The story is nothing special, and the plot has no ups and downs. But the director's narrative method is very special, which is the most successful part of this film.
The movies in my impression involve violent factors such as shootings and explosions. The scenes are more magnificent, bloody, cruel, and shocking. It may be our subjective consciousness, and certain things must happen in a specific environment. Imagination is good, and it will bring greater stimulation to your senses through film art.
But this movie is the opposite, using a lot of long shots to give you a special sense of reality. In the film, there is rarely such a way of taking a long shot and then taking a close-up. You are more like a bystander, or the shadow of a party. If the narrative methods of general movies can be said to be in the third person, the movie should be in the second person.
At least eleven characters are introduced in the film, and the characters appearing on the scene have no clue to the brief introduction, and they are all students. First, there is a black field, then the name of the character in black appears in the center of the screen, and then there are some trivial things about the character. No narration, no psychological hints and so on. The shooting method of "The Crofer Archives" is a bit similar, but the "Clofer Archives" is more realistic. You are like a bystander. You even look at your friends doing your own business as usual, although it seems meaningless to you. But you will not interrupt them. There is no too much lens language, and the lens in ordinary movies is somewhat related to the development of the plot. But the director is too plain or even indifferent in this respect. You watch Elias repeatedly shaking the film, or listen to them discussing homosexuality in class. You will look around the classroom and observe the expressions of everyone when they speak. Or they will follow a certain character and walk aimlessly, or even look back at the girl talking next to him, etc.
The timeline is not conventional linear time either. The tempo of the whole film is very slow, even boring, but I’m glad I didn’t fall asleep. In the first segment, there was a whole section of "Moonlight Sonata", and the sound effects were not as simple as the soundtrack. Most of the time, there were background music and the protagonist. Some very detailed sounds, noises in the environment, and a little psychedelic sound effects occur at the same time. The narrative method is gentle and criticizes others. But this is where the film is awesome.
At first, I thought the title of the film was something like the animal world. Later, I learned that the term "elephant" came from an analogy by the Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty about "problems arise but not resolved". He said, "It's like in your house. There is an elephant, it is so huge that you cannot ignore its existence, but everyone tacitly never talks about it, ignores it together, and quickly gets used to its existence." Indifference and even discrimination will intensify the problem after all, even if it is meek as an elephant, it will produce unimaginable power after anger.
The girl in the movie poster actually spends at most 100 seconds in the movie, and the theme has no relationship with the movie, except that the sky in the background is repeated three times in the movie. But I think it has meaning. The blonde boy survived, perhaps because of the girl's kiss.
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