Today, I will talk about an old film with an exciting plot and ahead of its intentions.
The director is Brian de Palma, known as hitchcock's successor. Some of his most well-known works include "Dawn of the Lover", "Scarface Star", "Mission Impossible" and so on, but the best is still the thriller crime genre.
Due to the divorce of his parents in childhood, the director turned into a "stalker" in order to collect evidence of his father's infidelity when he was young.
This special experience not only became the psychological root of his future obsession with the theme of "voyeurism", but also was filmed in the movie I want to talk about today - "Razor's Edge".
The film opens with an imaginative bathroom scene.
A middle-aged woman showering alone saw her husband shaving in front of a mirror through the misty glass. The air was filled with the smell of lust. But suddenly, a killer rushes out from behind, and the heroine Kate wakes up from the dream.
Upon waking up, Kate finds real life boring.
The remarried husband was no longer passionate about her; the son was addicted to scientific inventions and shut himself in his room every day to do experiments.
Kate went alone to the psychiatrist Elliot and told him about her troubles.
Desperate for an exciting life, she tries to seduce Elliot, but the doctor refuses to have an affair with her.
After leaving the clinic, Kate went to the art gallery alone to see the exhibition.
Unexpectedly, I met a man in the exhibition hall, and after a short chase and temptation, the two quickly determined their eyes.
Kate followed the man back to the apartment, where she dried wood that day.
However, just when the audience thought that this was an ordinary derailment story, the painting style suddenly changed -
Kate was just about to leave when she met a real "razor killer" in the apartment elevator.
The other was a blonde woman wearing sunglasses. Without a word, she came up and took a razor and brutally cut Kate's throat.
Only this time it was no longer a dream.
When the elevator door opened again, Kate was covered in blood and dying.
The blonde woman fled the scene in a hurry, but was bumped in the face by the prostitute Liz.
Liz was then taken back to the police station to take a confession.
Unexpectedly, there was also a witness at the scene, the cleaning lady in the apartment, and she mistakenly regarded Liz as the murderer, and the police in charge of the investigation also wanted to close the case as soon as possible.
In order to get rid of the suspicion, Liz had to find out the identity of the blonde woman.
Fortunately, she also had a helper, that is, Kate's son Peter.
It turned out that Peter had made an appointment with his mother to go to the exhibition. But in order to invent at home, he broke the contract.
This made him feel that he had killed his mother, and he vowed to find the murderer for his mother.
It is worth mentioning that the prototype of Peter's role is the director himself.
Before entering the film industry, the director focused on physics, and as a student, he won a prize at the local science and technology fair, and his design project was "Applying Analog Computers to Solve Differential Equations".
In the film, Peter's inventive talent plays an important role in the investigation of the case.
First, the use of homemade wiretaps to eavesdrop on human confessions was used to determine the physical characteristics of the suspect;
Subsequently, each suspect was monitored at the same time.
He placed a sneak peek outside the psychiatrist Eliot's clinic and photographed the blonde woman coming in and out.
From this, it is speculated that this person should also be Ariot's patient.
He tracks Liz and bumps into a blonde woman on the subway trying to kill Herz.
In a critical moment, he saved Liz's life with homemade spray.
After the two met, they quickly formulated a "plan to catch the murderer".
Liz intends to seduce the doctor and steal his notebook, while Peter responds outside the clinic.
On Elliot's side, he actually burned his eyebrows long ago—because he knew that the murderer was his patient Barbie.
Barbie has violent tendencies, and after killing people, he confessed his crime to him through a telephone message that day.
In order to stop Elliot from calling the police, she specifically stole his razor as a murder weapon.
However, when Liz sneaks into the office as planned, everything is revealed.
The blonde woman "Barbie" was already there waiting for her...
Speaking of which, it must be mentioned that the title "Razor's Edge" is a wonderful paraphrase.
Because if you look at the original English name "Dressed to Kill", viewers familiar with the routine may be directly spoiled.
Yes, the so-called "Barbie" is actually Eliot's second personality.
However, unlike crime films that generally involve "schizophrenia", Elliot himself is not a perverted murderer, but a gender cognitive disorder.
Because of his female psychological gender, he split into a transvestite personality. The struggle between these two personalities is actually a game of two gender consciousnesses in his brain.
Barbie's two launches were both when Elliot was seduced.
Because this time his masculine consciousness triggered an alarm, trying to gain the upper hand.
And Barbie kills people in revenge on Elliot.
She repeatedly proposed that she wanted to have sex reassignment surgery, but the master refused, so she came up with this method to force him to obey.
However, the film adopts this curious setting, and it is not just to act as a gimmick.
On the one hand, it shows the inner plight of transgender people through Eliot's (Barbie's) self-destruction and struggle; at the same time, it also shows the invisible discrimination of society against transgender people through various seemingly careless cutscenes.
For example, when Elliot was on the phone at home, the TV in the background was broadcasting a talk show, and the guest was a well-known war correspondent.
She said to the screen, "I've done so many amazing things, been stationed in the Middle East, reported police news, sneaked into the treasure shipwrecks in Spain... But when I was introduced, people would still say – 'This is Nancy Hart, a transgender person'. ”
It seems that only after great career success, the identity of "transgender people" will appear insignificant and recognized as a "normal" member.
For example, after the truth came out, the director borrowed the mouths of Liz and Peter to make some popular science on the transgender group.
Peter believes that the development of science and technology should also provide help and convenience for this group of people.
This argument seems to be "politically correct" today. But as a film released in 1980, "Razor's Edge" is undoubtedly very avant-garde and advanced.
In addition, the film's depiction of the horror atmosphere and violent scenes is impressive.
There are a total of 6 murders in the film -
The first scene is Kate's "bathroom killer" dream at the beginning of the film.
The scene uses jump scare to instantly shift from lust to horror, setting the tone for the film.
The second scene, which is the confined space of the apartment elevator, Kate encounters Barbie for the first time.
The torture scene is fierce and bloody, and Liz, who is standing outside the door, glimpses the murderer behind the door through the reflective equipment, which is extremely frightening.
In the third scene, Barbie tracks Liz on the subway and tries to kill her.
The subjective shots of wandering are extremely urgent, and the bright and dark carriages also make it easy for the audience to substitute for the character's panicked mood.
In the fourth scene, It is Liz seducing the doctor, accidentally triggering the mechanism, causing Barbie to go online.
The process of Liz's peril is presented by Peter's telescope lens, the most common voyeuristic perspective in thrillers.
In the fifth scene, Elliot, who is imprisoned in a mental hospital, murders the night nurse in order to escape.
The scene unfolded in the presence of countless patients.
The overhead shots are both surreal and creepy.
The sixth scene, which is also the end of the film, echoes the beginning, and is also a dream that takes place in the bathroom.
Liz heard an unusual noise in the shower and saw through the curtain that there was a pair of white nurse shoes behind the door...
Of course, because It was clearly filmed that Liz woke up from the nightmare, it is up to the audience to imagine whether the fifth murder really happened and whether Elliot successfully "escaped from the madhouse".
Importantly, from these murders, whether true or false, we can see the director's admiration and imitation of Hitchcock.
Bathroom murders, schizophrenia, identity misidentification, dreams, tracking, voyeuristic perspectives, mirror reflections, light and shadow of thunder and lightning on rainy nights... Almost every element was used by Hitchcock.
The two dreams at the beginning and the end are also clearly a tribute to Hitchcock's classic "bathroom murder".
But the director skillfully incorporates these elements into a story based on personal experience. Other than that, the most advanced "stealing master" is nothing more than that!