The essence of cinema is to tell a story. But there are many films that tell stories in a very special way, but they are also obscure. Mulholland Drive, Clockwork Orange, Tin Drum and Inception are some of the more famous unintelligible films. And "Sacred Carriage" is also one of the most obscure films. So, what is arguably the most difficult to understand movie of recent years, "The Sacred Carriage", what is it talking about?
"Sacred Car Dealership" is undoubtedly the most "controversial" film of 2012. The audience who watched the film presented a polarized reaction: the lover was deeply impressed by its deep emotions and grotesque and extreme form; the beleaker was completely ignorant like falling into the clouds; and the haters dismissed it as a work of grandstanding and contentless form. Carax himself has maintained a consistent attitude toward his films — refusing to read or even comment. In an interview that went out of his way to explain the plot, Carax replied: "People talk about art, artists make art, but do artists have to open their mouths to speak?" ”
Carax's attitude posed an arrogant challenge to the audience. What are the over-interpretations in the controversial version of the explanation, and what substance is close to Carax's original intention? Is this a vast, elaborate fable, or, as Carax puts it, "The more you bother watching my films, the easier it is to get lost in them?" In the context of such contradictory and interesting texts, our intention may not be to seek literal answers that precisely explain the mystery of the entire work, but to sort out the different elements full of metaphors and symbolisms in order to integrate several different levels of understanding of the film.
Regardless of the controversy, "Sacred Carriage" is undoubtedly the most special structure, the most complex coding system, and the most emotional content and ideological level of the world cinema in 2012. When entering the analysis and induction of several different levels of it, it is especially necessary to comb through the various details presented in the ten different segments of the film. Let's start with the prologue of the film, with a description of "what we see" and a "question" style of questioning— perhaps not all meaningful questions will have a clear answer, but this thought process will still help us to make a comprehensive judgment on it.
1． prologue
The prologue begins in a movie theater filled with spectators. After the title of the film jumped out, Carax himself, dressed in pajamas, got up from bed and pushed through the room to open a door and walked into the theater where the film was being screened. Many of the details here are considered by critics to be full of metaphors and origins: a review article in Sight and Hearing confirms that The passage in which Carax walks through the room to a hidden door and listens to his ear comes from Jean Cocteau's "The Poet's Blood"—in which the poet walks through the hotel room to the door and peeks through the keyhole, and this voyeuristic dynamic situation is closely related to the film's viewing mechanism; and the Film Handbook and "Sight and Hearing" Both quote Carax's own elaboration and associate the door and the forest murals on the walls with the verse in Dante's Inferno, "At the midpoint of my journey of life, I find myself in a dark forest."
In addition to these clearer sources, other details are more interesting and challenging: the black-and-white silent film clip that appears at the beginning of the film, in which a naked man throws an object on the ground (several of Carax's predecessors use silent film clips taken during the early birth of the film at key moments, which are intended to constantly connect the unique methodology of their film with the magical impact effect of the screen on the audience's psychology during the film's birth period); or the audience sitting in the dark with their eyes closed Carax used to open the door of the theater with a huge iron key attached to his middle finger; and the babies and monsters that staggered through the theater were mysterious. What attracted me most was the film's carefully designed sound-painting misalignment from the beginning of the prologue: from The Passage of Carax through the room, to the plane landing on the gliding flash outside the window, to his entry into the theater through the corridor, the background is always accompanied by the gentle caress of the waves on the seashore (probably the pier), the cries and flights of seagulls, plus a few long steamship whistles, and the audience has never seen a picture that matches the sound in the visual. In fact, several of the spaces that Carax passes through in the prologue have nothing to do with the sound of the background!
