"Comedy is tragedy plus time"
I admit that I didn't have a good life as the characters in my own work.
How would you expect a movie labeled "comedy," "love," and "fantasy"? Did it start with an adventure in "The Grand Budapest Hotel", or did it fall into the multiple dreams of "The House of the Unma" and finally greet the reunion of "Roman Holiday"?
▲ "Deconstructing Love Mania" Phoenix Satellite TV Movie Station was broadcast at 21:15 on September 10
"Deconstructing Love Mania" is difficult to summarize by these labels, it tells the story of a gray writer and his fragmented life. Like peat moss, he took inspiration from the people around him, and instead of enjoying the honor and love brought by his great works, he almost messed up all his feelings and could only share happiness with the characters in his works.
Perhaps you are even more confused, how to interpret "comedy" and "fantasy" for such a ridiculous and slightly sad protagonist? But when the film's choreographer and lead actor is Woody Allen, when he interprets "bereavement" with a very personal style of whimsy and black humor, let people know that sadness and self-deprecation are the funniest comedy.
Woody Allen is one of the most famous film directors in the United States, and has received 23 Oscar nominations and 4 Oscars so far
In Woody's creative career, there are many lighthearted and romantic comedies, such as "Anne Hall" in the 70s, and the rich jokes and romantic love stories have become the models for modern romantic comedy films;
By the end of the 90s, just as the producers in "Stardust Once Upon a Time" felt the aesthetic fatigue of the audience, "I will never make funny movies again", Woody Allen began to create more profound satirical films, and there was "Deconstructing Love Mania" born in 1997.
▲ The romantic comedy "Annie Hall" won the Academy Award for Best Picture
The work is no longer limited to a certain stage of life, but looks back at the past through a long experience, turning the past scandal into jokes.
01
Movie overview
Harry (Woody Allen) is a talented and famous writer who has been living a chaotic and disorderly life because of his nervousness and madness.
▲ "Deconstructing Love Mania" Douban score 8.6
He uses exaggerated artistic techniques to write about the people around him and what happens around him into his own novels, including his own emotional experiences with many women: meeting his ex-wife's sister, having a relationship with a book fan, and portraying his father as a "wife-killing ogre"...
Harry published the most terrible secrets of his work into the material of the work, won the success of the work, and was praised by critics, but he also hurt and offended many people around him, and since then everyone has rebelled.
▲ The ex-wife's sister accuses Harry of revealing their meeting in the book
Even more painfully, Harry was surprisingly honest about his questions. He can't really control his desires, nor can he be responsible for each other, and can only constantly remind each other to "not really love each other" before both parties sink.
He is well aware that his life is a mess, his real life is constantly intertwined with the fictional plots in the novel, and at the same time he finds that his inspiration is beginning to dry up.
Harry tries to deconstruct his own real life, deconstruct the lives of fictional characters in his novels, and deconstruct the impact of fictional characters in his own lives. Can this genius writer, who cannot operate his life normally, but can only exert his talents in art, deconstruct the "truth" in his life?
From a writer's point of view, Harry is an unreserved, sacrificial life-loving artistic creator. He sees life as an experience, extracts material from it for artistic processing, and then faces his lover's hysterical rupture again and again.
Humanity, racial beliefs, and family responsibilities could not limit the scale of Harry's artistic life, and freedom and imagination were his charms, yet moral accusations would not turn a blind eye to a talented writer. Even the most imaginative talents live in the real world, and Harry is no exception.
At a time when his life was at a rock's throw, he received an invitation to the honorary ceremony of his alma mater, hoping that this would save people's evaluation of him. Unfortunately, Harry, who had a bad reputation, lost the trust of his old friend, and no one was willing to accompany him to witness this glorious moment.
He had to find a prostitute to accompany him, and the next day his friend Richard also came to accompany him, and on the way he also kidnapped his son from his ex-wife... What will happen to such a strange foursome on the way?
▲ Stills from "Deconstructing Love Mania"
Who would have thought that on the way to the ceremony, the prostitute was found to be carrying drugs, the friend Richard suffered an accidental death, and Harry himself was accused of kidnapping his son by his ex-wife and was put in prison... After being released on bail by a female classmate who had a relationship, the last person to walk on the podium with Harry was the person he was proud of.
Harry emotionally thanks them for the happy times he spent with them, and it was these fictional characters who taught him to accept that he "can't do something" and live well. A writer who receives honors with his work is, in a way, the most appropriate way.
Harry thanked him at the ceremony of honor for the character he had created
After the ceremony, Harry sat back at his desk and muttered that he wanted to create a character who "cannot function properly in life, but can only play in art" character.
