German director Fayt Helmer's new film The Bra, Chinese title is "Bra Adventure", which has the meaning of a bad disney princess film. In fact, the story takes place in an underdeveloped area of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where train tracks are even laid directly on narrow streets tightly clamped by dilapidated row houses.
In 2007, After filming "The Absurdist" in Azerbaijan, Helmer saw a report on the dilapidated "Shanghai" district of the capital Baku (which locals thought was the sight of Shanghai) on Radio Free Europe. In one photo, the train runs straight into a cluttered neighborhood. Helmer was so shocked that he immediately decided to make a movie with this as a backdrop. In "Brass", it is popular to dry clothes on the street, and the clothesline hangs on the railroad tracks and flutters with the wind. Whenever the train passes through "Shanghai", the chatting neighbors are scattered, and the women are anxious to retrieve their clothes. The protagonist, Nuran, is a retired train driver, a well-meaning man who is responsible for returning the clothes and pants that fly into the window to the residents every day after work.
According to Helmer, "Shanghai" people were a little angry when they saw the film, because the railroad tracks were where they threw garbage instead of drying clothes. The Azerbaijani government also did not like the script, and they wanted to show the modern side of the country, such as skyscrapers.
Back in the movie, one day, a blue lace bra hit the locomotive. Nuran put his bra in his satchel and knocked on the door from house to house. It should be difficult to find the owner of the bra: Azerbaijan is a Muslim country, and women must be fully armed even if they only have their heads sticking out of the door, how can they take the bra sent by a strange man?
But from here, the director skips the taboo question, and "who is the owner of the bra" from a question of fact to a "Cinderella-esque story", "a universe of another gender". Just as all girls in fairy tales expect themselves to be the rightful owners of the crystal shoes (even though they know very well that they have never worn them), in Brass, the woman behind the door sees the blue corner of the satchel, welcomes Nuran through the door, happily undresses and changes into a bra, and does not shy away.
Whether the woman was fat or thin, old enough to be in a wheelchair or underdeveloped, Nuran generously handed over the bra. In order to make the bra fit with themselves, everyone racked their brains: some used clips to secretly clip loose ties, some would paddle a piece of cloth at the back seam to widen, and some in order to cover up the ill-fitting of the bra, they changed into a black gauze long skirt and danced a beautiful dance to try to divert Nulan's attention, but they were all exposed by Nuran's eyes.
Later, Nuranso pretended to do a chest X-ray examination for all the women in the van, so that everyone lined up and went into the car one by one to undress, and he observed through the image whether the women and the bra matched. During filming, nearby residents were suspicious and came to ask the crew, is this a film? The police also came looking for trouble. It is true that various breasts become the protagonists of the second half of the film, but these half-naked scenes are not vulgar, but exude a brisk absurdity.
That blue bra is so important to all women, but why is it important? It is not clarified in the film. Some of the earliest people who have seen the film have analyzed on IMDb or Douban that the bra symbolizes patriarchy, religion, and the imprisonment of women; Or, conversely, it's the code for women to pursue freedom.
At a post-screening conference in Beijing in April, a male audience member asked, is the meaning of bra sex? Helmer happily avoided the symbolic meaning of the bra and replaced it with ridicule, fortunately he chose an old man as the male lead, "If you choose a young man to be the main actor, he may have the same association as this audience." 」 ”
In an interview with foreign media, Helmer said that "Bra Adventure" is "the practice of magicism." Unlike his famous predecessors in the New Wave of German cinema, he liked to photograph "places not found on the map" with an outsider's eye, pursuing visual ingenuity, as was the case with Rhapsody (1999) and several subsequent films. After filming digitally, "Bra Adventure" deliberately let the artist make it old and present the texture of the film. It's still a silent film of actors from 10 countries, without a single line, but each of the 700 shots has the improvisation of the actors, which also makes the film full of unpredictable details. "For me, storytelling without dialogue is the purest form of cinematic art. Everyone can understand it. He said.
*This article is excerpted from the "Southern People Weekly" issue 14, 2019, the sharing content is limited to reading promotion and auxiliary purchase decisions, the resource copyright belongs to the original publishing institution, friends who like magazines, you can subscribe to the magazine shop!