There is no doubt that Carax intends to present a connection between the dream and the essence of the film, but we cannot help but wonder: in what context does he present such a connection beyond this obvious and even clichéd metaphor? The experience of sound-painting dislocation gives us an entrance to the prologue and even the entire film: we all know the power of sound montage and image montage on the screen - their combination can produce meaning that the physical picture and sound itself do not have, and can also take the audience's sensory consciousness away from reality and introduce it into the sensory situation constructed in virtual space. In this abstract debut, Carax appears to have deliberately "abused" the combination of sound and painting with skill, which became the swirling tone of the prologue to this shallow intoxication, with the most common all-encompassing means used in other contemporary films to attract the audience—metaphors, long mirrors, spatial transformations, and even those 3D computer-synthesized images—to suck the audience in the theater into the filmmaker's preset situation. When these silent viewers (who even close their eyes and willingly lose their ability to identify) follow the context of the film without resistance, does that mean that the film has succeeded in capturing the public's senses? Or when the film itself becomes a medium of discourse power and audience awareness, does the harmony between authority and the audience also constitute an impeccable "conspiracy" performance (which forms a strong correspondence with the intuitive internal mechanism of the silent film clip from the birth period of the film demonstrated at the beginning of the film to attract the audience)? When we saw Carax appear on the second floor of the theater expressionlessly examining the "conspiracy" of "harmony" between the film and the audience in front of us, he was neither excited nor engaged, but remained silent with coldness and arrogance. A context of deep irony of questioning arises, and we have a hunch that what we will see will be neither a sublime hymn nor a nostalgic and moving reminiscence, but a rebellious deconstruction of the things and emotions we know from a cold perspective.
After discerning the inner texture orientation of its context, this prologue, which lasts only a few minutes, has already pointed to the core content and level of "Sacred Carriage": it questions the internal relationship between the three levels of the individual (creator), the film (the medium) and the carrier (life). The latter two are clearly reflected in the prologue, and the former is about to constitute the subject of this question, the creator. Carax once again incarnated himself as the actor Danny Rawang's play, becoming an emotional guide, leading us into the cinematic metaphorical space he intended to construct.
2. Bankers, beggars and special effects people
The only prop that first aroused the audience's strong interest, and the only prop that ran through the very different first three acts, was this elongated Cadillac sedan with a symbolic significance. It is not only "a dream machine that makes contemporary fables, and danny Lavan can transform in the countless roles in his life" on it, it is also the only real personality space of "Mr. Oscar" - out of this car, he can only interpret the illusory life of the other; only when he steps into the car, he can restore his original appearance in a short break. But the tragedy is that, as Carax describes, such a precious real space appears outwardly and functionally like "a moving coffin with no end," sealing the spiritual world that belongs to the true self firmly within it.
The image of the banker in the first act of the film comes from the French Socialist Party leader Strauss Kahn (who quit the 2012 French presidential race because of a sex scandal in a New York hotel): "His body language, the image of his suit and shoes, and the cautious and secretive charm of a high-level banker" are the sources of this screen image. Similarly, the image of the old lady begging on the pont au change bridge across the Seine in Paris in the second act comes from a life archetype: Carax once observed several different female beggars appearing in the same costume on the bridge, and even wanted to make a documentary about the experience of one of them. If the huge difference in the identities of the characters between the first two acts ignites the audience's curiosity, then the dazzling body movements of the stuntmen in the "Action Capture" studio in the third act for the first time deeply convey a sharp ironic atmosphere: the exaggerated gorgeous actions and scenes bring not only visual and sensory viewing satisfaction, but also a deep inner emptiness. The contrast between the strong and dexterous physique displayed by "Mr. Oscar" and his tired and weak seemingly exhausted heart (two exhaustion falls) strongly conveys the character's inner contradictions, in the words of Carax: "This third act seems to me a bit like Chaplin's Modern Age: workers with special skills trapped in parts and huge industrial machines." The difference is only that there are no machines and engines (in this film). Danny Rawang III is struggling alone in a huge virtual system. ”
The total duration of the first three acts of "Sacred Carriage" is only ten minutes, and there are very few effective dialogues that can drive the plot forward. But it relies on an incredible setting—a constant shift in identity—to set the tone for the film as a whole: it's an unconventional narrative film that takes an inside-out approach to emotional contradictions to set off the inner coldness, endurance, anticipation, pain, and disappointment of the characters in an absurd context. At the end of act III, Danny Rawang's conversation with the driver Selena about the forest reveals the former's potential desire to escape, and we suddenly realize that this constantly changing identity of the "schizophrenic" state is the normal life that "Mr. Oscar" longs to get rid of but cannot abandon. The anticipation expressed in Danny Rawan's gentle tone contrasts with the cold, wild and bizarre erotic motion capture in which he participates at the end of act three, setting off an unspeakable state of inner tragedy for the characters. The continuous enrichment and development of the character's inner contradictions, and the constant intensification of his conflict with the different environments around him, is the core expression of this film.
