and watching the moon, as mother does, and he picks the right music and flowers which favor mother very much. On the contrary, despite great love for mother, the colleague doesn’t know or will never know mother’s cup of tea. In the end, the playwriter makes mother choose the perfect man over the colleague, from which we can see the perfect man in the mind of the playwriter is the one who can read one’s heart.

There are also a few minor flaws in the film. For example, the chance encounter between the daughter and the perfect man is a really made-up plot; without her classmate, they wouldn’t have met each other. Besides, such minor characters as the classmate is really minor, who isn’t fully portrayed as a human being. What’s more, the ending is too perfect to believe, with the two pairs coming together.

All in all, it’s a good film. It’s a film giving account of our life in the solitary society and offering a way out to a certain degree.