Author: A big wave
With no screams, no escapes, and only the quiet details that grip people's hearts, the French film "Breathe" provides a successful model for a non-American disaster film for Chinese mainland big screen.
In Breathe, Paris suffers a sudden catastrophe: after a seemingly unhurried movement, the city is suddenly enveloped in smoke several meters high. The hero and heroine flee to the old couple's house upstairs, but their hearts are worried about their daughter who is still in the house downstairs, even if she is temporarily safe for the time being- because she suffers from a rare disease called "defeat disease", she has been living in a purification cabin isolated from the outside air.
Aside from rising a few centimeters per hour, the fog doesn't seem to be so "scary"—it's like an early morning fog, colorless and tasteless up close, and it doesn't take the initiative to attack. The main characters in the film are only the above five people, and the scenes are mostly concentrated indoors, at most extending to the street. But because of this, the whole story seems much more real than the texture of american disaster films that are often big scenes - these characters and scenes are so ordinary that the audience can easily substitute for the characters, imagining what to do if the same ordinary self encounters this unusual day. This profound sense of substitution is especially evident when the protagonists rush into the fog several times without protection — you unconsciously hold your breath and run or search with the protagonist in the imaginary world until his or her head emerges from above the fog again.
In the classic disaster film "Titanic", many people are most impressed by the big scene of the shipwreck, but the choice of the little people in the last moments, such as the old couple in the cabin who refuse to escape lying calmly on the bed, or the band insisting on playing the last song in the fleeing crowd. When a great disaster strikes, most people probably don't have the ability to be heroes like the heroes in American disaster movies to save the world, all they can do is react instinctively at every moment of crisis. For example, in "Breathe", when the hero and heroine are separated, when one of the people's oxygen mask is damaged, when they have completely no mask but the purification cabin of the daughter downstairs urgently needs to replace the battery... Focusing on the humanity in the non-everyday state, from this point of view, such atypical disaster films are more "typical" than American typical disaster films that are detached from daily life.
Judging from the word of mouth after the release of the film, many viewers are not accustomed to the shooting method of "Breathe" because they are accustomed to watching popcorn movies. In fact, in detail, the grand background that the film should have is not a lot. For example, the fog comes from the underground, which is what the fleeting army in the film tells the audience; and when the mortality rate reaches a certain number, people will not be able to wait for help from various social institutions, so they can only save themselves, and this inference comes from the short conversation between the hero and heroine at night. There are more hidden plots, such as when the hero repairs the semiconductor radio, the heroine and the old couple are heard in the ear of the sporadic dialogue, the message is quite meaningful: as a rare disease, the genetic probability of defeat disease is getting higher and higher...
Is fog a punishment of nature for human destruction of the environment? Although "Breathing" does not deal with this problem head-on, through various details, the answer is ready to come out. The final ending preserves a little light for the audience in front of the screen, but the torture left by the film is still there, not as aggressive as the American disaster film, but more striking. (a big wave)
Source: Yangcheng Evening News