For a moment, looking back at the scenes of the entire film, it is suddenly difficult to distinguish what really happened and what Harry imagined in order to create, only to know that everything we have just seen has become his material again, and Harry continues to dedicate himself to art.
02
Off-camera
After watching the film overview and character settings, I don't know if you have found some visual sense from it.
The protagonist of the film, Harry, engages in nonsense with his wife's sister, his wife's sick, students, prostitutes, etc. In reality, Woody Allen, a top director in his 80s, sits on a world-renowned film and television work, and also has the "stain" of his life that has accompanied him for nearly 30 years - sexually assaulting underage adopted daughters and marrying adopted daughters.
In 1980, Woody Allen began a relationship with the divorced Mia Farrow and became lovers, but Woody seemed completely unimpressed with children, and he was reluctant to spend time with Mia's children when the two were first together. The two did not have children together, but after 3 years together, adopted a blonde girl, Dylan Farrow.
Woody Allen (third from left) and Mia Farrow (first from right) are in love with adopted children
After this, Woody's attitude towards children gradually changed and became more "intimate". Mia once advised Woody to see a psychiatrist, but the psychologist came into contact with Woody and said: "He did behave inappropriately, but it was not about sex, just because he was not often with children and thought it was a way to express love." ”
Mia will be suspicious and will then be kindly reminded whenever she sees Woody acting excessively intimately. Woody will also be reminded, which reassures Mia.
But in January 1992, at the end of their romance, Mia found nude photos of his adopted daughter Song Yi (a Korean girl that Song Yi adopted for Mia and her ex-husband, who is now Woody Allen's wife) at woody Allen's residence. This made her feel that things were not as simple as the psychiatrist judged.
After some internal struggle, in August 1992, Mia formally accused Woody Allen of molesting Dylan Farrow. On the other hand, many of Song Yi's statements, including the cause of death of her adopted son and adopted daughter who has died, and Mia's neglect of adopted children, are different from those of Mia and other family members.
▲ In 1997, Woody Allen married his adopted daughter Song Yi, who was 35 years old, and this year was also the time when the movie "Deconstructing Love Mania" was released
This year, with the broadcast of the documentary "Allen Vs. Farrow", two versions of the story about the director's sexual assault scandal have once again entered the public eye:
In the "victim" version, Woody Allen, as a father, molests his 7-year-old daughter in a frenzied manner, while in the "perpetrator" version, everything is farce, with the ghostly mother Mia Farrow instigating her daughter to falsely accuse her father of sexually assaulting her.
What is the truth? No one knows.
Perhaps the original intention of Woody Allen's 1997 creation of "Deconstructing Love Mania" was to use Harry to "deconstruct" himself in real life.
Although he has long been labeled as a "drug" of sexual assault, Woody Allen has been active in Hollywood as a gold medal director for nearly 30 years. It was only in recent years, as the worldwide cultural resistance to sexual assault in the entertainment industry increased, more and more women spoke up for their own suffering, and men were responsible for their own misconduct, and his famous aura was broken.
▲ Douban 8.2 high score documentary collection "Podcast Hunt: Hollywood Sex Scandal"
The "understanding" and "tolerance" treatment that Woody Allen has received over the years reflects the atmosphere of hollywood film circles and makes people sigh.
There are three major sexual assault cases in Hollywood, one is Roman Polanski's rape of young girls, the second is Michael Jackson's molestation of boys, and the third is Woody Allen's sexual assault of adopted girls
Melissa, founder and publisher of the film news website Women in Hollywood. Silverstein, who advocates for gender equality, says: "Working with Woody Allen is no longer so glorious, and I think his time is over!" It should have long since passed! ”
Melissa. Silverstein predicts that Woody. Every step of Allen's planning process will get harder and harder, including raising money and actors. "#MeToo和Time's Up, the two games continue to evolve, and with them not going away, Woody Allen will only have more trouble."
03
Shooting method
What the world cannot deny, however, is the talent of Woody Allen. Back to "Deconstructing Love Mania", this movie is full of a lot of narration, monologues and dialogues, and the language-intensive output of the film is usually easy to distract people, but Woody has achieved a good audiovisual effect by cleverly using scene scheduling and cooperating with Harry's high-intensity golden sentence output.
▲ Harry nervously complains from time to time, and if he is not careful, he may miss the details and laughs
The film begins with a woman in a trench coat coming to Harry's house to beg for an explanation. The picture of a woman getting off a taxi and walking into the courtyard is repeated many times, accompanied by the technique of "dropping frames" to create an incoherent perception, suggesting that "someone complains" that often occurs, and the originator of the perspective may also have an unstable mental state.
Similar audiovisual language is used many times in the film, in Harry's subjective perspective, there are often jumping frames or blurry pictures, and in the dialogue of the characters, he also conveys his psychological state of "uneasiness" and "anxiety" through the shooting method of over-the-shoulder mid-shot.
