Wen 丨 West Parker
Imagine if you were an ordinary woman living in the northeastern United States 150 years ago, with poor material conditions, a poor spiritual life, struggling with food and clothing every day, and life for you to see the end at a glance, is there still hope for life? Do you still have illusions about the future?
It may be hard for modern people to imagine what it would be like to be a woman whose desires were suppressed in a desperate time. And director Mona Fasteld's new film "Open Heart World" puts us in the shoes of a housewife in 1856, in the form of a diary, restoring the most fertile era, unwilling to fate of women, experienced the most fiery love and desire.
"Open Heart World"
Adapted from the 2017 novel of the same name by American writer Jim Shepard, Open Hearts tells the story of Abby Gale, farmer Dale's wife, Abby Gale, who lost her daughter to diphtheria in the 1850s during the Great Frontier in New York State.
One day, The wife of the new neighbor Finney, Tully, visits the house, and the two become friends who talk about everything. In the process of getting along, the two women gradually fell in love and developed into an intimate relationship, all of which was recorded by Abigail in his diary. As Tully refused to share a room with her husband, causing her husband's displeasure, he began to obstruct the two from meeting and moved to another farm. The two could only write letters to communicate. One day, Abigail did not receive a reply from Tully, went to her house to look for it, but finally found only Tully's body, which is a tragedy of the times that cannot be loved.
Fast Od is a post-80s talented woman, not only a director, but also a screenwriter and actor, who has previously directed "Wanderer", and this film is her second directorial work. At last year's Venice Film Festival, the film received a good reputation at its premiere, and was called a female version of "Brokeback Mountain" by a large number of media, and finally won the Queer Lion Award.
In fact, in addition to the tragic story of two heterosexuals with families, becoming same-sex lovers, and finally dying, the two are actually very different in narrative techniques. "Brokeback Mountain" is a parallel narrative of two protagonists experiencing temporal changes in different spaces, while this film uses the diary as a narrator, digging deep into the various waves in the protagonist Abigail's heart, and contrasting with the barrenness of the external world, delicately showing the rich inner world of this character, which is a completely single-line narrative.
Films with narration as the core of the narrative are not uncommon in film history, but most of them appear in film noir and crime films. The most typical examples include the narration in "Double Compensation" and "Good Guys", which points out the core of the film's fatalistic tragedy with a detached perspective, breaking the fourth wall and giving the audience the effect of separation. The other belongs to the narrative narration in "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Miracle in the Green", which depicts the divinity of the male protagonist from the perspective of male number two, providing a guide that is easier for the audience to bring in.
The Shawshank Redemption
"Open The Heart World" belongs to the third type, and its narration is actually not narrative, emphasizing more emotion. Most of the time, removing the narration from the narration doesn't affect the audience's understanding of the story, but emotionally it's completely different. A closer example in film history is Chinese director Fei Mu's 1948 Spring in a Small Town.
In "Spring in a Small Town", the young woman Zhou Yuwen lives a tasteless life in the small town, and the intrusion of her old lover Zhang Zhichen makes her secretly feel affectionate and has rekindled hope for life. This also coincides with the scene in "Open Hearts" in which Abigail, who is caught in the death of her daughter and in despair, is suddenly ignited by Tully's passion. In order to show the inner contradictions and wandering, the two films also adopt the form of narrating the heroine.
Spring in a Small Town
Zhou Yuwen kept asking himself, "I didn't expect him to come", and kept wandering around the city wall, saying to himself, "There is an endless road along the city wall, look outside the city, look at the distance with your eyes, you know that the heavens and the earth are not so small." In his diary, Abigail recorded the whole process of his depression to hope and finally despair, from "with the only pride and hope we have left, we began the new year" to "surprise and joy" three times when encountering love. Driven from the inside to the outside, guide the audience to find clues to the development of the relationship between the two.
In line with the previous year's Portrait of a Burning Woman, the film also attempts to extract the male gaze, in Which the character completes the female gaze through the process of constructing a painting. The film borrows a diary to show Abigail's observations of Tully. This observation is scattered and off-topic, and Tully is not the absolute center of Abigail's diary, in addition to recording her own state of mind, there are also a large number of descriptions of the surrounding environment, the freezing of the river, the husband's attitude toward himself, and the trivialities of life. The 16mm film shot with a shallow depth of field oil painting is like a video prose poem.
In films featuring male writers, women are often reduced to embellishments for male characters. This is true in "Assassination of a Novelist" that has just been screened in this year's Spring Festival and "Shakespeare's Love History", which won the Oscar for best picture. Women are either portrayed as daughters attached to the protagonist or as lovers pursued by the protagonist, and are the inspiration for the writer to create the characters. In the name of help, the protagonist transforms women and finally completes his self-redemption and makes himself complete.
In this film, the two heroines played by Catherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby are in a state of complete equality and parallelism with each other. No one's life is redeemed, and everyone follows their own established route to the abyss, full of regret and helplessness. In contrast, the male characters are in a state of withdrawal. Abigail's husband, Dale, is perceptual and devoted to labor, completely unaware of the bitterness of his wife's widow. Tully's husband, Fanny, although not shown by camera, the director strongly implies his violent tendencies, a male power who ostensibly emphasizes equality and responsibility, likes to quote the Bible, but is extremely cruel at heart.
Time is another scale of the film, the whole story begins on January 1, 1856, the two met in February, met almost every day, exchanged everything, kissed for the first time on April 25, fell into crisis in June, and finally in August, Tully died, and the diary stopped on August 31. From the beginning to the end, the relationship lasted only eight months, but something in Abigail's body bloomed and died.
In the form of a diary, time is displayed like an annual ring in Ecstasy, becoming a yardstick for the love between the two. We can also clearly feel the passage of each day. Some important days are omitted in the film, including the dates of the two men's entanglement and the details of Tali's eventual murder by domestic violence that Abigail could not have known.
In the scene where Tully dies, Abigail holds Tully's body, and suddenly the world turns around and begins to flash back to the days when they were hidden in the diary, and it was the time when the two had a relationship, the most glue-like time. From the beginning of April to the end of May, those most intimate, heavenly times. This is the highlight of Abigail and Tully's life, and it is also the climax of the whole movie.
The title of the film, literally translated, can be translated as "Futurama". For Abigail, the love with Tully opened up hope for the future world, and in a better world, they can really be together. For the audience of this film, we are in this "future world" that Abigail aspires to, but in our world, how many people can accept such love? And can it blossom and bear fruit? In fact, no matter in which world, their tragedies are predestined. The world is still imperfect, which is the real most mournful place hidden under this story.