I think the film <The crying game > tells a story about human nature. It may hide deep inside one’s soul for a life time silently until the day he dies. But it is always ready to show up as long as there are proper induction factors. And the result is, we never know when a man who just lives around and waves friendly to us at a distance everyday, who loves whistling and telling jokes, who behaves as a gentleman turns out to be a real devil. And we’re never wise enough to tell the kind-hearted by nature from the wicked until something terrible happens on us some day. These suffocating feelings tangled all the way when I was watching the film.
The whole story took place at the time when Irish requested independence from the United Kingdom of Britain and can be divided into three sections.
The first part shows that a black soldier Jody who was kidnapped by the Irish Revolutionary Army (IRA) was imprisoned at their secret base in Irish where he met Fergus, the hero of the film who was actually supposed to kill him. During the watching, they gradually became sort of friends, prattling and laughing happily with no notice of their true identities. And finally, Jody died because of his own fellows and Fergus escaped to Britain pretending as a Scottish. In the second section, Fergus visited Jody’s girlfriend Dil and fell in love with her. When finding out that Dil was a false lady, Fergus felt teased and disgusted. Then Fergus’s former fellowmen traced him and threatened Fergus to finish a murder or they would kill Dil. To protect Dil from risk, Fergus accepted the task reluctantly but found himself tied in Dil’s bed on the exact morning while Peter, the boss, who couldn’t wait any longer took action, got shot and died. Jude took revenge on Fergus only to be shot to death by Dil in his house. Finally, Fergus was caught and sentenced instead of Dil.
To promote the plot, the editor set a series of comparisons and conflicts of which the “scorpion and frog” story plays an extremely important role. It was the story first told to Fergus by Jody and at that time, the mercy sleeping in Fergus’s subconsciousness began to wake up although he himself might pay no attention to it partly on account of his indecisive character. And it drops a hint that Fergus couldn’t make up his mind to break up with his organization at last. At the end of the movie, the story was told again by Fergus to Dil. We could find the intense comparison between the two scenes. Jody was sad and despairing when telling the story but he still believed Fergus had a heart to let him run away, so there was kind of hope in his words. And Fergus had been behind bars when he repeated the story to Dil in an exaggerating voice with laughter around. He was in a tranquil mood after so many tragedies. It seemed that everything had come to an end. To some extent, he realized that he had completed an atonement to Jody be accepting the sentence with good cheer which made him perfectly happy and peaceful in his heart of hearts.
Besides, strong conflicts between the roles are also spotlights of the film which mainly appear in the way of love. The love between Fergus and Jude at the beginning of the film is physical to a large extent. Meanwhile, Fergus couldn’t accept Dil as a gay and transvestist, but still tried his best to cater to him when he decided to protect Dil. On the other hand, Dil loved Fergus with all his heart and soul and promised to do anything for him even cutting down his curly hair while paying no attention to Fergus’s averseness to the pet name “honey”. And I guess this kind of love mixes with feelings some of dependence, closer to spiritual request. And Fergus’s affection to Dil may mostly be clemency. Yet, boy’s love has always been a sensitive subject which glamourizes the movie here.
Like Waiter Col said: Who knows the secret of the human’s heart? Can we simply justify that Peter is totally wicked and Fergus is absolutely kind in nature? We human beings ourselves are affected by our surroundings easily. Life itself is like a cruel game filled with so many changeable factors and accidents. And men may never get what they deserve. That may be what the film tries to tell us: The society is unjust in itself.