Hello everyone, I'm Junjun.
There is a movie that ranks on the Douban list for a month. I can't help but wonder, what is the best film?
After watching it, I found that this is the film with the softest perspective that can be hailed as 2021.
Starring "Joker", the film emperor Phoenix's new masterpiece -
How to retain a trace of warmth in the alienated modern society
Call on friends and lead companions
The movie "Calling Friends", directed by Mike Mills and starring Joaquin Phoenix, can be said to be the most special and unpopular movie of 2021.
Only more than 3,000 people have marked it on Douban, and this movie with almost no plot to speak of has a high score of 8.0.
1.
The main line of the story is simple.
It is about a documentary filmmaker who takes care of his nephew while working on a project, in which the two sides reconcile with themselves, each other, others, and the world.
The documentary filmmaker is a middle-aged man who is good at listening to others, rich and closed-minded,
The nephew, on the other hand, is a child with mature thoughts that do not fit his age and behaves strangely.
In the cross-narrative of the story, we learn that the mother of the child, that is, the director's sister, is a person who is deeply trapped in the female predicament.
On the one hand, she has to take care of her husband who is mentally ill and isolated.
On the one hand, it is necessary to pull a sensitive and thoughtful child.
The story begins with her having to go out of town to take care of her husband and entrusting the child to a blood relative who has been unable to communicate emotionally for many years.
After that, the documentary filmmaker and the child embarked on a journey to shoot a documentary.
The director who is not good at words always contradicts this child with independent thoughts.
Then reconciled, and each reconciliation promoted a step closer to their feelings,
In the process of constantly reporting to his sister about the child's situation, he also got to know his sister better, and the child also walked out of his independent small world during the trip with the director and began to understand everything around him.
2.
The construction of the character image
The pattern of adults taking children to "travel" has become a common narrative mode,
In "Kikujiro's Summer", the strange uncle played by Takeshi Kitano and the child who is also not understood by his peers come on an absurd and beautiful summer journey, showing the proposition that strange people are not alone during the journey;
In "This Killer Is Not Too Cold", the escape journey of the cold killer and Little Lori is full of thrills and romance, and the sad end is tragically ended at the end of "childhood is always so difficult".
Alice in the City is more like a reference model for this film.
Directed by Wenders, the new German film standard-bearer/pioneer of road films, "Alice in the City", tells the story of a documentary literary worker full of Baudelaire-style urban wanderer temperament, and a lonely little girl constantly observing and wandering in the city.
The film is full of whispering elegance, and the slow rhythm outlines the communication between generations and the social landscape.
And "Calling Friends and Leading Companions" is not only the same as "Alice", but also emphasizes the indifferent and alienated intimate relationship in modern society with black and white pictures.
With a gentle rhythm, the gradual melting of the glacier between people is laid, and more importantly, some isomorphism can be found in the contrast between the characters and themes.
As mentioned earlier, the adult of "Alice" is a person with a Baudelaire-style city rover temperament, what is a Baudelaire-style city rover?
Baudelaire's "Flower of Evil" can be said to have opened up the art of "judging ugliness", and in exposing the ugliness of Paris, it has produced a poetic aesthetic taste.
The crisis of modern spiritual civilization caused by him refers to the group that takes the modern city as an aesthetic object, starts from the individual's life experience and emotional dilemma, and is exposed outside the system and separated from the mainstream society.
These people seem to live in modern space, but they are not closely related to society.
They reject the mediocrity of modernity, and escape, confusion, loss, and pain constitute their spiritual life, and they are in the city but wandering as spectators.
"Calling Friends and Companions" is obviously a narrative that unfolds with such characters from the beginning, and New York has become an urban space that is constantly mentioned and displayed.
The protagonist is played by Joaquin Phoenix, the actor who successfully played "Joker" undoubtedly has a depressed, melancholy temperament.
It is very much in line with the character of the "lonely patient" in the story who recently lost his mother, was estranged from his only relative, lived in the city, and always carried out podcast records alone at night.