3. From madman Meade to dying uncle
From the fourth act, "Sacred Carriage" enters a new mode: it borrows the film as a carrier, starts from it and returns to examine the film itself, and makes a series of brilliant cuts into its various forms.
Mad men from "Tokyo! In "The Sacred Carriage", he performs an absurd "Beauty and the Beast" legendary fantasy humor satire; the atmosphere of the film is reversed, and "Mr. Oscar" is transformed into a heartbreaking emotional exchange one-act play between an isolated father and a young daughter who has not been seen for a long time; after the passionate church accordion ensemble reverberates as an intermission, the audience sees the gangster horror murder in the huge container warehouse in Paris's Chinatown. "Mr. Oscar" with this series of jumping performances of identity transformation makes us suddenly realize the goal that Carax hopes to achieve in the form of the film: he is familiar with the history and theory of film, he borrows the shell of different types of films and provides different performance platforms for "Mr. Oscar" to show the frequent switching of the latter's unimaginable roles. And the question we need to ask is, what kind of ability is required for such a high-density investment of different types of emotions to be completed, and does it really have no effect on the performer itself? "Mr. Oscar" sits behind the frosty exterior of the Cadillac sedan, how does he really think about such a life? The answer is revealed in his conversation with his "boss" (Michelle Picoley): when the boss asks him what the beliefs that underpin his work, "Mr. Oscar" replies: For the beauty of gesture (his own belief), while the "boss" reminds him that "beauty" only exists in the eyes of the audience (it seems natural to adapt to the times and the requirements of consumers), and Oscar finally asks: What if the audience no longer watches? (This is a tight retracement of the scene at the beginning of the film where the audience closes their eyes.) The core theme of the film is gradually revealed in this dialogue: a carrier of an art form that was once full of faith, faith and ideals, under the premise that the external form continues to evolve with the changes in the surrounding environment, its core also begins to undergo a qualitative change irretrievably, and will the value of the people who fight for it on such a carrier disappear with such changes? Will they evolve into a walking corpse with an empty shell? The indifference, doubt, exhaustion and inner pain expressed by "Mr. Oscar" all find their metaphorical meaning in this mysterious dialogue.
After a short, sudden intermission (which is closely linked to the banker's passage in the first act and is a continuation of the previous one, also a thriller about a man being killed by his own stand-in), followed by one of the film's most emotional rival scenes (based on the henry James novel The Portrait of the NobleWoman): a pair of uncles and nieces who are deeply in love with each other with a slight incest flavor say goodbye to the former before their deaths. Danny Rawang not only contributed one of the best performances in the film, but also fully embodied Carax's intention: to use such a deep and complex emotion to counter the hidden irony of the previous thriller. This contrast also responds to the confrontation between the "boss" and the "Oscar" in the previous paragraph: for the actor (the devotee of the acting career), what is really valuable is a performance that moves the audience with passion, or does it use the "beauty" in the eyes of the audience to standardize the career of his life? In this scene, the audience is like a director sitting in front of a monitor, watching the actor enter the shooting set, cultivate emotions, put into the performance, release the passion, indulge in it, and finally leave the scene - two actors who are fully engaged in the performance in the play do not even know each other's names. The characters they play become the only link that connects them. At the end of this scene, we see how much mental and physical consumption and suffering the two performers who have devoted themselves to the emotional life of the other have been subjected. This also brings the film to a deeper core discussion: Can one's true self-emotions forever bear the kind of consumption that comes with shaping the spiritual shell of the other? Can the self-mental subject of an actor who is constantly consumed in order to fulfill the actor's duties and bring the audience a perfect performance survive the seemingly perfect "conspiracy" between such a communication medium and the audience? These questions lead us to the end of the film.
