At the moment of Internet celebrity, modernization, and fast food, people's aesthetic consciousness has an unconscious desire for classics.
Text | Qingyan
Edit | Wang Zhuojiao
People often think that the uniqueness of sweet tea lies in its classical and exquisite face.
Indeed, sweet tea has exquisite features, fair skin, and a melancholy literary face, both like a Greek sculpture and a man coming out of an oil painting. You can see youth, abstinence, sweetness, fragility, stubbornness, obedience and rebellion in his seemingly simple but highly malleable expression.
These seemingly opposing contradictory sides can always find a self-consistent way to get along in his exquisite face.
It's like he's constantly changing girlfriends, but keeping his distance from online social platforms as much as possible.
He was high-profile, but as low-key as possible not to expose himself.
That is to say, in addition to being praised to the classical face that does not need to be repeated, the real fun thing about sweet tea is that he has a middle state that can reconcile all contradictions, so that when he performs, he presents a mixture of obsessive effects.
This is his seniority.
High-level has always been subtle and complex, and it is simple and complex.
Maybe it seems too mysterious to be confused.
It is better to look for clues from his role.
According to Dune director Dennis Villeneuve: "In terms of appearance, he has a 'fragile sense of cleanliness', full of possibilities to be molded. So on the list I gave to the production company at the time, there was only one male lead, and that was Timothy Challemet. ”
There's actually a funny vignette here: When Villeneuve said this, Sweet Tea, after a brief embarrassment, carefully said to Villeneuve: "This is not the first time we have met, I went to audition when I was preparing to make "Prisoner" in 2012. ”
It was Villeneuve's turn to be embarrassed.
He hesitated for a moment to think about it, then pretended to be relieved and said, "Remember, we did see it before", Villeneuve tried to make himself look as natural as possible, he continued: "You auditioned very expressively, but your physique was not suitable for that role. Recalling this awkward time to the media afterwards, Villeneuve added: "He probably scolded me in his heart because I didn't choose him, right?" But what, he's not a good fit for Prisoner, but he's a good fit for Dune. ”
Dune
In fact, Villeneuve's "fragile sense of cleanliness" is most evident in his famous work "Call Me by Your Name".
It comes from the body's instinctive desires, and at the same time transcends them—that is, when you see him, you can't restrain your possessiveness, but he can also stimulate your restraint on your own possessiveness.
This is why, at the end of "Call Me by Your Name", when he is alone in mourning and self-pity and quietly weeping, so many people will follow the sadness with their hearts and lungs: first of all, of course, because we have emotional resonance with the character, but the lowest logic of this empathy is still our love for him and can not admit it.
More generally, he can provoke you, but he can also reject you.
It is a pure, restrained, and simple beauty that allows him to maintain a prudent distance from the world at any time.
"Call Me By Your Name"
It also happens that this feeling of entering the world and being born has become the basic starting point for many directors to use him later. It's just that each director's style is different, and his characteristics are also presented differently.
For example, director Greta Gerwig, she is interested in the sweet tea state, the kind of melancholy mixed with elegant texture.
Whether it is "Miss Bird" in 2017 or "Little Women" in 2019, we can see sweet tea with few words, melancholy looks, but mysterious temperament. In these character settings, what is needed is that he is mixed with elegant mystery, so that even if his role in the story is not heavy, he can always leave a deep impression in the effect of each appearance.
Little Women
Miss Bird
But there's also a certain downside to this, which is that director Greta Gerweger doesn't seem to care too much about the role of male characters in her narrative, which makes sweet tea more of a tool-man effect in her film. Or rather, she let Sweet Tea follow the pitiful side of his famous works, so as to present the psychological changes in the female characters under her lens when they face this kind of man.
Compared to male characters, Greta Gerweger cares more about her heroine.
This is very different from Woody Allen.
Woody Allen sees the rebelliousness and alienation lurking within his sense of cleanliness.
In "A Rainy Day in New York", he plays a high-society male brother, but he hates the hypocrisy and extravagance of high society represented by his mother, refuses to live according to the rules, quotes the classics of contempt for the art world, but when colliding with the real world, he really feels endless boredom, such as rude classmates, brothers and sisters-in-law who complain endlessly, brothers and sisters-in-law who laugh like barbells, and girlfriends who are elegant and disappear all the time.
"A Rainy Day in New York"
Woody Allen's great point is that he keeps sweet tea ostensibly in a melancholy and pure state, but makes his every choice and action full of provocative meaning and power. After being "beaten" by reality, this melancholy and pure state of emotion will make the audience realize loneliness and loneliness. So every time he encounters an acquaintance, it shows that he is out of place with the city, and endless loneliness. More importantly, you can feel the enthusiasm behind this loneliness, and his eagerness to find the best place in the secular life and art world.
Because he is beautiful, even the hardest rebellion will be pitied, and thus begin to reflect on the class and culture he opposes.
This idea is also reflected in Phyllis van Guningen's previous "Pretty Boy".
Pretty Boy
It's just that director Phyllis is too concerned about Nick played by Sweet Tea, and the pain sensation erupts. The result is that the sweet tea, which is still needing to be polished in acting, erupts slightly out of control, especially in the second half of the ordeal, and even shows hysteria and viciousness that is visible to the naked eye.
Viciousness is the opposite of beauty, and it is to deprive beauty.
So in Villeneuve's "Dunes," he wants the actor, even if thrown in the desert, to maintain a virginal purity; even if there are many dangers along the way, life and death, he must remain pure, so that the character can be fixed in the noble fable of the savior. So we see that even though he killed someone, even though he was killed by innocent people, he would not arouse the disgust of the audience, but you would forgive him, and even try to give him a legitimate reason for having to kill when he showed a look of surprise and horror.
Even if you make a mistake, you may be forgiven.
But this nobility is only the underlying logic, and Villeneuve cares more about his restrained restraint and the needle hidden in the cotton.
The more gentle and weak it seems, the more it can give people a greater intensity of tremor when it erupts into antagonistic emotions.
This paves the way for dune's follow-up to the character to grow into a leader.
But all he has to show now is restraint.
This also happens to be his strength.
It should be said that Sweet Tea is not the kind of actor with strong acting ability.
Fortunately for him, he always meets directors who dig out his character.
His own value lies in the fact that he is aware of his own qualities, but he does not abuse them.
Sweet tea gives people the feeling that they are not explosive, offensive actors. But he is also not wooden, and a spark in his eyes can always startle some kind of ripple in the audience's heart.
This can be found out in addition to the classical and exquisite facial features, why he can stand out from several new actors in the same period: he not only represents the current audience's more advanced and inner physical needs for stars, but also reflects everyone's more subtle emotional demands that are beyond sexual desire.
Just like we can't help but admit that sweet tea is not the hormonal type, but it also doesn't have that contrived, malnourished feminine feeling. This is in line with the audience's vision of spiritual consumption upgrading, that is, at the moment when everything is popular, modernized, and fast food, people's aesthetic consciousness has an unconscious desire for classics.
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