Stills from the movie "Bohemian Rhapsody". Stills from the movie Caravaggio. Draft: Li Jie
Between "great music" and "controversial film", "Bohemian Rhapsody" involves the question of how to shake hands and make peace between "making an artist's biopic" and "making an artistic biopic".
Without the 20-minute end-of-the-film reproduction of the "Queen" band at the "Save Lives" concert, the wind review of the movie "Bohemian Rhapsody" would have been discounted. The cinema turned into a karaoke hall, the old guns watched it over and over again, and the whole audience sang "We Are champions", crying and singing... Witnessing such a grand event in the film, the main credit goes to the band "Queen", which is a monument to music.
He looked too normal, not too much like an artist
Judging from the photos left by Freddy Mercury, the male protagonist of the film, Rami Marek, is quite far away from him, and his "good" at the performance level belongs to the creativity of the film, and he uses his imagination to give a character blood. Marek, with 4 toothless teeth, has always looked timid, like a frightened hamster. Freddy's own face was lustful, with a kind of fetishistic charm, and it made sense for fans to paint him as a rock cat shining in the spotlight. Some veteran music fans write long gossip, using the academic spirit to explore the differences between the plot and realistic details of "Bohemian Rhapsody", in one sentence, the professional ability of the Oscar best actor is impeccable, but it is far-fetched to say "Freddy's soul possession".
There must be a tug-of-war between reality and fiction, and "real" is not a virtue that movies need to adhere to. Between "great music" and "controversial film", "Bohemian Rhapsody" involves the question of how to shake hands and make peace between "making an artist's biopic" and "making an artistic biopic".
Two writers of Bohemian Rhapsody, Anthony McCarten wrote Darkest Hour and The Theory of Everything, and Pete Morgan was the author of The Queen, The Last Dictatorship, and the series The Crown. The common point of this combination is that it is good at placing the protagonist of the legend in the position of ordinary people, facing the extraordinary situation with the limitations of ordinary people, and finally achieving legend. This is the creative strategy of "taking the greatest common divisor of the audience", "the unusual growth of ordinary humanity", and it is the relevant angle of the people - people who see the vortex of power or the peak of the profession are subjected to earthly bumps and properly induce the audience to "imagine substitution".
Using this strategy to write a "biography of an artist" largely avoids the cost of art and the dark side of the artist. The real Freddy is debauched, he has defected to the abyss of fate, and the music left behind gives the pros a distant vision, and because of this, he sings "Mom, life has just begun, but I destroyed it", which has the power to destroy the decay. "Bohemian Rhapsody" created a "do not challenge the ordinary people's three views" Freddy, and such lyrics, such music has little to do with such lyrics, such music. Adapting the adventures of the artist's voice and color dog and horse into a "wrong way" with private morality, and making him carry the "return" of repentance, this is a set of stage indoctrination rhetoric, shaping a rock musician into a counterattack inspirational person, he looks too normal, inevitably not like an artist.
Sometimes, the power of art is far greater than the precise calculation of business
When using fiction to reproduce an artist, whether the landing point is "ordinary people" or the keyword "art" is often in conflict, because "art" often means a sense of challenge.
Director Jarman makes a biopic by the painter Caravaggio, which is opened by two parallel timelines, one is Caravaggio dying in a hospital bed, and the other is that he has been living and painting revelry since he was a teenager, squandering his life into love, fighting and creation. Carnival and dying, the soul of Caravaggio's paintings, correspond to the song of his life. There is a very important line in this movie: art is the opposite of life. Jarman boldly and radically shoots art and life at odds with each other, caravaggio despairing of the reality of not being artistic, he cannot compromise, he can only embrace tragedy in the unreality of art. The idea and core theme of the play clearly did not conform to the mainstream commercial films dominated by Hollywood, but in 1986 it not only won the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution, but also one of the best-grossing films in the UK that year – sometimes the power of art far outweighed the precise calculation of commercial capital.
The 2009 César Award for Best Picture, Flowers And Flowers, is also a biopic about "Art and Its Costs." The German collector William Wood was famous in the history of Western art for excavating Picasso and Henri Rousseau after World War I, and before that, he also discovered Sahafanie, a vulgar laundrolet woman, who died in a lunatic asylum and died as the Pantheon of fine arts. The heroine of "Flowers and Flowers" is Sahaphne, who seems to have no artistic temperament, almost a little foolish, but when she gets out of the part-time work of washing and brushing during the day, she draws trees, flowers and fruits with a fervent soul in the middle of the night, and the painting allows her soul to break free from the palm-sized village and town, to the world of divinity. Rural life in the French provinces has no waves, and "Flowers And Flowers" is filmed lightly, and even Wood's betrayal of Sahafine once or twice is like the wind blowing through the treetops, without leaving a trace. The original French name of this film is the name of the heroine, Chinese the paraphrasing of the title is very good, the birth of art and the death of the artist are like "flowers falling and blossoming", it is the process of natural glory and death, "talent" This kind of thing, as if the heavens are randomly distributed, and quite unreasonablely withdrawn, the cruelty of "talent" is that there is either there, or zero, there is no process, only the state. Sahaphne in the movie said, "People who paint love in different ways. The inexplicable "different ways" here is the thin red thread of art.
"Portraits of artists" exist in a subtle sliding interval, and they cannot be too "normal", but also not "abnormal" spectacles. In Piara's Van Gogh, in the last two months of his life, Van Gogh suffered from mental illness, but he traveled back and forth between saint-Rémy and Arles in the countryside, eating, painting, loving, and living humbly, neither saint nor demon. Juliet Binoche starred in Camille of 1915, leaving Rodin as a devastated woman, in a state of delirium in the convent, she was a "mad woman in the attic", but "madness" and illness are constructed concepts, and it is the daily trivialities that draw her into an inner war. Mike Lee, director of "Mr. Turner", explains the painter's actions in great detail, explaining his inferiority, his rudeness, his eccentricities and his pride in a series of character relationships. In these biopics, the running-through chronicle and the narrow sense of "drama" are abandoned, and the creators let "life", not "story", take the initiative, and then the protagonist of the biography steps into a strange area.
Artistically making biopics is to get closer to this strange area - the music of "Queen", mozart's operas, van Gogh and Turner's paintings, these are an enclave above the world, and the spiritual charm of art lies in the rushing sense of life, rather than relying on the flowing account of "reminiscing about the past" in a vain attempt to get a chicken soup for the soul and a philosophy of life.
Therefore, the story of the prodigal son's return in "Bohemian Rhapsody" will soon disappear into many movies, and Freddy's song will continue to be sung through this popular story.