On romance films, Sir used to only serve Wong Kar-wai.
Unique perspective and distinctive style.
The opening is a golden sentence, all kinds of ridicule of the love and resentment between men and women.
But recently.
Sir found another treasure.
Like Wong Kar-wai, he wears sunglasses, slows down the film, has no script, and is all self-written and self-directed.
And only make romance films.
But he was even more demented than Wong Kar-wai
Fall in love with each of her heroines.
In other words, it's all about shooting love, others are making it up, and he only records it.
How can this be compared to others?
Today's article may be more niche.
But Sir thinks that if you like romance and are interested in this extreme madman, you must not miss his new work.
Annette
Annette
The opening film of this year's Cannes.
The main actors are acquaintances, "Old Driver" Adam Dreifer, the French goddess Marion Cotillard.
As a song and dance film, on the day of the screening, it received more than 5 minutes of applause from the audience.
And director Leo Carax (the representative of the French post-New Wave, known as Godard's successor), won the best director in Cannes with this film.
They all say the movie is good, but in Sir's opinion.
In addition to the film itself, this is a very private autobiography belonging to the director personally.
Look at this French Wong Kar-wai, a talented director, the most capable of filming love in contemporary times...
How to reconcile with your own legendary half-life.
To understand the story, you have to start with the director himself.
01
Carax's entry story Sir is tireless.
At the age of 17, after Carax left secondary school, he did not want to go to school anymore and came to Paris alone.
In Paris, he didn't know anyone.
He got a job posting small advertisements and watched some movies in his spare time.
Look at the faces of the women in front of the camera, and also look at the whole world behind the women.
He gradually realized that behind the camera was his place.
So he bought a 16mm camera and started his film journey.
But pay attention to the key word, the woman's face.
Women, the reason he entered the industry, are the absolute protagonists of his films.
This purpose is truly vulgar and pure.
At one point, there were even rules.
He only shoots actresses who fall in love with him.
Even confidently saying that the faces he likes will look good in the movie.
The most famous of these is Juliet Binoche.
What is the lover's eyes out of the West?
Carax gave the answer with his own lens.
The combination of the royal male protagonist + the lover female protagonist.
Nearly 40 years into the industry, before "Annette", only five feature films were made, but all of them were classics.
Among them, "Lovers of the New Bridge" (1991) was the most expensive film in French history at that time, costing 160 million francs (about 186 million yuan).
It took three years, serious overruns, directly dragged down the three producers, and stopped shooting for 16 months because there was no money.
If it were not for the direct intervention of the French Ministry of Culture, the support of the capital, and the transformation of this film into a national asset, "Lovers of the New Bridge" would never have been completed.
This also reflects on the side of How pampered Carax's films are.
Even he attributed the reason for the slowness of filmmaking to this:
He couldn't find the person he wanted to photograph .
The subtext is, except for one's own lover.
This is a director who has spent his whole life making love feelings into movies.
But at the same time, movies are also his means of finding a way out in the face of chaotic world affairs.
Extreme literature + extreme self.
Knowing this, you can understand what Annette is talking about.
02
How would you rate the movie Annette?
The most worthwhile song and dance film of the year.
The plot of the story is very simple, and it can be summarized in two sentences:
The story of a "scumbag" who kills his wife, the self-destructive path of an actor.
Stand-up comedian Henry (Adam Dreifer) falls in love with opera soprano Ann (Marion Cotillard) and has a child, Annette.
When in love, both parties are on the rise, but because of The arrival of Annette, Henry entered the midlife crisis ahead of time.
He began to become anxious, tossing and turning, unable to sleep at night, unable to write new passages.
Until, until, a well-prepared performance, completely failed on stage.
Kicked off the stage by an angry audience, the career ended.
But on the other hand, Ann's career is thriving.
Henry's performances were completely cancelled, and Ann's performances outstripped supply.
The imbalance in the husband's heart increases, anger, jealousy, unwillingness, and various complex mentalities.
Let him decide to "kill his wife".
