Time is Like Aged Wine

Zhang Shanjian is back　March 25, 2025,  06:49

Twenty minutes in, the heroine emerges in a soft halo of light, stepping from an ivory-white car. Wearing a deep purple wide-brimmed hat, she’s helped by a chauffeur and ascends the gangway with elegance—an opulent entrance. This contrasts sharply with Jack, who, in a dockside bar, wins his ticket with a poker hand, dashing to the ship’s stern at the last second and squeezing into a cramped third-class cabin. It’s the first layer of contrast: their vastly different statuses. The second layer lies in their words. Rose, boarding, says dully, “This is a slave ship.” Jack, backed by lively Scottish dance tunes, grins, “Good news—we’re off to America to become millionaires!”

Picasso, Degas, Freud

In the first-class palace suite, a maid unpacks Rose’s many suitcases. Flash back to the opening, where elderly Rose arrives by helicopter on the salvage ship, still towing a dozen bags—even her own fish tank. Decades later, she’s kept her own world intact, a woman who, in today’s terms, still has a vibrant soul. Among her paintings is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, inspired by Iberian sculptures and African masks—distorted bodies and misplaced features, women selling themselves. She holds it up, staring as if into a mirror.

Next, Degas’s Dancers on Stage: a ballerina mid-leap, arms outstretched, watched by another dancer and a man from the wings. She places this in her bedroom—a space where defenses drop, an amplifier for the heart’s secret whispers. The painting in the living room speaks of unchangeable captivity; the one here might be her spirit’s self-rescue.

Then her fiancé calls the Degas “cheap,” and in the next shot locks the “Heart of the Ocean” in a safe. Their desires are clear: Rose yearns for the “moon”, he for “sixpence”. This seemingly perfect match is a tight candy shell, a damp sugar tower—beautiful until you feel it crumbling inside.

Those who get the joke are Mrs. Brown and Andrews; those who don’t are Ismay, the capitalist, and her sycophantic fiancé. Ismay even asks, “Who’s he? Is he a passenger?”

The Three Camps of First Class

The contrast between these camps continues throughout the film, shaping the characters not through exposition but through their every word and gesture.

Andrews, the ship’s designer, gives up his lifeboat vest, staring at an oil painting as he meets death calmly.

Her fiancé went further, posing as the father of a lone little girl to scramble onto a lifeboat, fulfilling their prophecy: “As you wish, we’ll be remembered by history.”

These are the two threads tracing the opening personas and final acts of each camp’s representatives. I don’t want to define human nature in absolute terms of black or white, good or evil, but this perspective aligns well with the concept of “the beginning of human nature.” Emotions, appearances, and life itself all have an expiration date, yet the essence of human nature at its origin is something that transcends civilization and class, laid bare like an untamed wilderness. This will become even more evident later when discussing the collective fate of people in a shipwreck, forming a tableau of human nature.

I place Rose’s mother in a third-party camp. From the very beginning of the film, her cold disdain for her daughter’s fiancé reveals the arrogance of “old money” toward a “new money” upstart businessman. However, upon discovering Rose’s close relationship with Jack, she can only tell her daughter, “Your father left us nothing but a legacy of bad debts hidden by a good name. That name is the only card we have to play.  It is a fine match with Hockley. It will ensure our survival! Why are you being so selfish? We’re women. Our choices are never easy.” She is a woman caught between societal expectations and personal desires. Unlike her daughter, she lacks the courage to break free from convention, instead numbing herself to the sharp edges of reality. Those who defy the current, we call brave; those who choose security, we deem pragmatic. Yet security often comes with a sense of numbness. In the end, as the ship sinks and she sits safely in a lifeboat, watching her daughter go down with the wreck, does she remain silent because she has placed her own survival above all else?

The Sinking: Order Within Each Person’s Chaos

As the ship sank, first-class women and children boarded lifeboats first, while those in steerage were locked behind iron bars. A man pleaded, “You can’t keep us locked in here like animals. The ship’s bloody sinking!” It recalls the book Blindness: “If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals”

Before disaster struck, all was chaos; to speak of order in the face of death is a fool’s dream. Yet these thousands of faces—aren’t they each a reflection of inner order, the most instinctive choices?

A wife, learning her husband wouldn’t join her, refused the lifeboat three times, staying with him: “We have been together for 40 years, and where you go, I go.” A band played amid the sinking; as members parted, a violinist stayed to play alone. Hearing his notes, the other three turned back, joining him to finish their final piece. The fiancé schemed trades to the end. A telegraph operator sent SOS signals until the last. A gentleman, rejecting a life vest, dressed in finery—“I’ll leave as a gentleman”—sipping brandy, smoking a cigar. A priest, forgoing the boat, led passengers in the Rosary. A man draped a shawl, posing as a woman to board. Humanity isn’t black or white—these 2,000 portraits weave a tapestry of society, a record across time, the truest notes and masks.

To Jack, she was radiant, untouchable, and high above. But Rose, weary of the endless, hollow galas, returned to her room, tearing off the necklace, hairpins, and corset that bound her, and fled the opulent first-class cabin for the deck. Jack saved her from leaping into the sea, urging her to ride horseback like a man, chew tobacco like a man, teaching her to spit—to do the things she’d longed for but etiquette forbade.

The Heart as a Zen Chamber

The film begins with a salvage team wielding precise instruments, dredging the priceless “Heart of the Ocean” from the deep, and ends with elderly Rose, frail and trembling, casting that “Heart of the Ocean” back into the sea from the ship’s bow. “I’ve thought about it my whole life,” she says. “I came here to put it back where it belongs.” Even in her direst moments, she never traded this gem for material gain—hers was a treasure beyond gold: a human heart.

Yesterday, the green of the hills hadn’t fully unfurled; a brisk spring breeze swept my mind clear and cloudless. My master gifted me four words: “Guard your true heart.” I thought of the “Heart of the Ocean”—isn’t the heart an ocean too? At times, pursuit stirs its spies—desire and pleasure surge, stirring tides, or others unwittingly tag it with worth and judgment, urging us to explain or uphold outer ties for the sake of decorum. Yet the cherished instinct within always pierces through our own and others’ facades. In stillness, perhaps we hear the heart’s drumbeat, a slumbering childhood, the world’s underside. In the zen chamber of the heart, a wisp of incense rises, drifting toward its longing.

Time is like aged wine. Its sharp blade carves foreheads, eyes, and flesh, yet pours forth a draught that makes us weep, sing, wake, and reel—a taste of the human world. Perhaps in ten years, I’ll view this film anew, but every moment is the finest.