After waiting for a long time, the "symmetry maniac" Wes Anderson's new film "French Mission" finally arrived.
This movie is undoubtedly a rare "local tycoon lineup", and almost everywhere the camera reaches are the familiar faces of the film emperor and the film queen, and the stars cannot be pulled by a bus.
I also watched this movie at the request of my friends for the first time.
Overall, "French" continues the director's consistent routine, and even more so.
The film uses his usual chapter-style narrative, with interludes and flashbacks nested layer by layer.
In addition to the "traditional art ability" of format change, there are also a lot of black and white and color screen switching this time.
The film still pursues the ultimate symmetrical composition, and the color combination is very recognizable.
The opening chapter even shows the characters one by one through the illustration-like scenes.
The narrative is even more crazy —
Some paragraphs are bursting with information, and while large paragraphs of "long and difficult sentences" narration, the picture is still supplementing new information, so that the audience is forced to look at the six roads and listen to the eight directions;
Some passages simply omit lines and actors, replace them with two-dimensional animation and BGM, and have no impact on the amount of information so small that they are completely cut out.
This blatant "water duration" operation caught the audience off guard.
It is no exaggeration to say that "French Mission" can be regarded as the most suitable movie to watch online this year.
Because the audience can "flirt" with the progress bar at any time, review the content just missed, fast-forward the paragraphs that have no nutrition, or directly pause to digest "what I just saw"...
If you've never seen Wes Anderson's films before, it's easy to be dissuaded by it at the opening, as if the director himself blew up an Oxford dictionary.
Because the whole film is a very personal expression of the director, it is a love letter to the American magazine The New Yorker and its editors.
The film features a fictional English-language weekly magazine, French Pie, covering politics, art, fashion, food, etc., and is distributed in 50 countries around the world.
The editorial board of the magazine is located in a place called "Boring Town" in France, and the editor-in-chief is the son of a well-known American publisher, with a somewhat eccentric personality, and sometimes he opens up without a word.
However, he was unusually tolerant of his column editors, had no strict limits on the word count and style of the articles, and preferred to lose money and make money rather than shoot the editor's work.
Under his slow and methodical leadership, the magazine showed readers the world step by step.
One day, however, the editor-in-chief suddenly died of a heart attack, and according to his will, the French Mission would also be discontinued.
The plot after the film is printed with the content of the suspension number of the obituary of the editor-in-chief.
Yes, the director made a movie of a magazine that didn't exist in his head.
The reason why the film uses a lot of black and white pictures and the dialogue is long and cumbersome is to create a reading experience.
The whole movie is more like a short story collection, mainly telling three seemingly boring and boring stories, but in fact going to the weird.
The protagonist of the column "Art and Artists" is a painter who has been imprisoned for killing and dismembering corpses.
In order to curb the impulse to commit suicide, he signed up for an art interest class in prison, and inadvertently created a work that was noticed by an art dealer inmate, and the two talked about cooperation in prison.
After the art dealer was released from prison, he held an exhibition for the painter, and he even gathered a group of industry insiders and celebrities to buy the prison guards to go to prison, just to appreciate the latest works of the painter.
Unexpectedly, the painter's masterpiece was actually painted on the load-bearing wall of the prison, which could not be taken off and taken away, and the copyright was completely owned by the government, and the art dealers were angry on the spot.
Unexpectedly, at this time, there was a riot in the prison, and the prisoners poured into the exhibition site.
The painter, who was full of force, rescued several people, and finally received a suspended sentence and regained his freedom.
The protagonist of the "Political/Poetry Column" is a radical young man, Zifferini.
He and like-minded friends used the café as a position to fight for the freedom they deserved.
The female editor of the column happened to be a friend of his parents, so she covered the movement from the first perspective.
The female editor initially insisted on the neutrality of the journalists, but soon fell in love with Ciferini, and even ghostwrote the second half of the movement manifesto.
But on the night That Zifferini read the manifesto on the radio, he was electrocuted while repairing the signal tower, and has since become a pretentious cultural symbol in people's hearts.
