The inexplicable confusion is the answer to this movie
One of Haneke's early iceberg trilogies was a film called 71 Fragments of the Chronicle of Chance, which I call "forty-three cold fragments scattered" in Paris Ukiyo-e.
The film shatters the normal narrative structure, making a cold, realistic copy of each fragment with skilful long shots and fixed camera positions.
Haneke completely abandoned the dramatic packaging of the film, throwing me in front of the screen and forced to deal with the biting cold.
Due to the lack of storytelling, Paris Ukiyo-e loses its basic sense of closeness. It is difficult for us to detect the sign-like emotional guidance from the film, so the characters have lost their personality and aura.
In this film, Binoche perfectly interprets an ordinary person who is addicted to life, she has no emotional fluctuations caused by cause and effect, and she has no great feeling, and the audience seems to be placed in the hurried streets of Paris, looking at the sadness of strange faces.
"Paris Ukiyo-e" undoubtedly sheds Hanek's uncompromising blood. The director's mastery of the film is reflected in every detail, and the sense of precise proportion is clear and direct to the point.
The film won the Catholic Humanitarian Spirit Award at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and when it comes to Catholic humanitarian spirit, the theme can be guessed;
As a qualified ukiyo-e, the film includes a rich focus: "war, domestic violence, racial discrimination, illegal entry, class oppression, indifferent families", all the social problems facing Europe are not missing, which can be called a deformed phenomenon show.
Two films have to be mentioned on a similar subject:
One is the biggest winning dark horse film of the 78th Academy Awards, "Crash";
The other is Alessandro Gonzalez' Tower, one of Mexico's three masters.
Crash's multi-line narrative structure and exposition of "correct" values make it one of the must-sees on the list, but like most Oscar films, it has the common problem of asking questions and ending abruptly.
From the perspective of artistic achievement, "Crash" is far inferior to "Paris Ukiyo-e".
The hollowness of the character portrayal and the one-sidedness of the human setting of "Crash" make it far from the masterpiece. Babel is more comparable, and this excellent film is like twins with a very different personality from Paris Ukiyo-e.
The two have the same theme, the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Babel, which is well known in the Bible about the Legend of Babel:
Ancient humans spoke the same language, and they were determined to build a huge tower that could soar straight into the sky, hoping to ascend to heaven...
Paris Ukiyo-e expresses the same concern. The puzzle-style opening credits are unsolved and depressing, and the Russian poet in Tarkovsky's Nostalgia expresses the same pessimism:
Poor human beings cannot understand each other unless the borders are abolished, and these borders are not only the borders of nations, but also the boundaries of languages.
Michael Haneke expresses this sentiment, the despair of the boundaries between people.
"Babel Tower" and "Paris Ukiyo-e" each have their own smoothness, Gonzalez has a sense of narrative fluency, and Haneke has a sense of gaze.
The former expresses the truth with rough pseudo-documentary shots, while Haneke uses long shots and fixed camera positions to counter-detect the truth, and the film goes straight to the theme at the beginning, which also corresponds to the theme of Code Unknown with the final ending.
The first long shot of the film is 9 minutes long, and all 9 minutes are set on ordinary streets.
It's a wonderful group scene where the four main characters are simultaneously connected by a sudden event, and Haneke zooms in so that we can navigate through the appearances of the four characters like a scroll painting, and give them a basic portrait sketch.
In the film, Haneke cuts hard many times and controls the amount of information very restrained, which reminds me of "Fun Game" and "Hidden Camera", and the audience seems to have a remote control in hand, which can be switched at will in the character mode.
Among them, the portrayal of the father is extremely wonderful. The scene of the cow killing the cow in the cowshed begins with a gunshot, the director starts with the last cow killed, and we see the father walking past the carcasses of one cow after another.
And this corpse seems to be a perfect metaphor for the father's own toiling life.
In addition, the director also chose a better way to show the role of "George", that is, his photography.
Haneke asked George to show his work as he spoke, once on the front line and once on the subway, George was a lone photographer, a lonely man fleeing from society, and only constant curiosity would give him the desire to survive.
The film creates an excellent non-closed-loop setting where the fragments of each character unite to form an open loop. We can sort the pieces as we see fit, but no matter how you change the order, there is no beginning and end.
Because everything has not changed, all the sins and tragedies that have already occurred have been cycled endlessly in a circle; there are irreconcilable contradictions in the relationship between each pair of characters, and the lives of all the characters seem to be a circle, repeating the same encounters at a certain time.
Finally, we can return to the meaningful title, where a little girl plays a puzzle in front of a pure white wall, the white background makes the little girl's performance extremely clear and becomes an inescapable focus, and the eerie and abrupt light prints a dramatic shadow on the wall.
After the little girl's performance, the following children racked their brains to make various guesses in sign language:
lonely? villain? Bad intentions? sorrowful? captivity?
The first thing that comes to children's minds is an indictment of sin.
This makes us sigh at the childlike innocence of the children, and only one of the little black girls (that is, the sister of the racist black boy in this film) has a neutral answer:
"Hide and seek", and in the end this "hide and seek" became the best metaphor for this film.
With one wrong answer after another, the little girl became disappointed and helpless, and fear even appeared in her eyes. This silent and unsolvable title not only hung the movie on a high question mark, but also haunted my mind for a long time...
I think this inexplicable confusion is the answer to this movie.
Author | pASslosS
A shadowfinder who is still cultivating.
(All articles published on the platform only represent the views of the author and do not represent the position of the official account)
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