My friend suddenly gave me such advice and I spent most of the evening watching this movie to answer the question for myself why "Upstream" - the English title is so "hot".
The film is about a 45-year-old senior programmer with diabetes named Cao Tien Luy. One day he receives a decision to be fired. Ironically, the decision comes from the list of cuts and optimization of human resources that his programming team had previously designed.
Crisis and tragedy came one after another to Cao Tien Luy: His savings were wiped out due to the collapse of the lending system, the bank demanded debt for the installment apartment, the international school tuition for his children, and the burden of medical debt after his father had a stroke...
He hid it from his family and looked for jobs everywhere, but no one would accept him. When he applied for a job at a company, he was even invited for an interview, but after learning that he had mistaken his age, the boss flatly refused and told the employee that this was not a nursing home.
Then, unable to find a new job in the technology industry, Cao Chi Luy was forced to work as a food delivery shipper to try to pay off his debt. But this job is extremely harsh, workers have to work 14 hours a day and risk their lives on the road to earn enough income. From here, the tragicomedy begins with the nakedness, hardship and pressure of the shipper job. But in that hardship and pressure, there are people, values that cannot be fully appreciated on the outside. There is a guy who is super stingy, to the point of being stingy, at the dump just because he wants to save money for his daughter's brain surgery. Another person works regardless of hours and tries every way to earn money but only to help a colleague...
As for Cao Tien Luy, from the point of “failing at everything” and constantly being criticized, he tried hard, accepted, and even put aside his personal pride to earn money. The film ended somewhat happily, with the open ending that Cao Chi Luy could be invited back to work as a programmer when he himself, during his time as a shipper, developed a navigation application to help delivery drivers improve their performance.
The film is from Chinese cinema, but the story is timely and partly shows the harshness of work and the pressure of life of the majority, in which many Vietnamese viewers see and find themselves.
It also shows a message: Even when you feel most hopeless, most stuck, life still opens up ways for you. The question is whether you accept it or not.
As a philosopher said: “At some point, we feel overwhelmed with happiness not because we have pulled something out of the water, but because we have thrown something back into the water and let the water carry it away. At some point, we suddenly understand all the laws of heaven and earth: nothing is permanent, on the contrary, it is through change that we have new and pure things.”
