Film Review----The Crying Game (focus on the black elements)

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The Crying Game offers a rare and precious movie experience. The film is an unclassifiable original that surprises, intrigues, confounds, and delights you with its freshness, humor, and honesty from beginning to end. An unlikely kind of friendship develops between Fergus, an Irish Republican Army volunteer, and Jody, a kidnapped British soldier lured into an IRA trap by Jude, another IRA member. When the hostage-taking ends up going horribly wrong, Fergus escapes and heads to London, where he seeks out Jody’s lover, a hairdresser named Dil. Fergus adopts the name 「吉米」 and gets a job as a day laborer. He also starts seeing Dil, who knows nothing about Fergus’s IRA background. But there are some things about Dil that Fergus doesn』t know, either. The Crying Game is really two plots in one, the plot with the IRA and the plot with Dil forming separate stories. It begins as a typical civil war thriller and transmutes into an alluring and strange love story. To me, this isn't really a love story in the typical sense. This story is more about loyalty and atonement than it is about anything else.

The black elements in the film:
A. Setting and Atmosphere:
The background of the film is during the British civil war. As we can easily see that violence, death, terrorist, and assassination are the primary mood of the film. In the same way, much of The Crying Game takes place around dingy London streets that are lined with loneliness rather than paved with gold. Dil drinks margheritas in The Metro where, in what is almost a parody of a seedy England, a second-rate singer intones The White Cliffs of Dover. Sexual identity becomes part of this scenario.

B. Character:
Jody: the black British soldier is lured by Jude into an IRA trap, stays in the mind not as a military presence but as a man with savored memories, and real fears of death, which suggest his sad, gloomy, and pessimistic mood.
Jude: the typical femme fatale, the IRA woman (in the second half of the film she resembles a gangster's moll), who uses her beauty to induce Jody in the bar at the very beginning of the film. In the whole story, as we can find that Jude’s brutal treatment towards Jody and her sudden appearance in London reflect her double-crossing, unloving, mysterious and desperate characteristic.
Fergus: the IRA Solider, whose kind natural is encourages by Jody. After the British troops』 attack, he escapes form the IRA in Ireland and ends up in London. He changes his name and wants to have nothing to do with the IRA, but found and asked to do another mission by Jude. Despite the alienation, his kind natural helps he to transform from dilemma to disenchantment.
Dil: Jody’s 「girlfriend」, the only good woman is not a woman at all. He is a transvestite, and paranoia.

C. The Black humor in the film:
As the title indicates, music is important in the film as, indeed, it is an essential element in Jordan's work. The song from which The Crying Game takes its name was a Sixties』 hit. Other songs play a central role that becomes more apparent as the film goes on. They include 「When A Man Loves A Woman and, in a neat touch at the end, Stand By Your Man . That last song leaves the audience laughing. The film has many other moments of humour and the script is often hilarious. One such moment occurs when Fergus helps Jody, whose hands are tied, to pee. Dil’s friends celebrated in the barber’s as Dil finds a boyfriend. Etc.

To sum up, this film is wonderful on so many levels. The storyline is heartbreaking and suspenseful, and it tugs at your heart too. Keep an open mind - there's a lot more to it than the "secret" that you probably already know about.


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