And the child's actor is also a juvenile wanderer, in the movie, there is a shot of a child hanging out of school, and then this child who is difficult to get along with his peers silently walks out from behind with his head down,
He himself was well aware of the oddities of his behavior, but he always pretended to be strong on the surface, pretending that he didn't care about all this.
Wandering away from the main narrative of the story, that is, the mother who is far away who did not participate in the trip, how can she not be a wanderer?
In the passage of recollection, in the face of her mother's death, she says that she is not at all saddened by her mother's death, saying that for "you" (i.e., the documentary filmmaker) to lose a mother who loved you, and I lost only a person who never understood me.
The trivialities of the original family and life have long become the tragic source of the core of her life, when the child tells the director about his mother,
We see a woman who used to be happy with her friends and has a self-spirit, and we also see a woman who is ostracized in the mainstream of society.
Just as the child repeats his mother's words: Even if we are in love, she will never know everything about me, and I will never understand everything about her.
It is these three wanderers, these three people who exist in the gap between people and people, between people and society,
In a journey of compulsion to establish communication, gradually open yourself to accept each other and the world.
3.
Establishment of the theme of the film
The structure of the film is very interesting, using non-linear narrative shots such as memories, the protagonist's monologue, and documentary interviews, so that the themes expressed in the whole film cannot be generalized and very broad.
Parent-child relationship
As the film obviously wants to tell, it is obvious how the parent-child relationship should be established. In the film, although the original documentary director is a person who is good at listening to the children,
But in the final analysis, it is only one of his artistic ideals, collecting children's ideas about themselves, the world, and the future, which is the main motivation for him to complete an art project, and from the beginning of his relationship with his nephew, we can see that he is actually not good at getting along with children.
One of the more humorous passages is that when the director and the child have a conflict, he needs to apologize to the child, at this time he chooses to find out how to communicate with the child on the mobile phone, and while reading the steps, while expressing himself, it is obviously difficult to put down his identity as an elder and apologize to the child.
At this time, the child said, at this point you should say sorry, and the director is quite embarrassed to say sorry.
The establishment of parent-child relationships lies first and foremost in equality, and before the trip begins, we see that children and mothers often cause mothers to not understand because of their children's strange behavior, and she cannot agree that children always have some ideas that are beyond their age.
And who prescribes what a child should look like?
The director has ingeniously constructed a character who is "not like" a child, and even in the interviewees, the children who tell their ideas have amazing ideas beyond our imagination, such as one child who said that "adults always think too highly of themselves".
We should listen to the children as equals, rather than using the ideas of our adults to circle the growth of children.
Close your heart
In the triangle relationship of the film (director, child, mother), the mutual relationship between the three people is difficult to achieve two-way communication from the beginning.
This is also the director's desire to emphasize the existence of the diaphragm between people in modern social relations, even in kinship.
Compared to another film master, Bergman, who can never reach an understanding of people, the director of this film is obviously more optimistic about this relationship.
Bergman's "Shouts and Whispers" is about the problem of mutual understanding that cannot be solved between relatives, and even the atmosphere presented at the end of the film is pessimistic.
And "Calling Friends and Attracting Companions" can be seen from the title, although the director is immersed in their own inner world for people nowadays, it is not impossible to complete the communication of people through the way of "calling friends and attracting companions".
In the most touching scene of the movie, in the long-range shot, under a lush natural beauty, the director and the child shout to each other, saying that all this is terrible.
The two do not pretend to be fine, uncover the inner scars, vent the inner emotions, and in the blending of the scenes, it seems to have completed the cry of life.
In a way, "Calling Friends and Leading Companions" is by no means a fascinating film, its expression is really a bit dull, but in this calm narrative,
We can better understand the so-called "calling friends and leading companions", which is by no means a warm force to force you into a story of mutual redemption, in the details to penetrate into the protagonist's inner care,
We can feel that "calling friends and leading companions" is a long stream of water, it is natural, it symbolizes that the essence of marx's human being is a social relationship, even if it will be obscured by modern confusion, but the haze will gradually dissipate, revealing its warmth.
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