During Harry's mental decline, feeling unappreciated and abandoned by his family, he imagines himself as a "obscured" person. Like a supporting role that the camera doesn't focus on, the outline is blurred in people's line of sight.
▲ Harry's imagination of the "obscured" person
In his subjective perspective, the film appears from time to time with black spots, as well as large pieces of blurring, expressing the abnormal vision of the characters. In order to highlight the contrast, "front and back" is also applied to both sides of the camera in the play, on the one hand is a normal person with a clear face, on the other hand is a small character with a blurred outline, and the camera switch directly shows a completely different picture in the same scene, filling in the changing visual effects in the long dialogue.
The design and execution of this place can be described as amazingly ingenious: the abstract concept of "neglected person" is transformed into a visual "sense of blurring", which conforms to the shallow and deep meaning of "seeing", and intuitively expresses the overall image of the character; the implementation of picture blur processing is not difficult, and in the whole film focusing on small spaces, the use of restrictions becomes a feature.
Combining the possibility that the entire film is Harry's reserve material for his next work makes people even more impressed that he is indeed a brilliant and imaginative creator.
04
Reality and fiction
Just as the character building in Harry's work is exaggerated by art, Harry himself in the film may be a more extreme example, but it is undeniable that he has the representative characteristics of many creators.
The struggle between artistic pursuit and life needs is a matter that every creator needs to weigh, especially the author who takes personal life as the main source of material, will inevitably dig more stories, graft and combine different materials, and exaggerate reality with imagination.
When the boundaries between "real" and "fiction" are repeatedly blurred, it is indeed possible to offend the characters who really exist.
Bi Feiyu's "Back feeding- the reverse creation of fictional characters to fictional authors" once proposed that the most basic professional characteristics of novelists are not writing, not imagining, not fiction, but morbidly and wishful thinking in fiction.
"He believes in the truth of fiction; he believes in the degree of display of fiction; he believes in fictional sense of existence; even if fiction is immaterial and non-three-dimensional. The characters in the fictional world are nothing but people, but people themselves. ”
"The novelist and the characters he depicts are one in the light and one in the dark. One is material and one is immaterial. They are in the same space-time, are they in the same time-space. It's a very unique, very subtle, almost eerie kind of interpersonal relationship. ”
Harry confessed affectionately to the characters he created
Faced with the difference of "you inject your heart into the work, while I live with my heart", from which moral accusations, violations of religious beliefs and evasion of family responsibilities have gradually emerged, the creator will not be completely detached from life because of the work, but will be deeply involved in it.
Most of the creators have such a helpless and sad color, and few people can present more happiness like Harry. He frankly admits that all he has is imagination, accepting a messy life is his price, has no interest in making a makeover, and feels the joy of creation on top of the sadness of life.
No one can really break free from the shackles of life, but the purer creators can always be more determined, facing the rupture between fiction and reality.
There are also pure artists who cannot accept the great changes in reality, and 1900 in "The Pianist of the Sea" finally does not step off his ship, looking down at the bustling crowds of the dock, knowing that the era of great navigation that belongs to him has passed, and turning around to leave a tall and decent back.
This does not determine that he is a tragic figure, and the incomprehensible gaze of others will not let the creator's artistic life be damaged in the slightest, and he himself will not feel sorry for himself, let alone blame others.
▲ Stills of "The Pianist at Sea"
In the 2016 fire of the British drama "London Life", which turned life into a work, the screenwriter and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge dialogued with the audience by breaking the fourth wall, showing that the protagonist's fragmented life is not in exchange for sympathy, but the embarrassment, struggle and love in the work have aroused widespread empathy.
Although the protagonist's profession is not that of an artist, like "Deconstructing Love Mania", the creators themselves are also characters in the work, tearing apart the various faces of life and telling the artist and ordinary people to "stop pitying each other and live well".
▲British comedy "London Life"
"Deconstructing Love Mania" presents a terrible side of a writer's life, and still inserts a lot of laughs into it. Some details make people laugh, and the collapse of a relationship is regrettable, but throughout Harry's life, he has tried his best to fight for a connection with people, and has not completely given up and drawn a clear line, because of his extraordinary creativity.
This may be the way the film interprets "comedy", whether you are an artist or not, the heart that tries to analyze yourself and desires acceptance is similar.
Everyone has a hopeless moment, there has been the experience of searching up and down for nothing, there has been a past that has done everything to fail, at least we can continue to try, accept ourselves who can't, and live well.
Coming soon
Deconstructing Love Mania September 10, 21:15
Text | Luo Qianyi
Edit | Skylar