★ Anna's War is a 2018 work by Russian director Alexei Fedorchenko, war themes. The work is not long, only more than 70 minutes, it can be said to be a one-man show, there is basically one protagonist in the shot, and there are almost no lines. There is also no sadistic dog blood plot support at all. Although it cannot be said how superb the acting skills of the protagonists are, people do eat by acting skills, and this alone is enough to make many first-line actors become dung, especially those who earn high brain tax on their faces - if they can still call themselves actors. However, Mr. Chopsticks will not talk about acting skills today, let's talk about movies.
When Mr. Chopsticks first watched this movie, he thought that there was some thrilling display of large pictures, but he did not expect that the movie story was so simple that it was outrageous. The film tells the story of how the little girl Anna survived alone under the Nazi eyes after she escaped the Nazi massacre by chance. The main scene is very single, that is, in a house, the line of sight spreads outward, and it is only a few tens of meters. At the farthest distance is an attic above the house, much like the scene of the escape of the Chamber of Secrets.
But then the director will tell us that the people who make the film are not responsible for disappointing and vomiting. From the beginning of the slaughter, the film quietly captures our compassion for the weak, allowing us to play the proposition of people's struggle for survival in the storm of extremism in such a minimalist situation, and Anna, who actually represents the common fate of the group, in such a minimalist situation – this is by no means limited to the proposition of World War II, and in events such as the Rwandan massacre, it is still noticed by justice.
Anna's war is almost silent, and Mr. Chopsticks thinks it can be felt simply from three aspects.
First of all, Anna has to resist hunger and death, in order to survive, she steals water from the flower pot every night, grabs food with rats on the mouse clip, and eats poisonous rat food by mistake, almost entirely surviving by enduring luck. In the hungriest moments, she even ran to the attic to trap the pigeons and pluck a live pigeon from its feathers. This is a duel between humanity and animal nature under extreme conditions. Judging from the results, the primitive desire to survive of human beings has overcome the human civilization that has evolved and upgraded since Ru Mao drank blood.
But don't worry, Anna will not become a person who has lost her humanity, the director has the responsibility and obligation to keep her "positive image to the audience", he arranged a self-redemption bridge, I will say later.
Second, Anna must resist the fragmentation of the self.
In Anna's eyes, the world was shattered. The film is represented by a recurring shot of anna hiding in the fireplace to observe the cracked mirror of the outside. In that repressive space, she must resist the damage of a shattered, hopeless world. She needed to maintain a precarious integrity so that she wouldn't collapse with the wind like a torn building.
Mr. Chopsticks observes that the film gives Anna a number of images of herself curled up in her hiding place, which gives us an expression of Anna's perhaps unconscious survival: silence and curling up are her only weapons against shattering and despair. She enclosed herself in the body she considered safe, keeping the last of her life and warmth.
Second, Anna had to fight the enemy she hated. Of course, we can say that the whole film is a metaphor for this proposition, but as a story conflict, the film is expressed through her struggle with The Nazi army dogs. Just the hiding of successful performance is obviously not the pattern that the director wants to show. The director needs to use this symbolic struggle to complete a contest between the tiniest individual and the grand war. At the same time, as I just mentioned earlier, the director needs to let Anna repair and maintain her human condition in terms of character development. In addition, through the hope and the pleasure of victory generated by this active struggle, it is necessary to form a paradoxical suspense with a certain despair at the end of the film, which causes people to think more.
Anna meets a rogue cat in her hiding place, becomes friends with it, shares scarce food, and repairs humanity hurt by primitive survival desires. But in order to avoid being discovered by the military dogs, she had to throw the cat out and fake the illusion that the indoor presence was a cat, so that the cat could take a terrible risk. After the cat was bitten by the military dog, the love and justice made Anna take the initiative to attack the evil forces represented by the Nazi army dogs, throwing poisoned food to the military dog, poisoning it (the soldier who managed it was shot on the spot by his commander, who was worse than a dog.) Think about it, it's not bad to be an overtime dog now)."
In the presentation of the story, the three aspects mentioned above are Anna's war, and of course the war of all the lowly people in the war. For those involved, the war is far from over, the slaughter continues in the planned order, and Death still rules the Jewish world. The director didn't give us a happy ending, anna's hopes of escaping death were dashed, and more military dogs suppressed her in that small place. The director is bad, he doesn't want to leave us any hints, none of us know Anna's final fate, the only thing we can know is that after the dark curtain of the movie, Anna is still fighting alone.
The tense and conflicting plot setting in this one-man show is really not much, but its narrative rhythm is not soothing at all, and the close-ups from the beginning hold us tightly. What Anna is going to do, what is she going to do next, what is she going to do next, this perplexed implicit tension spontaneously pushes us to experience a fragment of her life with little Anna. Mr. Chopsticks was drinking a strong beer and looking at it in the sofa, three cans down, the whole time without urine.
Tip: During World War II, about 6 million Jews were slaughtered, including about 1.5 million children, including those with disabilities in shelters. The motive for the massacre did not disappear because of the collapse of the Third Reich. It wanders the world like a ghost, constantly unleashing round after round of atrocities. Maybe in the time we were stringing and brushing the circle of friends, Annas with different skin colors were experiencing their own war in some corner.
【This article is the original of the wandering chopsticks, please indicate the source when reprinting】