Xu is to open up the Chinese market with the help of Hong Kong-made films with "Fengyun", and the French film "Guardianship" released in 2018 landed on the domestic cinema line after a year. On June 21, "Guardianship" was released without showing the mountains and water, but it did not get much attention from the audience because there was no pre-publicity.
The self-written and self-directed French director Xavier Legrand controlled his first feature film so maturely and rationally in an almost perfect way, presenting the social and artistic nature of domestic violence in such a restrained and realistic, profound and thorough way that the audience could comment. Winning the 2017 Venice Silver Lion Award for Best Director and Best Debut is a triumph of his personal accumulation and compassionate humanistic care.
The story of Guardianship is simple. In the eyes of Julian, a 12-year-old child, the grumpy and violent father Antoine and the crooked, weak and cowardly mother Miriam are not qualified guardians, but due to the limitations of law and society and the family system, he has to wander away from the two parties who are fighting for custody - the father's obscenity and the mother's tolerance.
When the father selfishly uses his own way to forcibly intervene in the child's inner world, a domestic violence tragedy that should not have happened is more and more clear in the step-by-step and stripping cocoon.
This is a film with superb rhythm control and emotional rendering, the sense of substitution and expressiveness are exquisite, Xavier Legrand's cleverness lies in the fact that the plot and characters are close to reality, a strong sense of documentary and a distinct personality conflict, so that the audience unconsciously follows the ins and outs of the story, and gets a fantasy viewing experience in an inevitable domestic violence.
In the opening court mediation, Xavier Legrand uses concise and condensed vision and originality, unhurriedly and slowly to explain the background of the story and the positioning of the characters, so that the audience can't help but have doubts, as the father in the film suddenly tears off the hypocritical appearance under the stimulation of self-esteem, erupting into fear, nervousness, powerless emotions, the mother's continuous concessions and forbearance, then the spread and accumulation of silent indulgence. In the end, the contradiction between manic catharsis and implicit retreat eventually broke everyone's psychological defense line.
Using the suspenseful thriller genre film technique, telling a tragic story full of fatalism, this is the embodiment of Xavier Legrand's creativity, and he accurately grasps the root of horror - emotion. It is precisely because "Guardianship Storm" shows the audience the unstable emotions of the parents step by step in a way that is close to the truth, and the child is always in a serious state of insecurity, which is more convincing and more emotionally touching to the audience.
As the saying goes, a slap doesn't make a sound. When two people with character defects, under the extreme excitement of emotions, have the autonomy to choose to act willfully, trying to understand and release their "love" in a way that they think is "reasonable", everyone has to pay a heavy price.
The reason why I want to describe this family tragedy as inevitable is not only because the appearance is calm and calm, mature and stable, but also the selfish and rough, self-righteous male protagonist on the inside, from the scene of the opening trial, the heroine's indecisive virgin personality is exposed.
Julian, 12, is innocent, and he has been forcibly bound by the law and his parents, as if his parents' extreme actions are all his fault, but the discerning person can see that he has been a victim of domestic violence from beginning to end, and it is he who is suffering the ultimate pain.
When a father who maintains the dominance of his family through violence and intimidation meets a cowardly mother who has passed and lacks courage, their children are the biggest victims, and they will be destined to live in the shadows and follow and influence their lives.
Even in highly developed modern societies, laws and norms that apply to all are sometimes the bottom line and cannot solve all the problems in the family. Just like the opening trial of this film, it seems to solve the problem, the result is to indirectly intensify the family conflict, and the "family war" for custody eventually leads to the bitter fruit of the dead net of the tail fish.
Human nature is too complex to withstand temptation. Family and emotions cannot be completely bound by rational rules and regulations. Everything has a cause and effect, and once a mistake is made, tragedy is inevitable.