Text | Zazie
There are some directors that I never dreamed of having the opportunity to appear on the big screen in China.
For well-known reasons, the imported films we can see in domestic cinemas are still relatively single. Europe is not to talk about it, and what we can see in the United States is mainly some blockbuster directors.
But blockbusters don't represent the whole of American cinema, and there are many very good independent film directors in the United States, such as David Lynch, the Coen brothers, and Quentin Tarantino, we are all very familiar with it, but we have no chance to see it in theaters.
Quentin Tarantino
There is also such a director, who is younger than the above-mentioned ones, and his recognition among fans is also less than enough, he only has six feature films in total, but you know what? Four of them were shortlisted for the main competition section of the Festival de Cannes! There was also a debut film that went into venice's main competition unit.
This hit rate, the world is estimated to have no director to catch up.
He is James Gray, an American independent director who is in the middle of the international film scene.
His new work "Lost City of Z" was introduced to China and released on June 2.
It was so unexpected to see James Gray's new film released on the big screen. It's done with vision!
Lost City of Z is the story of Percy Foster, an early 20th-century British explorer who plays the warrior soldier who was assigned by the Royal Institute of Geography to explore and map the Amazon jungles of South America.
Charlie Hannum as Percy
In the Amazon jungle, Percy found unknown signs of civilized life, and when he returned home, he excitedly told his countrymen, and everyone scoffed at it, these arrogant colonists did not believe that there would be civilization in that barbaric land.
Percy was not reconciled, so he embarked on a journey to the land twice, trying to find the legendary "Golden Z City", and finally disappeared into the rainforest, and has not been heard from since.
Percy is a real person, and the search for Z City is a real historical event.
The film is based on David Guern's novel of the same name. Fascinated by Percy's story, the writer went to the Amazon himself, repeated percy's path, and met an elderly man who said she had seen Percy as a child.
After returning home in 2005, Gern published his adventure story in The New Yorker.
He continued to develop the story, finally writing the book Lost in Z in 2009, which was named one of the top ten of the year by The New Yorker. Brad Pitt's production company, Project B, bought the rights to the book and invited director and screenwriter James Gray to adapt it into a film. It was also the first time Gray had used 4K technology to shoot, using the highest specifications to visually present the mystery and spectacle of the South American jungle.
James Gray
Here's a little more about Gray. Born in New York to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, his few works are almost all centered on Jewish families in New York, USA, whether romance films or crime films, there are two themes: separation and family.
"Discrete, called Diaspora" in English, is a specialized word that originally referred to the spread of seeds or pollen, and since the Old Testament, the word has been combined with the upheaval of the Jewish spread.
Today, the meaning of the term has been extended to all ethnic groups in other places, who are unable to give up their ties to their hometowns and often feel homeless, living in a state of cross-cultural collision.
In Gray's films, "Little Odessa" tells the story of Russian Jews in New York's Odessa district, "Two Lovers" tells the story of a young Jewish man who struggles between a Jewish girl who is more suitable for marriage and his favorite blonde, and "Immigrant" is a pair of Polish Jewish sisters who go to New York to pan for gold.
Immigration (2013)
All of the above films are related to immigrants in the United States, and "Lost City Z", which tells the story of British explorers, is Gray's most cross-cutting creation to date.
On the surface, it has little to do with Jewish immigration, but in its bones it is still a story of clashes between civilizations and cultures, and even it remains a theme of "separation."
The male protagonist Percy has a common trait with the immigrant protagonists in the director's other films: they are wandering people who have wandered between two different cultures and have no clear belonging.
Percy was a native of England, but his family had a bad reputation, and in the early twentieth century socially hierarchical Britain meant it was difficult for him to have room for upward mobility, and he worked hard to achieve success to revive the family's prestige, while his countrymen were dismissive of his discoveries.
Percy was such a man who did not fit in his homeland. Although he was at the center of the world civilization at that time, he was haunted by the world. In his affection for Z-City, we can see a remarkable change.
At the beginning, he also concealed the high posture of the imperial colonists, and actively and excitedly wanted to excavate and explore an unknown civilization land to help the motherland open up its territory. After being ridiculed by the people, his feelings began to change, and gradually, Z City became a home for him that must be returned.
The film causes Percy and another explorer, Murray, to react completely differently when confronted with cannibals. These two reactions are exactly two natural attitudes towards an unfamiliar civilization.
"Twilight Man" Robert Parkinson plays Percy's assistant Henry Kerstin
In his cross-cultural adventures, Percy chose to embrace the other, while his fellow countrymen remained resistant and blind. That meant Percy's travels had distanced him from the culture of the past— he had been changed.
Entering another culture by embracing the other means that he may no longer be able to fully return to and integrate into the culture of the past, but instead become a new wandering force in the cross-cultural network, which is what we often call "flying away" in the positive sense of the contemporary sense, another translation of diaspora, emphasizing the new language, emotions and imaginations created in the process of cross-culture.
Percy's haunting of Z-City is a moving emotion born in cross-cultural practice, in which he does not belong to Neither The British nor the Indians in the Jungle, but to the Wanderers on the path to accepting the Other.
As Tong Ming, a teacher who studies scattered literature, said, "The real value of the flying experience is that the scattered person finds his home in the world, or discovers the world in his home." Percy found her home in the world.
In order to fully understand Percy's personality, the film also focuses on his relationship with his son and wife.
Because he has been exploring outside, Percy has neglected the love for his family and missed the growth of his son Jack. Jack hates his father, but having grown up through the brutal First World War, does he finally identify with his father's adventures?
New Spider-Man Tom Holland plays son Jack
When it comes to world war, it changed the values of an entire generation of Europeans because of the brutal and meaningless sacrifice that gave rise to great doubt about the purpose of Western technological civilization, and they began to wander through the rubble or wander into the skeleton, or search for new meaning.
Therefore, at this moment when values have completely collapsed, it is very reasonable for the son to re-examine his father's lifelong pursuits, right?
What moved me about the film was that this film did not express the feelings of father and son through mutual care based on concrete, bit-by-bit life and material basis, as the average family drama did, but praised an abstract spiritual pursuit that can only be understood between men.
Percy and his wife, Nina, are in a different relationship. Behind the abstract spiritual pursuit and exploration of the external world in the entire human civilization in the most dazzling position, it is the invisible woman who has been tied to the home for thousands of years, silently carrying out the cultivation of material life.
Sienna Miller plays Nina
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first wave of the feminist movement was in full swing, and Nina was a well-educated woman who had her own pursuits, and she wanted to go into the jungle with her husband, but was rejected by him, asking her to take care of the children at home.
She had to retreat, but she still supported her husband's pursuit, to be precise, insisted on her own pursuit to a limited extent, and even consulted the information to find possible evidence of Z City.
In my opinion, she is the greatest person in the whole film. On the one hand, she gave her husband and children the deepest love and kept her material life in order; on the other hand, she also insisted on the idealistic pursuits that belonged only to men in the past.
She was the typical woman of that era with a charming bisexual temperament, and she was also a person who suffered infinitely because of being trapped by the times, but still had a tenacious life.
I won't spoil it here, and the film finally gives her a perfect ending, allowing her to achieve unity with the spiritual world of her husband and son.
This ending makes this film far beyond the realm that ordinary male adventure movies can achieve.