Finally, during the family's yacht vacation, they encountered a storm, and the two had a quarrel on the deck, and Ann fell into the sea and drowned.
After that, he used Annette, who inherited her mother's singing talent, as his own tool to collect money.
Killing his wife and taking advantage of his daughter is really a purebred "scumbag" story.
But compared to the simple plot, "Annette" is more brilliant in its form
A song and dance film that transcends the boundaries of a song and dance film.
Constructed a three-layer "play-within-a-play" that starts playing from the very beginning:
The director himself took his daughter to the camera, and said to the actors in the recording studio, but also to the audience, can we start?
This is the first layer, the reality of time and space, and it is also the dimension in which we, the audience, are located.
Musically, the actor (and the author of all the music in the film, Spark Brothers) sings: So May We Start?
At this time, the Spark Brothers walked out of the studio and starred in the camera, they are still their real identities at the moment, actors Adam Dreifer and Marion Cotillard.
After that, they took the clothes handed over by the crew on the side of the road and transformed into characters in the film.
This is the second layer, drama time and space.
Notice the identities of the two lead actors, a stand-up comedian and an opera soprano.
When the film brings the camera to the stage, the two begin their own performances.
—— These are these three layers, playing time and space in the play.
What's even more interesting is Carax's blurring between these three layers of space-time.
From the first layer to the second layer, he used a complete long shot to complete the switch, and the two layers of time and space were seamlessly connected, and the boundaries between the actors and the characters were broken and dissolved.
The three parted ways, switching from actor to role.
When Henry was performing a talk show, at first we stood in the audience's point of view to watch his performance, but as soon as we didn't pay attention, Henry interacted with the audience, and the audience became Henry's accompaniment.
During an opera performance, at first she was in a virtual forest on the theater stage, but as soon as she turned around, she stepped into the real forest.
The second and third layers of space-time merge into one, while the audience is squeezed out and returns to the first layer of real time and space.
In other words, the director is deliberately reminding you with various techniques:
You're watching a movie.
Why did the director create this sense of disconnection?
Let the form overwhelm the content in order to alleviate the sting of the plot.
In the movie, you see Annette, a puppet doll, an Annabelle-style puppet puppet.
The emotions conveyed by the male protagonist Henry's anxiety, and the film's repeated hints of the heroine's death, are adding weight to the tragedy of this story.
From the lines, to the interpretation.
The scumbag's attitude towards love and family, from loyalty when in love, to anxiety when Annette arrived, to jealousy of his wife, anger to his family, and finally complete madness.
It's all clear.
There is an externalized show in the movie that is very expressive.
Henry made up the uneasiness brought to him by his wife and children and put him on stage.
He imagined scratching the heart of his wife's foot and scratching her to death.
After scratching, he tried to scratch himself to death.
This scene fully shows the man's pathology.
He was in a difficult situation and could not extricate himself.
But first of all, they want to anger others, and use hurting others to gain pleasure and liberation.
In the end, I found that there was no way to escape by suicide.
Pathetic, selfish, timid.
What is a scumbag? Carax shot it.
But pay attention to his reminder:
It's watching a movie.
Are you sure?
For the director, the most moving thing about "Annette" is outside the movie.
03
Some directors have been making the same movie all their lives.
Such is the case with Carax.
Because he was always disassembling and reorganizing himself.
But could the self that has been photographed for so many years be the same person?
In his first three films, the male protagonist's name is Alex, which is the original name of Carax.
△ Carax, whose original name was Alex Oscar, broke up his name and reorganized it into his current name
The real him seems to have disappeared, and he has become another person.
In fact, if you look closely, the real him is hiding in it from beginning to end, and all you have to do is find a way to decipher his code.
In each of his films, there is a projection of one side of himself.
In Annette, Henry loves to ride a motorcycle, which was actually a hobby of Carax's youth.
This isn't the first time Carax has shown this in his own films, as Bad Blood has.
Not yet, the actor and Carax himself have a slight similarity in appearance.
