Produced | Tiger Sniff Youth Culture Group
The author | cucumber soda
Title picture| movie "French Mission"
This article was first published on the tiger sniff young content public account "That NG" (ID: huxiu4youth). Here, we present the face, stories and attitudes of today's young people.
There are two favorite directors of literary and artistic youth in the world.
One is the nagging Woody Allen, and the other is the well-known obsessive-compulsive director Wes Anderson.
The former was used by Wen Qing to expound his romantic philosophy, and the latter is the most popular aesthetic standard today.
But when it comes to "symmetrical composition" and "color matching", many people will pull Out Wes Anderson and the "Budapest Hotel" that made him famous, and they are eager to decorate their homes in the style of Wes Anderson's films.
Last month, Wes Anderson's new movie "French Pie" was launched on streaming, and the cast was luxurious, all big names: 9 movie kings and 4 movie queens, squeezing their heads to occupy a place. After the premiere of the main competition unit in Cannes, it received a 9-minute round of applause from the audience.
The evaluation is however polarized. Douban scored 7.8 and IMDb 7.4 — for Wes Anderson, that's already his worst score in recent years.
If you open the French Pie with the Filter of the Grand Budapest Hotel, you will be disappointed and even fall asleep. At least many people in the Douban film review have entered the sweet sleep on the way to watching the movie, and frankly admit that they can't appreciate this "gorgeous appearance but dry core" movie.
For Wes Anderson, who has an extremely strong personal style, he doesn't seem to care whether the audience praises him or criticizes him, like a casual restaurateur, it is your business to eat his taste, and it is his business not to make this dish. Just like Wong Kar-wai doesn't care if you can understand his lines.
Did this "French School" really make the public completely disenchanted from the "aesthetic god" Wes Anderson?
Can this "symmetrical maniac" who is sought after by the whole world still have a new job?
The film's bad reviews are mostly because of the first threshold in front of the audience: no plot. Let you watch the most beautiful PPT in the world for two hours, I'm afraid you can't sit still.
Wes Anderson's film experiment this time is crazy and paranoid: he wants to completely "visualize" a magazine.
The magazine was called The French Pie, and it was based on the famous New Yorker. The magazine has a kind white-haired editor-in-chief who has several highly personal columnists. Even the editors-in-chief and writers in the film correspond to the prototype of the New Yorker.
From the first page of the magazine, the audience began an "audiovisual reading". As an obsessive-compulsive disorder to the extreme, Wes Anderson even intimately restored the magazine's page numbers and paper typesetting in the movie, trying to make the audience "touch" the magazine with their eyes.
The French version of "The Story of the Editorial Board", consisting of four columns, is structured in parallel and in very different styles. The director hopes to read these stories with the audience without any emotion.
The opening travel column is a short text vlog.
The author takes the reader/viewer to wander around the virtual French town of Ennui-Sur-Blasé, like a go pro in the front of a car, as the travelogue presents in this video experiment.
After a brief introduction to the environment, the three theme stories are late.
The first story is an art column.
A prison felon (Benicio del Toro) falls in love with the female prison guard (Leia Saidu) who guards him, so he uses the female prison guard as his muse to create postmodern paintings.
An artist (Adrian Burundi) hypes him up as an artist worth tens of millions, but the painter doesn't care about anything but his lover.
The second story is the political column.
Female journalist Lucinda (Francis McDormand, heroine of "Three Billboards") documents a student movement that takes place on a French campus. Many critics have seen that the movement is a metaphor for France's "May Storm".
The demands of college students, under the director's ridicule of left-wing radical youth, became childish and outrageous.
Fight for the right of boys to enter the girls' dormitory, and the way to fight is chess.
Lucinda, a middle-aged female journalist who is a neutral bystander, also got involved in a yearless triangle with the leader of the movement, Sweet Tea, and even helped the students draft a movement manifesto in bed.
In the end, Young Sweet Tea accidentally lost her life during the movement, and the lost female reporter recorded what she saw and heard.
The last story is the food column that has nothing to do with food.
The author goes to the police chief's house for a banquet and bumps into the bandits who kidnapped the commissioner's son.
The chief of police sent the cooks of the family to deliver food to the kidnappers' dens and poison them. After a struggle, the administrator's son was inexplicably saved.
Yes, the above story is so outrageous and jumpy that people are confused.
It wasn't until the audience turned the last page of the magazine that they might understand Wes Anderson's intentions.
The last page is the obituary of the editor-in-chief.
It wasn't until the end that we understood that the real protagonist of the film was not the marquee characters in the first four stories, but the editor-in-chief who let the authors do what they wanted and insisted on not deleting a word.