In the "Delicious Food" column, the protagonist is a chef inside the police station.
He is famous for his unique "gendarmerie cuisine".
The column's editor was invited to a dinner party inside the police station, intending to record the chef's culinary talents in its entirety.
However, the dinner had just begun with an emergency, the police chief's son was kidnapped, and although the police quickly locked the location of the hostages, the two sides have been deadlocked.
At this time, it was the turn of the chef to make a big meal and deliver it to the kidnappers to ease the stalemate.
He knew that the director's son did not like to eat turnips, so he poisoned the vegetables and planned to eliminate the kidnappers in one fell swoop.
However, the plan was only half successful.
The commissioner's son did not eat the poisonous radish, but the chef swallowed the poisonous dish his scalp in order to prove the safety of the food to the kidnappers.
Fortunately, the hostages were eventually rescued and the chef was rescued.
This report, which was supposed to record the food, was also seriously off-topic because of the kidnapping, and the most vivid passage between the lines accidentally came from the chef's description of the poisonous radish:
At the end of the film, there is an obituary column of the suspension number.
All the editors of the editorial department worked together to complete the last paragraph of the French Mission.
After talking about the plot, it is estimated that the friends will feel as if this movie has said everything, and it seems that nothing has been said.
Although the film is "star-studded", the only person who impressed me was the editor-in-chief played by Bill Murray.
He seems ruthless, but he has always adhered to the magazine's purpose of inclusiveness, and has never suppressed the editor's writing with his authority.
He even indulged these pretentious writers too much, allowing them to spend more than standards when writing, acquiescing to their articles far beyond the prescribed word limit, preferring that they write off-topics rather than be arbitrarily deleted.
He was the backbone of the Francis, and his colleagues were accustomed to his style.
Until his death, everyone strictly adhered to his principle of "no crying" and wrote all the regrets into the obituary.
To some extent, the more nonsensical the three column stories in the suspension number, the more they can prove the unclear qualities of the editor-in-chief from the side.
Unfortunately, such a portrayal is found in the Francis and is the only one.
For most of the remaining scenes, the director is too obsessed with his own brain holes.
Format changes, black-and-white color switching, and even the use of two-dimensional animation have no specific rules in the film, but are only the director's means of emotional guidance.
This makes it difficult for audiences whose brains are inconsistent with the director's to fully understand what he is hilarious about.
So in my opinion, this movie is far less than Wes Anderson's previous work, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Although "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is also full of various farcical plots and fancy compositions to play to the fly, it does not sacrifice the character portrayal.
For example, the loyalty of the doorman "zero" in the story is not only reflected in the work, but also to the lover.
Even if he is more than half a hundred years old, he will still burst into tears when he mentions his lover who died early.
The heroine, Agatha, is not only beautiful and kind, but also a brave and intelligent woman.
As for the male protagonist Gustav, the director spent a lot of effort.
The five interrelated chapters in the film have been comprehensively describing the "decency" that the male protagonist insists on.
He made no secret of his wandering among rich women, but he always avoided talking in front of his own doormen.
He is strict with his subordinates, but he never gives in, and after successfully escaping from prison, he does not hesitate to be grateful to "zero".
Most importantly, in the years of morally degraded war, Gustav always guarded the only remaining light of human nature in human civilization, dying at gunpoint to protect "Zero".
The Grand Budapest Hotel, which does not exist, is full of charm precisely because of the shining points of the characters.
From this point of view, the director's attempt to make a movie of the reading experience is bold but unsuccessful.
Although there are many acting schools, the director obviously does not make full use of their strength.
For example, Silsa Ronan, who once had a good performance in his works, has also been reduced to a small dragon suit with blue eyes.
For most people, "French Pie" is more like a PPT file made by a director to make himself happy, no one denies its exquisiteness, but few people can taste the dry goods in it.
Speaking of this, the question also comes, this kind of personalized emotional experience, the beautiful products expressed by audiovisual techniques, can the small partners accept it?