"I Want to End It All": Warmth in Disorder

Willow Warbler/Text

Charlie Kaufman is a very stylized ghost director, whether it is his live-action or animated works, without exception, in a brain-opening way, to explore the intricate emotions of contemporary people, both the joy of facing the world and the loneliness of being born as a human being. At any stage of his work, he wrote footnotes for the world around him with childlike eyes. The same is true of the new work "I Want to End It All".

On the poster for the movie, a thoughtful figure sits quietly in front of a wall covered with dark green wallpaper, in front of a family feast, and the hand holding the wine glass seems to be hesitating whether to continue to import the wine. The man had curly hair and was wearing a loose striped sweater, and it took a closer look to identify a woman. The poster seems to want to create a strong family atmosphere, but the characters' slightly stiff expressions and dull tones faintly show a certain uneasiness.

Entering the positive film, this atmosphere becomes more and more obvious. The film begins with a road trip in which Jack and his soon-to-be-known girlfriend, Louise, drive to a farm on the outskirts of the city to make a home-to-house visit to his parents. It's a cold winter, the city is already snowing, and the further you go outside, the more extreme the weather becomes. Louise was absent-minded in the center of the car. Her inner monologue tells the audience that she wants to end the trip early and rush back to the city before dark in order to do the next day's work. In the face of her boyfriend who is driving, she is not completely moved, and even has some thoughts of breaking up.

The first thirty minutes of the film are aimed at the two people in the car, and the dialogue that comes and goes explains their background and hobbies, although it is slightly dull, but it is fully paved for the subsequent plot development. Audiences familiar with Kaufman's style should have been fidgety by this time. As a director, he has never been willing to be bored, such a long plot, must be brewing something explosive. Sure enough, upon arriving at Jack's parents' farm, the plot begins to intensify, a runaway dinner, with the characters constantly changing their ages and their ways of speaking and mood mutating with different spaces.

I have to admit that Kaufman is a good at creating atmosphere, just through the change of light and clothing, let the audience perceive the difference. The twenty-minute dinner scene is full of wonderful transitions and surprises (or scares) that come at any time. In the confined space, the atmosphere reaches a climax at one point. The most amazing thing is that Kaufman integrates the loneliness and excitement of a person's life into this scene - the gap between parents and children, the unspeakable secrets within the family, the pain and sweetness of growing up, all presented in a magical way that withdraws from reality. The audience looks at jack's family with "intruder" Louise, only to inadvertently discover that she is not entirely self-consistent. Louise's identity gradually appears in the narrative, she will be a painter, a restaurant receptionist, and a poet... Was her memory skewed, or was there something else wrong with the visit? Kaufmann constructs an unreliable but captivating narrative between the legs, sparing no effort to increase the audience's curiosity.

Louise, who wanted to leave Jack's parents' house, kept urging her boyfriend, and finally got her wish. The road back is snowy and full of "Mulholland Road" esoteric confusion. Ice cream shops still open on the road exude Kaufman's signature fantasy atmosphere. It is like a habitat in a child's dream, providing sweet comfort, but also containing a hint of uneasiness. The director is constantly providing the audience with fragmented puzzles and guiding them to deduce the whole picture of the story. It is not until the final chapter of the film that the game of peeping leopard in the tube is over. But what is more regrettable is that the director used a very dramatic dance and stage play to reveal the mystery to the audience. It turns out that all the previous narratives in the film are the thoughts of a polycycle patient before his death, half dreaming and half awake, and the real and the fiction coexist. He spent his life's strength, thinking (or constructing) the lovers and parents who floated through his life, and using the logic of romance to death, he ended his journey on earth.

"I Want to End It All" is based on the novel of the same name by Canadian post-80s writer Ian Reed, and it has a strong literary nature. The film version also explores the human perception of time through the mouths of characters, from Wordsworth's poetry to Guy Debo's social theory of landscapes, from Casavetti's "Drunken Woman" to the musical classic Oklahoma. This kind of intellectual dialogue makes the viewing process interesting. The downside is that some of the transitions in the film are sloppy, and the style transitions are also broken. As a director with strong personal emotions, Kaufman finally added a touch of hard warmth to the film, which is also a pity.

Editor-in-charge Li Jianhua Intern Li Geli

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