By Nikki Baughan
Translator: Qin Tian
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Sight & Sound (September 22, 2021)
Canadian film director Dennis Villeneuve is warmly inviting audiences to see his presentation of "Planet Aracis," based on his new film Dune, based on Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dunes (previously brought to the screen by David Lynch in 1984). As a director, he constantly looks to the future of cinema while at the same time mastering the wonders of the art.
Dune (2021)
Villeneuve has an intuitive understanding of how best to use the tools at his disposal—editing, photography, lighting, sound design—and, crucially, his team is full of innovative craftsmen. His films allow the audience to be completely immersed in the stories he tells. This applies not only to his latest blockbuster sci-fi blockbuster Dune, but also to the previous Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Arrival (2016). Villeneuve has been familiar with the techniques of attracting audiences since his low-budget debut.
Advent (2016)
Villeneuve has always been obsessed with exploring the relationship between humans and the environment, often portraying humans as aliens in their own world, and juxtaposing familiar and bizarre things.
A brief recap of Villeneuve's 1998 debut, August 32, shows a pair of young French-Canadian friends Simone (Pascal Bissiere) and Philippe (Alexis Martin) on a road trip to Salt Flats, Utah, who want to secretly conceive a child.
August 32 (1998)
The film was directed by André Turpin, who later also served as cinematographer for Villeneuve's groundbreaking work Scorched Earth and director of photography for Xavier Dolan, who emphasized the desolate, isolated scenes of August 32 with exciting visuals.
From overhead shots from above, the pair's bright yellow car looks like a bug on a white beach, while the rest of the film is shot from a distance—two vulnerable people roaming the vast landscape where daylight is fading. This special movement of mirrors, which contrasts small characters with a vast background, has become a highly recognizable theme in Villeneuve's films.
An upside-down world
Ahead of these spectacular, desolate shots, however, "August 32" begins with a claustrophobic nightcarbly crash that prompts Simone to have a desire to have a child, which is unsettling from the start. Sophie LeBron's editing allows raindrops from the headlights of the car to appear in the film's footage, and the green glow on Simone's face contrasts with the pitch-black face inside the car, where she dozes off.
Then, after the inevitable happens, there's a close-up that impresses the viewer, simona waking up in a crashed car; she's in a brief, unconscious state. Simone struggled to escape, walked to the highway, and beckoned a driver to get out of the car and reintegrate herself into civilized society. In this series of shots, Villeneuve conveys the fact that this is both the moment when Simone's life is coming to an end and the moment when it begins anew.
In Polytechnic, Villeneuve also uses the viewpoint of the upside-down lens. Filmed in 2009, Polytechnic is the director's dramatic representation of the 1989 Montreal Engineering School massacre, in which several female engineering students were murdered (Polytechnic was Villeneuve's first film nearly a decade after 2000's "Vortex of Fascination").
Polytechnic Institute (2009)
The style of handheld photography, black and white, makes Villeneuve's film aesthetic appear repressive and ominous, and in a key scene, the cameraman Pierre Gill's movement of the camera brings discomfort to the audience. A student named Jean François (Sebastian Huberdo) is driving to see his mother, who feels guilty for surviving the massacre, as many people died.
The camera pans his car, shooting at angles that constantly cross traditional boundaries, and it allows the audience to follow François's trail from under and behind the car, which is both disorienting and dizzying, and it turns out that the effect of this set of shots is also achieved.
The whole world seemed to spin with the camera, like the terrible, upside-down world that desperate Jean François saw.
Sound and vision
After filming Polytechnic, Villeneuve filmed Scorched Earth, an adaptation of Wagji Muawad's novel set in the Middle East Civil War. The film made Villeneuve famous in the international film world. After premiering in Venice and winning several film festival awards, the film was also nominated for a British Academy Film Award and an Academy Award.
Polytechnic (2010)
In a mesmerizing scene at the opening of Scorched Earth, Villeneuve once again uses vision rather than dialogue to present meaningful content to the audience. Radiostar's song "You And Whose Army?" The illusion of warmth and comfort is created, and the viewer's gaze follows photographer Andre Toul into a dilapidated room in the middle of the desert, where a group of depressed boys are shaved off by armed soldiers. At the very moment when the song's more propulsive chorus begins, editor Monique Dutton cuts a close-up of a little boy who is looking straight into the camera as his hair is ruthlessly cut.
This long-staying shot, combined with music and editing, makes the audience feel that this is an unusual boy. Subsequently, one of the film's protagonists, Jenny (Melissa Dessomons-Pollin), wears headphones while on a pilgrimage with her sister to her late mother's Middle Eastern home while listening to the radiomaster's song – the film's narrative-linked music.
