Author: Wu Zeyuan
Film critics who don't write good novels
Edit: Little Dragon
01 Bruno Dumont
Before talking about this year's miniseries Wide and Inhuman (2018), which ranked second in the Film Handbook, we should first talk about director Bruno Dumont. In fact, this entire article is only about Bruno Dumont, and nothing else.
For in the sense of astrologer and Truffaut's "authorship," Dumont is a pure "author-director," no matter how much the term means. In other words, he is his movie, and his movie represents him as a person.
So who is Bruno Dumont? Although many people know the name, no one can actually say the problem clearly, including the author. He was a "Bresson descendant" with high hopes from film critics, but he quickly shattered expectations with his extremely violent films. After Desert of Erotics (2003), he was replaced by a Canadian film critic alongside Claire Denis, director of Day and Night (2001), Gaspar Noir , director of Irrevocable (2002), Bertrand Bonilho , director of The Spring Palace Filmmakers (2001) and Leo Carax , director of Bora X (1999) . He is called the "French Neo-Extremist" director, but he himself is more like an overly serious monk.
Bruno Dumont
He was considered an intellectual through and through, but he wasn't actually the "professor of philosophy" that everyone was falsely rumored to be, he had only been a philosophy teacher at a high school in northern France, and he didn't like the job very much. He was one of the most humorous directors in France, but in recent years he has inexplicably changed his sex, making things more joyful than one. So, there is only one label left to describe him - "The Father of the Movie Handbook". Because basically every time he shoots a work, he will enter the top five of the year in the "Film Handbook" list.
So does Bruno Dumont deserve the admiration of the Film Handbook? The author personally believes that he deserves it. His films, though large in scale, are not aimed at seeking controversy; their films, though extremely slow-paced, are not as involute and boring as many contemporary "slow films." He made films in search of spirituality, and he did succeed: his "Beyond Satan" (2011) shook the author's soul, and his biopic " Camille of 1915 " ( 2013 ) impressed the author more than any Camiel Claudel biopic to date. In fact, the 21st century has given birth to many good films, but few films can bring some kind of soul resonance to the author like these works of Dumont.
Of course, Dumont's new work, Leniency and Inhumanity, doesn't quite fit the author's description. It's neither slow nor serious, and it doesn't want to play soul resonance with you at all. This cartoon-laden clown comedy doesn't care about the Holy Spirit, yet its innuendo to current events is unprecedentedly high. So when the audience wants to laugh at the mentally retarded and deformed people in the film, they will suddenly react: I go, am I laughing at myself?
FYI: Dumont had a similar vision to "Leniency and Inhumanity" back in the early 2000s: for several years he had been soliciting investment in a script called "The End." The script is a crime story about a pair of American police officers investigating a criminal case while a comet keeps falling from earth. More than a decade later, the story was repeated, but it wasn't the United States, and it wasn't a comet that fell from the sky.
02 From "Bresson" to comedy coffee
Stills from "Little Kids"
Wide and Inhuman is the sequel to the miniseries Little Kids (2014). "The Little Kid" was a turning point in Dumont's career. On the one hand, this is the first time That Dumont has made a TV series, and on the other hand, because this is the first time that Dumont has added a comedic element to his work. Unexpectedly, dumont couldn't stop when he tried comedy: his next three works, "Mar Ruth" (2016), "Joan of Arc" (2017) and "Wide And Wide", were simply more unorthodox than one.