It is no accident that he was photographed as a scumbag.
"Annette" is not so much a song and dance film that criticizes scumbags.
Rather, it is the director Carrasco, a confession of his past life.
Carax has a former named Catherine Golubeva, the heroine of his previous film Paula X, who committed suicide in 2011, supposedly due to depression.
Carax said at the end of "The Hallowed Carriage" that it was dedicated to her film.
The previous work was dedicated to his ex-wife, while this new one was dedicated to his daughter.
Together, Carax and Catherine raise a daughter, the one who appears at the beginning of the film.
Noticed?
The color schemes of the two Annette logos are reversed, symbolizing that Annette has become another person who is diametrically opposed and has gained a new life.
Annette, who had been in puppet form before, eventually "came alive" and turned into a human form.
It is about the awakening of a puppet.
This corresponds to a certain expectation of Carax for his daughter, not to be bound by his own shadow or to become a complete and independent individual.
Emotionally, it's a guilt-ridden film, a letter of apology from Carax as a father to his daughter.
He took his ex-wife's death for his own responsibility, and as the movie says, he might rather have killed her himself.
And he also feels that he has snubbed his daughter as she grows up, and even has the exploitation of her daughter, like Henry and Annette.
So he arranged such an ending.
At her closing concert, Annette did not sing, but used a talk show to report her father's murder.
It's a joke with the darkest humor.
Annette completed her own growth by killing her father.
From this perspective, Annette is undoubtedly the most tender film in Carax.
He tried his best to expose and hide himself.
You can see the collision of the two ideas.
Two actor identities, stand-up comedian and opera singer, represent two ideas in themselves, and a stand-up comedian means that you are close to the audience, and you have to please the audience and make fun of them.
Opera singers, on the other hand, mean that you are far from the audience, you don't need to please them, you don't need to lean down to communicate with them, you just need to express yourself from above to conquer them.
Interestingly, Henry and Ann did exactly the opposite.
Henry had no interest in pleasing the audience, he wanted to conquer the audience, so he constantly provoked and offended the audience in his passages, rather than leaning down to please the audience like his peers.
One of the most obvious manifestations is that he dresses himself as a boxer, like Robert De Niro in Angry Bull.
But he is not facing anyone else, but the audience.
He scolded the audience for being illiterate, exposed his ass to the audience, pretended to be shot...
At first, the audience still ate this set, but after Henry crossed the line to perform his death to Ann, the audience abandoned him.
The audience's betrayal of Henry is partly due to the audience's awareness of Henry's provocative psychology, and half because of the audience's preference for ann, the perfect goddess.
So Henry became so jealous of Ann that he became a criminal.
This guilt is essentially an echo of Carax's guilt that comes back after it swings through the space of the story.
"Annette" is in a way Carax's confession.
He was young, fierce, arrogant and wanted to conquer the audience, and did whatever it took to finish the film.
Remember how he first started making movies?
He bought a 16mm camera, and the money he stole from his boss.
Later, when making a feature film could not attract investment, he took the black road if he could not get through.
He went to fool the gang leader into being his producer, and the routine was to first ask for a small amount, and then pat himself on the back and ask for additional budgets.
But he is now old and moderate, preferring to reconcile himself in a self-destructive way.
Even if the ego is exposed to such a degree, when all the emotions have poured out, he is aware of this exposure and our prying eyes.
Carax recorded a lifetime of love behind camera.
In the end, he decided to kill himself who took love as his whole.
Going back to the previous question, why would Carax remind the audience that this is watching a movie?
Because "Annette" is not a movie.
It's shame, it's avoidance.
Eventually, he asked Henry to speak his mind for him:
Don't look anymore.
The appearance of the protagonist of this romance film dying.
Of course, the above is only Sir's personal interpretation, you can have your own understanding, you should also have your own understanding.
As Carax himself said:
Cinema is an experience
Life is an experience
Go and experience it
The picture in this article comes from the network
Editorial Assistant: Doraemon