Stills from The Best of Innocence
1905 Movie Network special article Douban opened a score of 9.2, the number of viewers exceeded 40,000 people, and it still maintains a high score of 8.7, and "The Best of Innocence" is on fire.
The director of this suspenseful new drama should be very familiar to everyone, that is, the director of "The Invisible Guest" and "Mirage" Oriol Paul, both of which have landed in domestic theaters, the former Douban score of 8.8, the latter 7.7, the quality is excellent.
The Spanish suspense director turned to the Netflix platform this time, wrote and directed his own mini-series for the first time, and created a word-of-mouth hit. The size of the two-hour film can no longer carry Paul's ambition for suspense narrative, and "The Best of Innocence" has a total of 8 episodes, each of which is about 1 hour, which is equivalent to an 8-hour movie, which is enough for him to show his skills.
Paul's previous works often have a solid material foundation, "The Invisible Guest" and "Mirage" are all derived from social news, and "Innocence" is adapted from the novel of the same name by the famous writer Harlan Coburn.
Suspense-themed film and television works are often labeled as "brain-burning", and the term "brain-burning" has been abused, so that once "brain-burning" is used to make recommendations, the audience often does not believe it. But this is not the case with "The Best of Innocence", it does "burn the brain", and it does not stop at "burning the brain".
01.
How to burn the brain?
How to make a wonderful suspense story? Director Paul always insists on a creative secret: the first five minutes of the opening, throw out the core event questions, get straight to the point, and directly grab the audience's attention. From the movie to the series, "The Best of Innocence" also implements this - the male protagonist Matt is partying in a nightclub, because of an accidental dispute and a group fight, accidentally killing the boy Danny.
The opening scene is exactly five minutes long, and the next plot progresses very quickly, with a set of less than 5 minutes of montage footage passages telling Matt's follow-up story one by one.
He was sentenced to four years in prison for manslaughter and has always felt guilty about Danny's parents: he was bullied in prison, prompting him to work hard, his parents died in a car accident, and one day he met his true love Olivia...
After his release from prison, with the help of his lawyer brother, he worked hard to make a career and became the owner of a law firm, but his brother died unexpectedly, and he also met Olivia again, married her, and Olivia soon became pregnant.
Ten minutes to shoot so many things, enough information, but all this is just foreplay. Olivia is going to Berlin on a business trip, but Matt receives a small video from a strange man of Olivia sleeping naked in the hotel, and another strange man is also following Matt, even driving a car and pulling out a gun to threaten him.
With "Danny's Death" as the introduction, the first episode lays a lot of doubts: did Olivia cheat? Who are the two strange men? Was it all caused by Danny's death or a mysterious past he had in prison?
Entering the second episode with a bunch of questions, it is strange that Matt and the case have disappeared, and instead begin to tell the growth story of a policewoman, Lorena, and immediately focus on her investigation into the fall of Sister Maria.
The suspense of the first episode was paved with new characters and plot threads. I thought that the nun's fall from the building was just a side story, but when I saw the end of the second episode, a wonderful foreshadowing that was carefully buried was revealed.
Did the nun commit suicide or murder? After Lorena's in-depth investigation, it was discovered that the nun had a false identity. On the other hand, the Special Crimes Section is also closely monitoring the case, but orders Lorena not to step into interference.
Insisting on her opinion, Lorena did not give up, and she found that the nun had a call record with Matt's brother's family before she died, and only Matt was taking care of the children at her brother's house that day, and the suspicion pointed to Matt.
So Lorena went to Brother Matt's house and rang the doorbell. Meanwhile, Matt receives strict instructions from the strange man who recorded the video at home, the bell rings to open the door, and the two look at each other. The two story lines finally intersected, and this suspenseful drama was really opened at this moment.
The grass snake gray line laid the puzzle, and the mysterious snowball rolled bigger and bigger, until the fifth episode, the whole situation and the people, things and things involved were gradually clear, and the audience was getting closer and closer to the truth.
The degree of "brain-burning" of "The Best of Innocence" is not the incomprehensible level of "Mulholland Road" and "Twin Peaks" that remains in the fog until the end, but it is difficult to see everything that happens without a brain and without keeping up with the rhythm. This is the charm of this suspenseful drama.
After Paul made "The Invisible Guest", he invited the audience to watch the film in advance, and 95% of the audience could not guess the ending. The same is true of "The Best of Innocence", perhaps a part of the witty audience can guess who the murderer is, but it is difficult to get a glimpse of the full truth.
Because the story of each episode is floating in succession, the narrative structure is multi-line crossover, there is more than one case, and there are many characters in the scene, there are connections, before solving the puzzle, it seems that every person in the bureau has an unfathomable suspicious move, and for the face-blind audience, it increases the threshold for watching the drama - you have to write down dozens of character identities and their lengthy names.
This is a narrative labyrinth that must follow the guidance of the screenwriter to get out. While solving the questions left behind by the previous episode, it creates new suspense at the end of each episode, while all the clues to the final answer are quietly hidden in the details of each episode.
If you watch the first two episodes and then jump to the last episode, you can indeed reach the face of the black hand behind the scenes, but you will also miss a key main line set in the middle of the process, without the tight tandem of this plot line, this puzzle piece cannot be spliced successfully.
It turns out that not only Maria has a false identity, but Olivia has also disguised her identity, they were once the same nightclub girl, and a mutual friend Jimi, who was forced by the lascivious power of the nightclub owner and assisted him in the skin and meat business for the elite, which involved the video tape of the number 27 person, and had a close relationship with the undercover Theo sent by the Special Crimes Section.