So why did Dumont become a comedy café? The answer is in the plot of Camille in 1915. The film takes place in a mental hospital, and all the patient characters, with the exception of actress Juliet Binoche, are really played by psychopaths. When Camille/Binoche watched the patients rehearse Molière's play Don Juan, she was first amused by their clumsiness, but then suddenly moved to tears by their persistence. "At that moment, I found that comedy and drama can merge with each other, because they are actually the same thing," Dumont said. Extreme sadness can often turn into laughter, and vice versa. ”
Since then, Dumont has unleashed himself, unleashing his banter and ridicule of the world, politics, history, and humanity. His Little Child adds black humor to a rural serial murder, Mar Rutter tells a cannibal story into a burlesque, Joan of Arc worries about France's fate on a heavy metal score, and Wide's comedy index culminates. The two policemen van der Vyden and Carpontier, who are only slightly abnormal in "Little Children", directly become two large mentally retarded people in "Wide and Wide", while the narrow and evil villagers in "Little Children" have no evil qualities in "Wide and Wide", leaving only stupidity and narrow-mindedness. Because the human heart is not as unfathomable in "Wide" as it was in Dumont's previous work, it is just ridiculous.
Stills from "Wide and Inhuman."
FYI: Over time, Dumont's attitude toward Bresson has flipped 180°. His first two feature films, Son of Man (1997) and Man Man (1999), were deeply influenced by Bresson, and in a 2007 interview with See and Hear, he said Diary of a Village Priest (1951) was one of his favorite films. But he seems to be by endless questions about Bresson: In 2009, when promoting Hadwig (2009), he said, Don't talk to me about Bresson, I'm completely different from him. He's a Christian apologist, and I'm not. The people I compare to him are either unimaginative or don't know how to understand my films, so they stick labels. ”
But if you look at 2011's Outside of Satan, you can clearly feel bresson's influence. Partial close-ups of the body of the figures, repetitive and religious image elements, acts of violence that occur outside the painting... You can see the shadow of Money (1983), Muchette (1967) and Pickpocket (1959). Maybe Dumont wasn't happy just because he was afraid that his secret would be punctured.
03 to the head
As we mentioned earlier, Dumont once wrote a play with science fiction elements called Doomsday. But in the decade or so from Doom to Wide, the objects that fall from the sky have undergone major changes. What falls off in Doomsday is a comet, and what falls out of Wide is a beach of alien sludge that looks like.
Dumont may not have been the best at using metaphors, but in his previous works, there have always been inexplicable, yet very charming and poetic metaphors and symbols. The faron of "Man And Man" rises in the garden, the rural tramp in "Outside Satan", and the unexplained imagery in "Little Children": the cow hanging in the air by a helicopter, the dead body posed as the protagonist of Rubens's oil painting... They all evoke a poetic echo that cannot be described in words, which is unforgettable.
In Wide, however, Dumont leaves little room for poetry and metaphor. The countryman's mentally handicapped detective Van der Wayden directly referred to the black refugees who came to the town as "black holes" and "non-human", and the right-wing parties that swept across France finally settled in the wide town. Dumont's films often take place in an abstract time and space that makes it difficult for us to discern the age, but in 2018, even he who is not so concerned about secular life can turn a blind eye to the bad current events. Populism, right-leaning, racial discrimination, the immigration crisis, these problems are like falling from the sky, both invading Dumont's film scene and affecting the lives of all French people, and no one can retreat in this storm.
What's even more absurd is that in the "shit" of "Wide and Non-Human", a star will run out, and this star will randomly burrow into the body of a hapless egg, and then the hapless egg will produce a replica of himself from his own ass. Thus the world is completely chaotic, as van der Wieden, who is both mentally retarded and a certain philosopher (he is indeed some kind of philosopher, just as the murderous tramp in "Outside Satan" is indeed some kind of Christ) said: "We have no idea who we really are." The end of the world is here. ”
Thus, at the end of "Wide and Wide", we see the most absurd scene in Dumont's film: a group of mentally handicapped people face another group of mentally handicapped people who are exactly the same as themselves, and those who have not been "cloned" are not clear whether they are a "real" mentally retarded or just a copy of the mentally handicapped. In reality, human beings always feel that the humanity they have is sublime, and even want to copy this illusory thing to aliens and machines, so that they can spread human nature throughout the universe. In "Wide and Wide", Dumont does the opposite, he asks the aliens to make copies of humans, just so that humans can see how ridiculous and funny the so-called human nature really is.
