"The Defective Man" is more than enough in following Cohen's style. Every step Eddie the barber takes is contrary to the expected result, but step by step toward the end point that he has invisibly selected. The success of this character setting depends partly on the boring description of his daily life at the beginning of the film, the pouring out of large monologues, and the chattering hoarse voice betrays the loneliness of life and the indifference after being consumed by loneliness, along with the mechanized day Repetitive work day after day. He has been smoking cigarettes to resist the boring bottom life. Value crisis, mid-life crisis, and marriage crisis make him use his numb good temperament to endure his wife's derailment and the irony of life. He is reluctant to give up the so-called "hair philosophy", which is a self-summary of professional accumulation. Hair, as the most vital thing in the body, is always cut off and accompanied by garbage. Eddie, as a hairdresser, is in contact with people Disdainful discards, this hair philosophy is the projection of Eddie's voice, and it also fits fatally with the theme of "absence". The foreshadowing of these characters and the establishment of the environment played a role in promoting Eddie's speculative practice of changing the status quo through an investment. I think if there is no meticulous and harsh foreshadowing in the front, what kind of blunt and far-fetched motivation and turning point will be behind it. , the waste cavity walks the board.
The next series of domino effects not only caught Eddie by surprise, but also made the audience feel helpless. Maybe only the director has been standing in the perspective of judging the situation and looking at the overall situation. In order to take a stake in the dry cleaners with his partner, Eddie threatened his wife's boss and lover, and killed him by mistake after being found out. Helpless, his wife became a scapegoat and went to prison. Eddie hired a lawyer for her, but Eddie's fate was reversed because of a car accident. In the end, Eddie became the scapegoat for the murder of his partner. The two meanings of "absentee" may be that one of Eddie's absence of existence and value is absent, and the other is that the murderer who broke Eddie's painstakingly solitary plan is still at large.
The spiritual burden that Cohen wanted to convey was a little heavy later on, and the generalization of life at the bottom can also be implemented into specific helpless projects: the shadow of justice, the self-taunting of mid-life crisis, and the inability to communicate. Great people are all the same, and insignificant people can also be included in one point: no sense of existence, sense of absence, sense of lack of value, sense of life without sense. Among them, the exposure of judicial corruption in many films will be satirical with great fanfare, such as Chicago, and the interpretation of the midlife crisis will also be explained in a dramatic way, such as American Beauty. But compared to Cohen's film noir, the revealing of spiritual values and the formalistic carnival, as the shortest part of the film's discreet charm, are seemingly inadvertently stylized by absolutely restrained images and resonant stories. For example, the dialogue between Eddie, Eddie's wife, and lawyer in prison is a poignant and subtle irony for today's society and era where the law is supreme and democracy is supreme.
This stylization benefits from the charm of black and white images. A story from the 1940s in the United States uses black and white images to constrict the audience's thinking space. Cohen said that this is a tribute to the black master James.M.Cain, and reshapes the realistic anxiety and society of the golden age film noir from the perspective of modern people's thinking. care. The use of black and white images is a test of skill. War movies such as "Schindler's List" and "Nanjing Nanjing" all try to avoid the color as neutral as possible to go back to history, and keep a distance from history. Sensitivity is the most indignant part. However, "The Absentee" is shot in color film and processed into black and white in post-processing, which is both a tribute to the classics and the indifference and alienation of the film's environment and characters.
The lighting of some scenes in the movie is sharp, such as the scene where Eddie kills his wife and boss in the office. The shadow of the two duel moves on the wall in many angles. The last shot is a big Yang, and Big Dave is in After the black pool of blood fell, the black shadow that remained in the line of sight was infinitely clear, and there was a sense of lingering lingering sound. Reminiscent of Hitchcock. There is also the light and shadow effect of Eddie accepting the hanging at the end of the film. The camera pans through several hairstyles that are completely different from Ed’s specialty and ends with a dazzling white light that finally symbolizes liberation. There is a kind of endless continuity. .
The emotional setting in the film is played by Betty, played by Scarlett Johansson. There is a LOLITA in the heart of every man, the tip of the tongue is upward, in three steps, gently falling on the teeth from the upper jaw down, LO--LI--TA. The lines of "Lolita" will not be jerky and uncomfortable here. Men overdraft their beautiful emotions on Lolita because of their emptiness and low self-esteem. Loli's piano sound and her unintentionally revealing saucy have lethal power to Eddie. But whether it's "Lolita" or "The Absentee", the male protagonists are all irritated because of Loli, and Eddie is in a car accident because of Lolita's teasing out of control. As another turning point of fate, Eddie directly Go to the gallows. What Cohen was trying to say might be that the more beautiful things are, the more lethal they are, making people rich but starving to death.
Undressing a dramatic, even tragic, or vile scene to a hilarious effect seems to be the very definition of black humor. Freud said, "Humor is the spiritual release of a person's psyche." Cohen has made too many fatal struggles with dark humor, but this one has no intention of "unexpected", but permeates the film in the details. Both the image style and the audio-visual language have an almost grim and discreet charm. Paying homage to "American black-and-white films of the 1950s" is clearly not a fig leaf to cover up creative impotence.
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