◎ Black Selection Ming
This year is the 80th anniversary of Kieslowski's birth, when people talk about the great Polish director, the first thing that always comes to mind is "red, white and blue", and the evaluation of "Two Flowers" is often "not deep enough", but today when we look back at this good movie, maybe we will realize that any interpretation is not as good as "immersion".
The charm of "Two Flowers" is "arousal"
I have to admit that for movies, this is an era when we will be afraid to show disrespect for "low grades". We now even succumb to certain low-grade tastes, especially when a film with low artistic quality becomes a box office hit, we are always afraid that some of the views expressed will provoke "public anger", and always hide our true evaluations. At this time, it is very necessary to read the famous film critic Roger Ebert's "The Great Movie", the biggest advantage of Roger's article is that it is not pretentious, he can tell you in just three words and two words, some movies are "great", you just have to love generously.
Recently, the third volume of the Chinese edition of The Great Movie was published. The article included here is the work of Roger after he became terminally ill. But in the words of David Bodwell, this batch of articles is the pinnacle of Roger's film criticism. The moment the book was gotten, there seemed to be another guarantee: the stills used on the cover came from the Polish director Krzystów Kieslowski's film Veronica's Double Life (1991).
This year marks the 80th anniversary of Kieslowski's birth. Thinking of this, I realized that he had died too early, but in a limited life, the quantity and quality of his works were amazing. So, in Kieslowski's film, why did Roger choose "Two Flowers" alone? (Some people may think that Roger likes too many American movies, but this is understandable, he has the most daily contact with American filmmakers, and there are many masterpieces of American movies that we really did not notice.) ）
Interestingly, when people evaluate Kieslowski's films, it is usually not the one with the highest scores. The ideological, or political, nature of Kieslowski's films is more appealing to "academic" film critics (such as "Song of Opportunity" and "Never Ending", which may be more attractive to them). But Roger Ebert was not academic, and in Podwell's words, he was a writer (he used the word not writer, but man of letters). This evaluation is very high, and it is possible that Shaw, Montaigne, Sontag, and Benjamin can all be called by this word. There are many professors in the universities, but such true knowledge comes from sincere "writers" are extremely rare. I think Roger Ebert's preference for Two Flowers is derived from the instinctive intuition of a "writer".
"Two Flowers" may also be the easiest to pick out faults, such as its story structure is loose, it seems that no story is told; for example, some people criticize it as "superstitious", "telepathic" these things, how to prove? In addition, it is also the highest-grossing work of Kieslowski, there are many "iron fans" around the world, including many girl fans, this film is likely to have spawned a lot of fandom or comics with the theme of "The Other Me in the World", and the puppet stories in the story are also quite "two-dimensional" meaning. This popular acceptance is likely to make people feel that it is not "profound" enough.
"Two Flowers" is indeed a different kind of thing in Kieslowski's films, so you can't look at it according to your usual thinking. Roger Ebert accurately points out that the film's charm lies in "evoking." It is not responsible for interpretation—there is a certain mystical experience that we may have that cannot be explained by positivist thinking. Twins often think of each other as having a "telepathy" that chimpanzees on one island have mastered and chimpanzees on another island will develop. The experience of "going somewhere" and "now it all seems to have happened before" is also something we do encounter occasionally in our daily lives, so this movie is to let us go deeper into it, but as Roger Ebert said, after watching this movie, the last thing you want to do is reveal the plot, which is equivalent to turning the clouds into raindrops, and what we have to do is actually "immerse" in it.
The beauty of the Raphaelite pre-school
But we can still analyze how this experience is "evoked" on the big screen.
The central character of Two Flowers is Veronica. She is the absolute first heroine, the visual center, and the film's plot development and story advancement rely on her feminine intuition, so this face (and temperament) is decisive. Kieslowski was very accurate and lucky to find Elena Jacob to play the role. The relationship between the big director and the actor is often delicate, and directors like Tarkovsky and Bresson are ruthless to the actors, seeing them only as tools (models). Chabrol even unceremoniously suggested avoiding meeting actors during their breaks. But Kieslowski's relationship with the actors seems to be fine. He initially contacted Hollywood star Andy McDowell, who initially agreed, but then changed his mind and took on a purely commercial film — if she came to perform, it would be the story of a mature woman rather than a girl. It is likely that Kieslowski changed the basic temperament of the story after seeing Jacob. At the time, Elena Jacob was only 24 years old, and her beauty was the same as Audrey Hepburn's (though their appearance was completely different), belonging to the greatest common denominator of Eastern and Western aesthetics— petite, soft, and uninsuring.
Fan filters always exaggerate the importance of an actor, but for a film that discusses women's feelings, her face is indeed very important, and this importance may be no less important than Dreyer's Joan of Arc. Kieslowski's skill is to see in the face of the 24-year-old Jacob a pre-Raphaelite beauty, an incredible, unspeakable sense of purity. This makes her nude shots, although amazingly beautiful, do not make people have evil thoughts, and this point is indeed not related to the so-called "appearance".
