Despite the title I gave it that looked like a horror movie, the film didn't feel scary at all.
The film uses a black humor narrative to present a doomsday world to us, which should obviously be a frightening lack of humanity, but it only makes people feel absurd. Today, let's talk about this "Rhapsody of the Black Shop".
The world is scarce and grain-free, the people in the city have to nibble on their own shoes for a living, and both lentils and corn can become hard currency.
At night, the town was shrouded in a thick fog, hazy, and there was no half-figure in the street. The sound of the butcher sharpening his knife came from the pipe to the tenant's ear, who was wrapped in scrap paper and hid in the trash can.
At this time, the garbage truck arrived just in time, and as soon as the garbage can lid was opened, the tenant was facing the butcher's face.
The next day, fresh meat was sold in a butcher's shop that never came from buying.
The butcher runs a dilapidated shop in disrepair.
The people in the building all tacitly came to buy meat, and the butcher was the ruler of the world.
The building is home to a variety of tenants, rooms like an old man who eats snails in a water curtain cave, a spiritual woman who tries all kinds of ways to die, a mistress who has a leg with the owner of a butcher shop, a family with children and a mother, and the Gubi brothers who love to cut canned food.
The Gubby brothers already owe the butcher shop owner two bags of corn, fearing they will be the next meat cargo.
But then a new tenant arrived, and the Gubby brothers' eyes lit up, and it seemed that the food for next week had fallen.
The tenant, named Louis, came after seeing an advertisement in the newspaper, which said that maintenance workers were recruited and that they were covered with food and lodging.
The butcher shop owner didn't seem very happy with the little man, he wanted the muscular, tall one.
But the apartment was in disrepair, everything was malfunctioning, and he needed a maintenance worker, so he reluctantly accepted this small piece of "meat".
There are two children in the corridor who are learning to smoke, and Louis shows them to blow bubbles with a smoke ring, which not only attracts the attention of children, but also attracts the attention of the heroine Zuli.
Zuri is the daughter of a butcher shop owner, but she is a vegetarian and has always disagreed with her father's approach.
At this time, the postman came to deliver the letter and brought a packet of cookies that Zuli had bought.
This scarce package of biscuits was snatched by everyone, but inexplicably reached Louis's hands.
When the postman picks up the gun and points it at Louis, Zurie comes out to support the postman and asks Louis to have dinner in the evening.
From the conversation between the butcher and the postman, it was learned that it was he who bought the postman and asked him to advertise in the newspaper every once in a while, so that people kept coming.
Zuri became interested in Louis, dressed up and took off her glasses. With her vision blurred, she made a lot of jokes when dating Louis.
Zuli, who plays the cello, finds that Louis also understands music, so Louis goes back to his room to get his saw, and the two begin to play together, and love quickly sprouts between the two.
During the conversation, it was learned that Louis was a circus clown before, and he originally had an orangutan as his partner, but the meat eaters beat it to death and ate it.
Fearing that the kind Louis would be killed, Zuri told him about the apartment, and who knew that he had turned his head and found that he was already asleep.
At night, Zuri had nightmares, and the people in the apartment had already attacked Louis.
She woke up and tried to persuade her father to give up killing, only to get a slap.
Zuli learned in the newspaper about an organization that was a burrowing underground vegetarian known as the seed-eating rat.
For Louis's safety, Zuri finds the group of cavemen and asks them to kidnap Louis.
Originally, they were very unfriendly to Zuli, an outsider, but they were still bribed by the corn in her hand.
The night before, Louis had escaped with Zuri's hypnotic tea.
The old woman was killed, but her daughter still shed tears while taking her mother's meat from the owner of the butcher shop.
Zuri came to Louis's room and watched his performance with him. The butcher owner shook the antenna to affect the TV's signal, leading Louis to the rooftop.
He must kill Louis quickly, so as not to make the night long.
The mistress discovers the butcher's ruse, she has long wanted to escape from here, and she has been impressed by Louis's kindness before, so she decides to warn Louis.
But when she came to Louis's room, she found that she was one step too late and had been mistakenly caught by the cavemen.
The butcher shop owner and Louis engage in a fierce battle on the roof, but a sudden explosion downstairs shakes the butcher shop owner downstairs.
Louis took the opportunity to escape and took Zuri into the bathroom.
The butcher gathered the tenants outside and slammed the door frantically, and Louis took off his clothes and Zulidi to plug the gap and fill the bathroom with water.
When a group of people outside opened the door, everyone was washed out by the water, and eventually the butcher shop owner was killed.
At the end of the movie, the thick fog that haunts the butcher's shop finally clears, and Louis and Zuri play the song of their first date on the roof.
Released in 1991, Rhapsody in the Black Shop is the work of director Jean Pierre Genet.
Just by looking at the name, someone may feel familiar, for him is the director of "Angel Amelie".
"Rhapsody in the Black Shop" is Jean-Pierre Genet's debut novel, it is no more famous than "Angel Amelie", but the director's use of lens and color in this film is also amazing.
The thick colors are just right to show this gray world, but they don't feel suffocated.
Ubiquitous details add a lot to the film, such as the family of five, the couple has two holes in the condom, and their family happens to have two little boys.
The director sets the story as an apocalyptic world with an unknown background time, but the imagination is based on reality.
The movie makes people feel ridiculous on the one hand, and at the same time makes people feel trapped in it.
The film reveals the greed and cruelty of human nature, the butcher represents the evil of society, Louis represents the ideal good, and the caveman is the attitude of escape.
The director uses the confrontation between the last butcher and Louis to erupt, expressing his attitude that good finally triumphs over evil, and the dawn comes.
But life goes on, how can others survive without the butcher's doom?
The film is never a one-sided expression of a certain point of view, the ending is only the ending in the eyes of some people, the director wants to bring the audience or the thinking of the good and evil of human nature.
French cinema has always been very good at telling stories very romantically, telling stories of human cannibalism in a humorous way.
The director can always use the wonderful interaction between the characters to alleviate the depression brought by the subject matter.
In addition to the main line, the film also uses a lot of space to depict various tenants, and the long shots and montage techniques used by the director in this cannot be expressed in words, and it can only be said that this is a movie worth watching and watching.
If you are interested in this movie, go check it out!