Introduction: "What's your name?" Spencer"
The legendary life is like a spiritual and heavy book, and when we try to approach those characters through various forms of introduction, its essence is also approaching a label. And these labels formed the currency that he circulated in history. As a film, the literary brushstrokes in the face of the characters are naturally the most intimate tone for the audience, but subject to their own media characteristics, the images cannot be stacked in detail like paper to form a book that accommodates past and present lives, so how to choose a "special moment" to show the face of the characters is an extremely important key for the biopic.
On some level, although the biopic tries to restore the sensory reality that has been written in history, it seems to make us more and more distant from the truth, and what we see and understand through the screen is more embodied in a character label, and even a prejudice of the character. In fact, this seems to be the point that the film "Spencer" intends to express, when the queen has lightly realized that her most important photo is nothing more than a head printed on the pound, the film also tells us that celebrities are remembered only for the most important aspect of their social value. Inside the rules, the three-dimensional of the person is ground into a plane, they become an oil painting hanging high, the gaze is also watched by the person, and the back of the person who is hidden can only be hidden in another signature.
Variety magazine's chief film critic, Ochin Gleiberman, ranked Spencer as the number one of his top ten films of the year, and regardless of its value, the film Spencer was brilliant enough as a biopic about Princess Diana's spiritual world and emotional twists and turns three days before the Prince's bureau. The film is different from previous celebrity biographies, it focuses on the spiritual level of Princess Diana as a woman, greatly weakens the influence of her social responsibilities, and also removes various social labels such as philanthropists, so that the audience can see Diana tear off the princess's pearl chain to face herself, becoming Spencer's spiritual redemption.
In fact, we can't look at this film as a kind of biography that states historical facts, it is more expressionist, the first-person visualization of Diana's autobiography, so the lens in this film is a noble palace full of strict guard and gloomy majesty, and the performance of the camera also reflects the norms and inhibitions of systems and regulations. The film mainly revolves around Princess Diana's married life in the British royal palace, according to the historical description of Princess Diana, Diana, who is coming of age, gradually feels extremely depressed and bound by the living environment of the princes and nobles and the complicated rules and systems, and this lack of human warmth and warmth and the oppression of power and attention have caused great harm to her spiritual world.
The film opens with this authority's disregard for human nature: dead birds lie on the road, the camera looks at the bird's corpse, and the military vehicle representing absolute power leaps over the bird's body, and the large and mechanical moving figure of the military vehicle is revealed in the camera as an irresistible force and is filled with cold meaning. When the lens gradually opens up the field of vision, the picture tends to be harmonious, and the fairytale-like picture color gives people a warm feeling, and such a picture is displayed in a large number of regular and smooth shifts. Fixed and shift shots appear in large numbers in the scene scheduling of the film in the palace space, which also shows that all the prosperity and celebrity images presented in the palace are structured in such irresistible and rules and strict rules.
This scene began to gradually change as Princess Diana's mental condition deteriorated. When night falls and Diana emerges from the magnificently illuminated palace, the tones of the interior and exterior contrast sharply. In the darkness of the night, the mist of the palace is extremely gloomy, which is the most appropriate description of the place by Princess Diana. Inside the palace, the film is still presented with a panning depth of field lens, and the oil paintings hanging high in the depths of the scene form an all-time gaze on the characters, and the upward perspective adds a sense of hidden oppression to this gaze. The film is full of a large number of images that also symbolize this, such as pearl necklaces, black billiards and so on. These audiovisual images present and symbolize the various programs shown in the film, from ritualistic eating to daily dress and personal speech that has lost their freedom, from narrative to audition, they are like the audience presenting the stylization surrounding Diana's own entire British royal family and the exploitation of human nature by this stylization.
Faced with this feeling of suffocation, Princess Diana chooses to seek answers from another character's autobiography, Anne Boleyn, which presents her state of mental illness and redemption as the spirit of the princess, and the real helper is the same-sex love with Maggie, which constitutes Diana's power to rediscover herself. For the break from the trough to rebound, the film uses a large number of costume changes to carry out the montage of this process, and the transformation of clothing, color, running and dancing is a clear embodiment of women's power against patriarchy.
The film can be seen as a kind of "meta-biopic", which not only clarifies the flaws and social utility of celebrity biographies through the mouths of others, but also expresses its redemptive power for the human heart. Biography not only contains a person's social history, but also has her emotional perspective as a three-dimensional person. "Spencer" tells us about the female identity that Princess Diana herself really identifies with, the turmoil and uneasiness hidden in her heart, her panic and kindness come from the self named Spencer, but at the same time it is the self named Spencer who makes her free and liberated. Whatever the outcome of history, Spencer, who hopes to stay in this specimen, can also give every viewer who reads her the power to chase freedom.