Ice Storm or Ice Storm? Black humor in a white world

"Ice Storm" (film stills/photos)

Ethan Cohen and Joe Cohen brothers wrote and directed "Ice Storm" to put the Coen brothers' family of three on the podium. The work won best original screenplay at the 69th Academy Awards and Best Actress by Joe Cohen's wife, Francis McDormand.

It's the film noir that's least like film noir.

The opening credits begin with the following: "This is a true story." ...... Due to the requirements of the survivors, the names of the people in the film were changed, and out of respect for the deceased, the story was told strictly according to the real situation. ”

In fact, this is a completely fictional story, completely in accordance with the way of the big melodrama. Those subtitles are a stylistic self-correlation, and with these subtitles, the Coen brothers make a little joke with the audience, which shows a certain self-consciousness of the author's narrative tradition and narrative style. These subtitles may remind us of early films and later crime stories, and authors often draw themes from social news and crime events.

The story of the film is like a crime story that we are familiar with. Jerry, a car dealer, wants to swindle some money from his father-in-law, so he hires two gangsters to kidnap his wife, which leads to a large number of corpses. In the ice and snow, blood splashed everywhere.

The first time I watched this work, I didn't think it was very black, but I vaguely felt that there was an uncomfortable strange tone permeated with it. If you want to look at its images, there are no segmented pictures of classic film noir, large light ratio lighting and other iconic visual processing methods. When the story comes to an end, the murderer is captured and imprisoned in the back seat of the police car, which can also be regarded as promoting the belief in the legal system.

There's a whole bunch of contradictory elements in Ice Storm. You see, the housewife-style detective and the irrational killing of the violent murderer are juxtaposed, the snowy and clear world is opposite to the blood splashing everywhere, the warm and idyllic scenes of family life are alternately woven with the stupid killing scenes; the textured simple realistic picture scrolls coexist with the strong black humor style.

In fact, in its seemingly mixed elements, there is an inherent tonality, and the whole film is unified in a certain style of black humor. Many times, when the director plays hilarious, he will come up with some kind of unbridled comedic elements. In the scene where two kidnappers kidnap Jerry's wife, we see the kind of unbridled, arbitrary rough behavior. The wife who screamed and ran away was found hiding behind the curtain in the bathroom, and rolled down the stairs with her head covered by the plastic curtain, so that we did not know whether our laughter at this time exposed the darkness and even cruelty of our hearts.

What turns these comedic styles into black is the killing and death in the work. This fake kidnapping in order to deceive my father-in-law's money was completely out of control. Two kidnappers killed each other at will, killing each other, and in the clean and white ice world, there were seven corpses lying down! According to the content of this story, the title of the film should really be translated as "Ice Storm".

These killings and blood stain the film with a strong black tone. The killing in this film is a crude, irrational killing. This gratuitous killing is meticulously choreographed by the director and perfectly presented.

The author wrote the two kidnappers as characters. Their criminal behavior is a kind of madness because of stupid randomness, out of smugness and laziness. The silent criminal, when questioned by the police, did not bother to make up nonsense and fool around, pulled over and shot him in the head. He guards the kidnapped Mrs. Jerry and beats her to death just because the housewife is shouting and shouting. He was the same with his accomplices, who were slightly controversial about the sharing of the loot, and he shot him to death, not wanting to care about where the looted ransom was.

The leprosy criminal played by Steve Basmy reminds me of the chattering clown in Knight of the Night, obsessively preaching his own murderous principles. Although he is not as proactive as his accomplices in killing people, he is also crazy enough.

As with many film noirs, authors will prefer to use contingency in their stories to change the course of the story. The characters in this work often kill people under unexpected, accidental, and immediate impulses. The scene where the language-disordered, whom I call the Silent Killer, suddenly kills the police officers on the highway who come to interrogate them makes me cry out in surprise as I watch. The horror and surprise here catch up with the black laughter of the irrational killing, the accidental killing of Pulp Fiction, and the bad laughter of Quentin Tarantino.

In these two low-level criminals, the author writes about the same mental state. What I saw was their confusion, their stupidity and panic in the face of the human world. This kind of crime seems to be fierce, but in fact, the abuser faces the language barrier and communication barrier caused by the aphasia of society. Because of their mental retardation or inner weakness, they lose their bond with society and with others. They will only stubbornly recite their own chaotic creeds, and they will also take these logical self-entangled creeds as profound and reasonable sayings.

The two criminal figures are juxtaposed with Maggie Ganderson, the sheriff of The Small Town, who is pregnant with Rokko, forming the character map of the film. The character of Maggie is beautifully portrayed, a cop with a big belly, reinventing the familiar private investigators in film noir who are crammed between the law and the criminals, often beaten to the face.

Sheriff Maggie is Miss Temple from the Midwest. She lives in a warm cabin with her husband, Nome, and in the early hours of the morning, she gets a call that there is a murder somewhere. Noam insisted on making something for her to eat. Like Miss Temple in Agatha Christie's, she solved the case not by a revolver and a well-built hand, but by careful thinking, familiarity with and contemplation of the world. In the story of solving the case, the director arranged for an old classmate to come to see her, which seemed like a idle pen that swung out. Perhaps it was from this classmate who told her imaginary family story that she got some kind of inspiration, so she went to question Jerry again. Her slow, long-paced inquiry with a thick accent, but full of logical power, made Jerry's question stammer and drove away on the spot.

The couple's bedside dialogue allows the audience to end the film in an idyllic atmosphere, with Maggie congratulating her husband on the duck being chosen as the motif of a three-cent stamp. Maggie's law enforcement actions and her warm family somewhat dilute the film's gloom and blackness. American film critic Roger Ebert said: "Darkness and cold oppress everything, and here, there is the warm cabin of Sheriff Maggie and her husband." ”

The film's original name, Fargo, is just a place name, not with some visual element like the translated name of the Chinese. However, the land landscape and visual environment of the clear ice and snow world in the film form a certain irony or contrast with the characteristic crime and the unbridled blood color in the story.

Snow Storm is an out-of-the-box, reinvented style of the film noir genre. I classify this type of film as the "Baroque style" that André Bazin loved and named, that is, "with Baroque formalism or symbolic conceptualism, Noon is its representative." It is a kind of creation in which the form is exquisite, carved and renovated, and the exploration of new forms and themes is infused with new elements into old types.

A successful renovation type brings a defamiliarization pleasure, an aesthetic pleasure, and sometimes its typological outliers make us unrecognizable or difficult to belong to its type. Ice Storm is one such work.