It was this videotape that sparked this cascade of crises for years to come, bringing all stakeholders together.
"The Invisible Guest" continues to create suspense with 43 reversals, while "The Best of Innocence" is different. The play starts from the merger of two cases, but does not follow the original reasoning, and the core of the puzzle is not in the reversal of events, but around the characters themselves. "Obscuring identity" is the biggest feature of this drama in story creation, and it is also the secret book of "brain burning" created this time.
Everyone has an identity on the table, and there are hidden identities, wrapped in lies and motives. We first see the iceberg on the surface of the sea, and when the other corner of the sea is also revealed, we can break through the fog and reach the truth.
In terms of shooting techniques, the blindfold method of "covering the complete scene" was used many times, for example, in the same scene shot, matt was only half-covered to shoot Matt fighting with the prisoner, causing suspense, and then the full picture of the incident was filmed.
In other words, only a part of the valid information is explained, and the complete and accurate information is obscured until the moment of revelation, so that the audience is followed by and creates a huge sense of surprise at the moment when the mystery is revealed.
Paul has said that he likes to interfere with the audience's audiovisuality and guide the audience to guess in a certain direction. This kind of "narrative trickery" technique is many in "The Best of Innocence", which constantly affects the audience's judgment and thinking.
In the first episode, the deaths of Matt's parents and brother, Danny's mother treating Matt as a son, the whispers Olivia told the doctor during pregnancy tests, and the details of her business trip without knowing the hotel itinerary will make the audience have unlimited associations, some of which are key strokes, some of which are deliberately set up to interfere with the information.
The most fundamental thing is that the characters, scenes and plot settings in "The Best of Innocence" are based on reasonable realistic logic, and grasping this point first convinces the audience, and with sufficient convincing, there is room and possibility to weave "brain-burning".
02.
"Brain burning" behind
The process is "brain-burning" and the result is "sober". Although there are loopholes and deficiencies in many plot details of "The Best of Innocence", such as Danny's father who witnessed the crime scene can immediately instruct the murderer, Theo of the Special Crimes Section does not destroy it immediately after getting the videotape, and then easily shoots himself under the lock of a group of policemen. But the flaws do not hide Yu, and it does not hinder the brilliance of this suspense drama.
Paul once said that when he was creating, he would first think about the beginning and the end, "all the storyline in the middle is like a bridge, filling in the content." "These contents in the middle of "The Best of Innocence" not only have suspense skills, but more importantly, they have touching emotions and strong text expression support.
The previous history of ordinary characters will not appear in the main film, but the show will make a prehistory story of a key character in each episode, which is equivalent to giving out the character biography in its entirety, and their personality and the social personality shaped by their encounters become an important part of the story.
These montage passages about the character's prehistory are narrated with "you" as the main language, which is also rare, unlike the subjective and third-person objective point of view in the first person, told in the second person, both close to the true side of the character, but also maintain a little distance, with a sense of suspense.
Innocence takes a different approach to integrating psychology into suspenseful narratives.
For example, in the portrayal of the policewoman Lorena, the reason why she is independent and strong is because she witnessed her father's suicide in her childhood and experienced the abandonment of her mother. Later, because she was 4cm shorter and almost unable to become a policeman, she insisted on wearing high heels, and after successfully solving the case and being promoted, she put on sneakers in front of her father's grave.
These meticulous strokes make the characters more plump and three-dimensional, without becoming tools for threading needles and threads.
Almost all the "guilty people" in the play are originally intended to pursue happiness, and they all have idealized imaginations of a better life, but they fall into the cultivation field of sin and punishment.
Olivia hides her unbearable past in order to live a new life with Matt. Detective Teo, the chief of the Special Crimes Section, is pursuing indecent tapes at all costs for the sake of his daughter and his happy family. Jimmy's hatred for her former friend Olivia is due to the irrational behavior of being betrayed by her beloved and having her heart broken.
This is also the advantage of the series in terms of human settings, except for the absolute villain of the nightclub old man Neba, the main characters have not fallen into the face, and there is no stereotypical opposition to distinguish between good people and bad people. They all have unspeakable secrets, and they all have helplessness.
In the current rising wave of feminism, this is also a work that praises the female group. It criticizes the filth and filth of patriarchal society and the upper class, and praises the friendship and mutual help between women.
Especially the sisterhood of Olivia, Jimi and The Sister Maria, who together manage to escape Hannibal's clutches, Maria leaves a suicide note to free Olivia from criminal responsibility, after which Jimi binds and frames Olivia, and Olivia still blocks bullets for her when the police shoot her...
However, "The Best of Innocence" does not fall into the extremist feminist expression, and there is no evil of hitting men with a stick. Relative to others, the male protagonist Matt is an innocent person in this chaos, and the female leader of the Special Crimes Section will also shield his subordinates. It should be said that it is about the good and evil in human nature, every person, every individual, regardless of gender.
There's a line in the play that describes Matt: "You'll let go of everything in the past, you'll think about everything you can be, you'll decide to do your best, to embrace a new life, until you feel like you have everything you want, everything you've been fighting for for years, and then you'll know that you don't need anything else to feel happy, maybe you just buried something in your heart." 」 ”
We can't get rid of the past, the past will eventually come back to us, and self-deception and distrust of intimate people will push the past and the present into the abyss, which is what "The Best of Innocence" wants to say.
Behind the suspense, what do you see in the play?