Border Killer (2015) is Villeneuve's third English-language film after Prisoner and Old Enemy. The sense of lawless brutality at the U.S.-Mexico border is at the heart of the film's audiovisual aesthetic. Photographer Roger Deakins captured this vast landscape with a long-range lens in the twilight. It's a no-man's land full of shadows and secrets, and some simple, ideal FBI agent Kate (Emily Blunt) finds herself physically and morally wavering.
Border Killer (2015)
Kate often appears alone in the shots, including those of key ones— such as her final standoff with Alessandro, the fierce agent played by Benicio del Toro, and Kate is a more determined, independent presence than her colleagues. Similarly, John Johnson's soundtrack (he also worked with Villeneuve on Prisoner and Advent) delved into the bewildering discomfort of this environment, with deep bass and rumbling roars forming the looping sound effect.
After Border Killer. Villeneuve made his most ambitious film to date, Arrival. His adaptation of Ted Ginger's novel makes the film more than a simple sci-fi film about alien creatures; instead, the film focuses on Louise, played by Amy Adams, a linguist who is invited to communicate with aliens who land on Earth.
This sense of responsibility is at the heart of the film as a whole, and Villeneuve and his crew did not let Arrival be overwhelmed by the exaggeration of genre films, but created a restrained effect; Brad young's photography was elegant and engaging.
Rather than letting traditional, sensational music dominate the film's soundtrack, John Johnson took a more avant-garde composition that fits perfectly with the sound design, stitching together the human and alien parts of the story with music. In Johansen's soundtrack, the vocals are crucial elements, with extended harmonies as well as laryngeal sounds.
However, the real power of Advent comes from its structure, which satisfies the audience's expectations of the film's narrative and presents language and time in a completely non-linear way. The film's editor, Joe Walker, is a regular collaborator with Villeneuve, who cuts strictly in the order of the scenes, ensuring that the narrative lines of the story are woven together with unmistakable accuracy and become a cohesive whole.
He then worked closely with Villeneuve to ensure that the emotional and thematic structure of the script was intact and, more importantly, not too quick to reveal too much information to the audience. Thanks to Joe Walker's ingenious arrangement of the scenes, Louise's personal flashbacks resonate strongly with the audience until the final poignant moment is fully revealed. Louise's personal flashbacks are at the heart of the film.
Emotional tone
All elements from Villeneuve's previous films converged on the epic masterpiece Blade Runner 2049, and Roger Deakins' stunning cinematography and Hans Zimmer's overwhelming soundtrack— once again connected to ambient sounds, such as the speed of a motorcycle engine, underscore Villeneuve's vision of what the metropolis will look like in the future.
Superb long-range shots quickly get viewers to feel the vibe of each scene, including a powerful opening shot: the shot switches from the turquoise pupil to the giant electronic farm, and the cityscape of Los Angeles. It tells us that human life has changed, albeit not in a way that we cannot fully recognize.
Strikingly, however, Blade Runner 2049 uses color to convey different ideas and emotions. This is the technique used by Villeneuve in early works such as Old Enemies, where the dual characters of Adam/Anthony, played by Jack Gyllenhaal, are dressed in bright and dark clothes, reflecting their diametrically opposed personalities.
In Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve goes a step further; together with Deakins and art director Dennis Gasner, he creates a changing, mixed-color landscape through changes in light and environment, rather than more obvious costumes or props.
For example, the concrete-gray Los Angeles, a city affected by climate change and population growth that now houses millions of citizens, downtown is a looming dark strip of the Los Angeles Police Department. In contrast, Deca (Harrison Ford) chooses to exile himself in the isolated, Gobi-strewn desert of Las Vegas. Another iconic, painterly long-range shot captures K (Ryan Gosling), a small figure in the middle of the desert, struggling to find his answer against the backdrop of vast yellow windswept sand.
K's Path of Discovery is depicted yellow as a nod to the "Yellow Brick Road" in The Wizard of Oz—a path that unfolds whenever K receives an apocalyptic message: the headquarters of the replica maker Wallace Corporation is illuminated in artificial sunlight; the dim yellow glow cast by ripples of light at the reunion of Deca and Rachel (Sean Young); and K's discovery of a yellow flower in a barren land, which leads him to make an unimaginable discovery.
In Blade Runner 2049, white isn't just the most tarnished color, it's also the purest of all —it comes into play whenever K approaches the truth of who he is, especially the impressive climactic scene that takes place in the snow.
Arguably, Dune is kicking off the next chapter in Villeneuve's career, shaping his creativity for more than two decades. His budget for film may be higher now, but his confidence and talent have been evident since his first time directing. It was his creative use of elements of the art of cinema that made the path to the Planet of Aracis a very rewarding one.