4． The top floor of The Samarittan with two endings
The unexpected encounter with Kelly Mirog at the abandoned Samaritan Mall is not one of the professional "dates" of "Mr. Oscar", who observes another peer (and was once his lover) as a bystander, and this observation is like a mirror effect, releasing his confusion through communication with another person.
Sarmaritin was once the most famous luxury department store in Paris, but it declined with the passage of time and was eventually abandoned. In such a metaphorical space full of "brilliant no more", Kelly Miroger sings the ultimate question of himself: "Who are we?" ”。 This question coincides with the extreme confusion in "Mr. Oscar's heart". Under the impact of both emotional and physical consumption, he is momentarily mentally confused and confuses the boundaries between drama and life - in the face of the scene in the play where the flight attendant played by Kelly Miroger falls from the top floor of Samaritan and dies, he can't suppress his inner impulse to cover his face and cry and run away. On the way to the final "date", out of the car window appeared the famous French cultural celebrity cemetery "Pantheon", the meaning of which is self-evident: a generation of artists (actors) who have lost their spiritual value in their careers seems that only the Pantheon is their dignified destination.
In such a state of mental exhaustion and near collapse, "Mr. Oscar" ushered in his last "date" of the day, and he will return to his "home" to be reunited with "wife" and "daughter". In the pathetic "I want to live again, relive those glorious moments" song, exhausted, he has to force a smile to re-enter the role - playing the husband and father of the chimpanzee - trying to add human emotions to the plot that jumps out of common sense. A strong tragic irony of "pseudo-idealism" in popular drama films jumps out – a brilliant actor enters the final "role" of the day in such a crying and laughable way. What was even more heartbreaking was that his "other" life would not end the night, and the only thing that would allow him to return to him briefly was the Cadillac sedan that came to greet him the next morning.
The end of the life of the "other" is not the end of the film. In the huge garage, the female driver Selina put on a white mask before stepping out of the Cadillac sedan to return to her own life. This famous mask is certainly derived from French director Georges Francis's 1960 film Eyes Without Faces, in which the only symbol of a daughter who lost her face is this pale mask. In "Sacred Carriage", it symbolizes the endless emptiness of human beings stripped of their disguises - leaving the luxurious "coffin" that carries the characteristics of the person's own individuality, and everyone, even Selena, is forced into an endless role play. In the end, the "mobile graves" (Cadillac cars) that carry the actors' real lives tell the ultimate meaning of the film in an anthropomorphic and humorous way: people no longer need "moteur" and no longer need "action"!
What needs to be explained here is that "moteur" and "action" are not just two French words that literally mean "engine/camera" and "action", they are also two French filmmaking terms that directors often use when shooting, meaning "boot" and "(actor performance) start". As film technology developed and the way of shooting changed, the camera became smaller and smaller (as revealed in the dialogue between "Mr. Oscar" and "Boss"), computer stunts were used more and more frequently, and these two traditional terms were used less and less frequently when shooting. The signs that people use to distinguish between virtual and real life in movies are also becoming more and more blurred, and everything seems to be in the play, and everything seems to be real life at all times. This is a portrayal of "Mr. Oscar's" exhausting day's experience, and it is not the spiritual price that each of us has to pay in this unpredictable era of digital capitalist consumption.
It was only at this moment that the real theme of the film appeared on the screen.