This is the secret that allowed the establishment of "Veronica of Poland" - Jacob did not feel abrupt or "foreigner" in the environment of the polish ancient city of Krakow. Krakow is one of the oldest cities in Europe and has several World Heritage Sites, with a variety of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque churches. Kieslowski's photographer photographed Jacob like a figure in a painting of religious subjects (of course he used a lot of yellow filters), because Veronica in Poland was meant to be holy. She knew she had a heart attack and that singing high pitches would be dangerous, but she risked her life to sing chants — it had nothing to do with "dedication" or star drafts. "Good girl" Veronica is also not in the secular sense, although we see that all people, from elders, teachers, classmates, like her.
And Jacob can be a French town girl Veronica who is not a "good girl", and even her French has a little accent, not so "Paris", very grounded. This may be closer to what she looks like in her own life. Veronica of France has a different sense of life through Veronica in Poland, confirming the existence of the soul - this process is "awakening", if Jacob does not truly interpret this process, the audience can not be "awakened".
The "Arousal" of the Hymn
It's probably hard to imagine that this is a musical. Of course, it's not the kind of musical song and dance film in Hollywood, but it's a real musical film. Perhaps it doesn't have many musical passages, but as Kieslowski puts it, "The Americans stuffed the music all over the place from start to finish..."
"Two Flowers", like "Blue", is a film about music, and it is the same composer Keanu Presner. One of his characteristics is that he was involved from the very beginning of the film's creation. What does this mean? True music creation, of course. This requires a true partnership between the musician and the director. In the so-called "film music", the most common is the "film soundtrack", most of the film music is "sound matching", or by reading the script to create the theme music, but that means the literary language "translated" into music, which is of course different from the effect of using musical thinking at the beginning.
For example, to convey "solemnity", writers, painters, and musicians think in completely different ways, and it would be wrong to "translate" them all through another medium, such as when a writer often assumes that he can describe the artist's "propositional composition" in words. A note flows from the heart, even before the literal description of the language organization.
From the very beginning, "Two Flowers" has its own musical image, and the theme music is sounded in a medieval cellar-style church in Krakow – Presner himself is from Krakow, graduated from one of the oldest universities in the world, Jagiellonian University, majoring in history. Why choose a cellar-style church? Because when foreign enemies or "pagans" invade, it can protect people's souls from the devil. There is no need to explain its "meaning" or "justify" its relationship with the chant. It is a kind of chant. This aspect really requires that the composer be a person with a "soul". The film pretends to be written by a Dutch musician in the seventeenth century, I am afraid that it has really deceived many people.
This chant is sung in Old Italian with lyrics from a short passage from Dante's Divine Comedy Heaven:
Oh, you guys row little wooden boats
Because of the desire to hear my singing
To follow the raft full of my voice to the other side
Please return to your familiar homeland
Don't follow me on an adventure to drift into the vast ocean
So as not to lose me and get lost
I will cross the ocean that no one crosses
Because I have the goddess of wisdom to blow
There is Apollo navigation
The nine muses motioned for Big Bear to lead the way...
It may not be necessary to examine what Dante meant in every word, but music itself is "language." This kind of music is "arousing". Unlike secular music, chants need to be looked up and heard, and this gesture is a movement of the heart upwards, a path to divinity. Why does Veronica's face have a sense of calm joy? What did she mean by "I'm not alone"? Only when the visual and auditory senses are combined can we strongly feel that we are being "aroused", followed by the process of curiously exploring the "why" after "arousing".
When the puppet artist Alexander uses the death of a ballet dancer to give elementary school students a kind of education about death, the theme music also "evokes" a movement of spiritual ascension: the dead ballet dancer grows wings and becomes a soaring angel.
The growth of anti-routines
Two Flowers is Kieslowski's first film in the West. Unlike some film masters, he attaches great importance to the audience's understanding, and will adjust at any time to try to tell the story as well as possible. But that doesn't mean he follows box office logic. Why isn't this story about two girls telepathy a "chick movie"? Because the spiritual growth in the film is not at all the content of the girl's book. Even from the perspective of women's growth, this film is not at all routine, although "love" also occupies a large part of it.
Veronica in France is actually lonely at first, because she does not understand "love", that is, can not find a way to emotionally connect with others. She has a vague sense of morality (perjury, difficulty perceiving the pain of others) and sleeps with beautiful boys, but the joy of the flesh still leaves her lonely. After watching the puppet artist Alexander's performance, she told her father, "I think I'm in love." "It's a growth in itself. But the biggest growth is at the end, and the audience may think that she and Alexander are "together", isn't that the most beautiful arrangement?
But it's actually the opposite. Alexander only "woke" her up on one level, letting her know her connection to Veronica in Poland, and concluding by pointing out that she had already taken a photo of Veronica in Poland by chance in Krakow. After a brief encounter, she realized that Alexander was a "storyteller" who loved only stories and that his connection to himself was also because of stories. In today's parlance, she is a "tool man." But his grasp of the story has actually encroached on the part that she privately owns and is not suitable for publicity. She had no love when she saw Alexander excitedly making two Veronica dolls—in Kieslowski's own words, "she's much smarter at the end of the film than she was at the beginning"— another layer of growth.
The soundtrack album of "Two Flowers" sold more than 50,000 copies in France alone. Considering the high price of Western genuine audio-visual products, this was a staggering number at that time, and it also made Presner famous. When Kieslowski died young, Presner was so sad that he couldn't get out for a long time, telling the media: "I feel like part of my life is dead." He was a rather tall, burly man with a full beard (Poland is a country rich in Hercules), but this is quite "Two Flowers", which also powerfully proves that it can "evoke" more than just women.