Because of his death, they all came together to write the last text belonging to the French Mission: the obituary of the editor-in-chief.
The film's problems are very obvious: form takes precedence over content, and visuals trump text. Seeing the end as if you didn't see anything, it was a beautiful "nonsense movie".
"French Pie" can catch your eye almost at the beginning of the film, its biggest advantage is audiovisual art, but its biggest elbow is also audiovisual art.
At the beginning of the film, it pays tribute to the French New Wave film Jacques Tati's "My Uncle". Silky picture scheduling, or the familiar taste that satisfies veteran movie fans.
Wes Anderson's famous traverse shots also become more brash in this film.
The break with the spatial pattern creates a dreamy visual country, perhaps to pay tribute to Godard in French New Wave films, or perhaps to the carnival of the director's exclusive pet of his own imagination.
This time, color guru Wes Anderson boldly gave up color. Or rather, he very imaginatively created a second way of using color.
In the main part of the narrative unfolded by the "authors", the picture is a lot of black and white. Once the reader can use his imagination, as the author's words let his thoughts fly, the picture switches to color for one second, breaking the traditional film narrative.
Immersed in the time of the sages, the painter looked up at the ceiling and saw the flowing brilliance:
When a cunning artist displays a painting, the reader's imagination is left to render the picture in color:
The female prison guard gracefully walks in front of the artwork with her as her muse, and the picture changes from black and white to color:
The kidnapped little boy shyly asks the prostitute guarding the door "What color are your eyes?", and the next second Silsa Ronan's pupils have color:
Looking back again at the director's selfishness: let every viewer become a reader of this "magazine". Just as we feel when we read the paper media, the font paragraphs are black and white, the pictures are colored, and when we read the author's literary flair, the intracranial climax is at the same time, the paint bucket is overturned on the white paper.
In addition to the ghost horse design of color, the director's "game childlike heart" is not hidden.
Hitchcock's suspenseful atmosphere can be broken by the next shot when he turns around: the cop chasing the bandits becomes a black-and-white painting of the puppet theater, and Wes Anderson is like a child carrying a line to play a game, scheduling every clever shot.
Of course, the audience will surely question: what does the director's personal hobbies, tastes, tributes have to do with the public?
The film's shortcomings are also exposed in Wes Anderson's every second-to-second showmanship - difficult traverse shots, complex camera scheduling, exquisite color collocation, in addition to the boundaries that make us marvel at creativity, it is difficult to understand what the director really wants to express.
Withdrawing from feelings, turning their backs on the audience, and even completely abandoning the "narrative function", in the end, this image magazine can only be regarded as a dazzling collection of short films.
Wes Anderson rendered his star-studded luxury cass useless, and eventually inevitably fell into the narcissistic dilemma of a self-talking artist.
The absence of the core of expression is precisely the reason why "French" is far less highly evaluated than "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "The Great Fox Daddy".
No matter how perfect the visual is, the text still can't hide the weakness and dryness.
But I still think that "France" is a sincere film.
Although this is a private love letter, every detail is buried in the silver thread of the director's humanistic feelings. As the editor-in-chief taught the authors: "Try to make this passage read like you deliberately did it." ”
Intertextually, the film is also the work of Wes Anderson "deliberately.". He is determined to lead the crowd into his kingdom of vision, to show off his deepest treasure— even if it is slightly childish and clumsy.
The death of the white-haired editor-in-chief led to the death of the magazine, and ultimately pointed to the death of the entire print media era and the newsstands. No one noticed, but it was already complete, completely buried in the soil.
Echoing Harold Ross, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, the hidden real protagonist, the white-haired editor-in-chief, is a journalist who is extremely doting on his opponents.
Even if the number of words in the column is too much, the author's reimbursement is overspended, or the author has no writing experience at all, or even if the author drags on for 30 years, he will insist on running the magazine and "will not kill any articles." He allowed any whimsical writing to exist.
Perhaps for the audience who stays out of the way, the death of the print media is insignificant, and the narrative of the jump is extremely unfriendly. But for Wes Anderson and the participants in the print media era, it was a grand and boring romance.
A scene that appears at the end of the film: the film is dedicated to the successive editors-in-chief and representative authors of The New Yorker
The Franco-Rite poster pays homage to the funny cover of The New Yorker
You can certainly say that it was little Bourgeois's disease-free moan. Wes Anderson didn't produce a serious and great inscription for journalism, but there's no denying that it did have a witty naïveté, more like a fairy tale written to the journalism industry.
If The Grand Budapest Hotel commemorates the demise of European romanticism, "The French Pie" commemorates the end of an era of elegant reading.
These are the hidden romantic thoughts that flow gives Wes Anderson the labels of "aesthetic, symmetry, balance, color.".
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