FYI: In a sense, a lot of Dumont's work is genre films: his "Man, Man" and "Little Child" are crime films, "Flandre" is a war film, "Virgin" is a song and dance film, and "Satan" is a serial killer film. "Wide" can also be understood as a science fiction film: the plot of alien creatures disguised as humans invading the earth can remind us of a series of science fiction stories including "Outer Magic Flower" (1956), "Strange Shape" (1982) and "Walking Invaders" (2017). It's just that these alien/non-human templates are so retarded that these copies are also flawed in the disguise process. But that's what makes Dumont interesting: genre stories are always pinched out of odd shapes in his hands.
Of course, the plot of some kind of advanced life making copies of humans is most similar to the third season of Twin Peaks.
04Do Dumont's actors all idiots?
Detective Van der Weyden (Bernard Pvost)
In the author's speculation, among the viewers who have seen "Little Child" and "Wide", there should be few people who are not curious about the actors in these two plays. After seeing the actors who play van der Weyden, Carpontier and the two priests either convulsive, or mentally retarded, or slurred in speech, you can't help but wonder: Are these people specifically playing clowns in circuses or children's movies? When you find out that these people have not acted in any of the scenes except "Little Children" and "Wide", you may be more curious: So are they really the same person? How did Dumont score their mental retardation and convulsive control on the same?
In fact, Dumont had a unique casting strategy: he would often go to small towns in northern France to find unemployed workers and make sure they had a stable income for a period of time by letting them act. So, through this model, a reciprocal relationship was established between Dumont and the unemployed workers. But that still doesn't explain why the townspeople in "Little Kids" and "Leniency" are so idiotic—there should always be people in the township who behave a little more normally, right?
Maybe they're just going to be dumb and ugly for Dumont? Not. Curious, the author searched for interview videos with Bernard Pvoster, the actor who played van der Weyden, and found that he was exactly the same as inside the play when he was outside the play: shaking his head, his facial nerves twitching, and his posture was crooked. Pvoster was unemployed before being selected by Dumont, and before that he had worked as a plumber and a gardener in a workshop for the disabled, so we can speculate that his body was also somehow irreversiblely flawed.
The use of low-intelligence and disabled actors often draws criticism for Dumont, who always appear ugly and ridiculous in His work. But Dumont insisted that no matter what others thought, he had a moral yardstick in his heart, and he was not exploiting actors. After watching the behind-the-scenes short film of Camille in 1915, the author believes Dumont's words, because he is indeed very gentle and patient when directing the mentally ill, and does not reveal the world-weary personality that he often shows in his works.
So why would Dumont make his disabled actor so ridiculous? In the author's opinion, he is not specifically aimed at people with disabilities, he probably thinks that all human beings are ridiculous. Perhaps in his view, human beings with all kinds of inherent defects are really like dementia and mental retardation created by a group of incestuous gods. And the disabled actor just shows his true view of all humanity. The author does not know whether this interpretation applies to his early works, but for Leniency and Non-Humanity, it is relatively appropriate.
What about Dumont himself? He, like his characters on camera, is full of self-contradictions. As a shadow man who pursues the Holy Spirit, his work is often vulgar; his work is very mysterious and seductive, but most of his interviews are boring. His films (well, at least early ones) are sympathetic to humans, but his view of the world outside of his work is arrogant and harsh, even a little impersonal. They all have inherent flaws that cannot be erased (or Inherent Vice, borrowed from the old man of Chin), so in a way, Dumont is actually the most "Truffaut" autobiographical author: he is his character, his role is him.
FYI: "Wide and Wide" can be considered Dumont's "Eight and a Half Parts". It's not just because the show ends in a carnival of people walking around in a circle, but also because there are a lot of figures in Dumont's old works in this circle: Emmanuel Scotton, who plays the main character Faron in "Man," Didier Despe, who plays the obese sheriff in "Mar Rutter," and of course, Muhammad, a black kid who dies in Little Kids, and Aureli, a singing girl.
Deep Focus DeepFocus is the author of today's headlines