The three levels of "grief"
Jean-Renoir once described his relationship with actors in an interview in the mid-sixties: "I don't shoot actors' performances, but moments in their lives. French director Bruno Dumont, known for his particular approach to directing actors, explained from another angle in a lecture: "We [the filmmakers] are exploiting the emotions of the actors in the most brutal way." If the former is still an objective commentary on Stanislavski's theoretical system of actor performance, then the latter is entirely a revelation of its negative effects. In a way, "Sacred Carriage" is a long interpretation of Dumont's emotions - performance is a great skill and art, and it is also the deepest consumptive torture of his own soul. When we see Danny Rawang doing his best to give the various characters a living life force with his own emotional and spiritual strength, we also feel that his own spiritual strength is declining a little, and his true emotions have gradually entered an inert blank state. But every actor has glory and brilliance, a sense of honor and pride in their dedication to their careers, but only if they maintain a firm belief in themselves and the cause they are engaged in. From the dialogue between "Mr. Oscar" and the "boss" car, we can see that because of the advancement of technology, the evolution of film production methods and the change of audience tastes (irreconcilable conflict between the audience's choice trend and the actor's professional ideals), "Mr. Oscar" has lost his passion for his career and lost faith in films that gradually change their essence, and this is the real reason for his inner pain: the meaning of performance based on emotional dedication and talent creation is not only to constitute a smooth "conspiracy" between the film and the audience. A link in the relationship (output content and acceptance of content), and it is also a means for him to realize the ideal value. And when this value is gradually hollowed out and lost its meaning due to the qualitative change of the carrier, what is left to the value seeker is endless emptiness, loss and pain. Finally, in such a strong inner contradiction, "Mr. Oscar" is unable to distinguish the boundary between the real and the unreal, loses self-control after seeing the tragic death of Kelly Mirog, and falls into the Cadillac car in despair and sorrow.
"Sacred Carriage" does not stop at the individual level. In fact, when countless details imply that "Mr. Oscar" is the embodiment of Carax himself, the contradictory relationship between the film actor and the film performance shown by Danny Rawen in the film becomes the microscopic allegory of the filmmaker in Carax's concept of the film world. It is worth noting that in the ten fragments of "Sacred Carriage", Carax makes a strong mockery of the popular genre of contemporary cinema from a delicate and profound and unique perspective, and behind the warmth, absurdity, murder, computer special effects and unexplained comedy ending, it is the more superficial film driven by money, consumerism, materialization technology and kitsch mentality, and the impact and impact of the initial birth of film on human senses, hearts, emotions and spirits are getting farther and farther away. It has evolved into an authoritative communication tool under the dual control of politics and business, relying on the control of the mass psyche, anesthesia and pandering to succeed and make huge commercial profits, and bringing the audience the most "blind" and shallow entertainment and sensory stimulation. All this became an incomprehensible and irresistible law of chains in The Eyes of Carax. He then created this allegorical and bizarre situation to allow his avatar, "Mr. Oscar", to travel through different cinematic situations throughout the day. A day is the artist's life, shuttling through the different roles that the artist is forced to devote to creating. Everything seems to be going smoothly, everything seems to be composed of a perfect and impeccable assembly line production, but is there really no problem with such a "complicity" relationship between the perpetrator and the audience? "Sacred Carriage" provides us with a concrete picture of the inner torment of the producers on this assembly line, the artists, and the unforgiving pressure of the cold world outside. This is not just an indictment of an actor, but a filmmaker and artist's helpless lament that the special existence of film, which combines artistic, commercial and industrial characteristics, is constantly "degenerating" in real life.
And when we once again use "movie" as the blueprint of microscopic fables to enlarge and look at life, people are clamped, oppressed and tortured by the law of the jungle of desires on which the system, system and capitalism depend for survival in socialized life, and are hollowed out by the spirit in the path of life, and the tragic reality of losing touch with their original intentions, enthusiasm and ideals is not exactly the model depicted in "Sacred Car Travel"? It is at this point that the film completes the tragic indictment of its grand conception from three basis points (personal, medium, and social life).
"Sacred Carriage" is a rare film in the film industry today. It relies on a large number of carefully constructed symbolization systems to complete a subjective description of the social operation mechanism, but what runs through it is the creator's own deep and strong emotions that cannot be precipitated and have nowhere to release. It is rational and cognitive and emotionally expressive. In a way, this is the proud feature of French cinema and even French culture: it is always the best meeting point between sensual romanticism and rational speculation.