Text: Xiaosheng Mu Xiaoyao. Welcome to the public account of the same name.
You look at the scenery from the bridge, and the people watching the scenery look at you upstairs.
Have you ever followed a stranger? There is no purpose, just the kind of tailgating, watching a stranger walking down the street, following closely behind, but not disturbing.
"Follow," the film begins with this particular hobby.
Bill, not really a writer, but a young man who made a living by writing. Maybe it's to find inspiration for his own work, maybe it's some other reason, he has a special hobby of following strangers.
He said, it's like someone in the crowd suddenly attracts his attention, and then that person no longer belongs to the crowd, and becomes a unique individual, it's that feeling at that moment that he can't resist.
This man, male or female, has nothing to do with desire, he just wants to know where they go, what they do, where they came from, where they're going. That's all.
But, often walking by the river, how can there not be wet shoes? Bill overturned while being tracked. As usual, Bill scoured the streets for his prey, and today the prey was a man his age.
The man is not tall, with thick eyebrows, big eyes, a suit and leather shoes, and a large black bag in his hand. The size of the bag does not match his appearance very well.
The strange man walked through the crowd, passed a few streets, and finally walked into a cafe.
Bill followed the cafe and took a seat at the two tables separated by the man.
Unexpectedly, not long after sitting down, the man got up and walked towards him step by step.
Without any warning, this strange man he followed, actually sat at his table by himself. It happened so suddenly, Bill couldn't help but be at a loss and panic.
The man's name was Cobb, and he said very directly that he knew Bill was following him. Surprisingly, the man didn't show a rage about being followed, and he took the initiative to ask Bill to check the big black bag in his hand.
It was a sporty tote bag with no bundles of bills or big bags of drugs like a regular gangster movie, but CDs of the kind stolen from elsewhere. Cobb was a burglar. But unlike the average burglar, Cobb wasn't greedy for stealing.
He sneaked into other people's homes, flipped through other people's private spaces, enjoyed the red wine in other people's kitchens, and took away some items that were not very valuable. Occasionally, the owner of the house will leave some things that he brought.
He can paint a portrait of the owner of the house through the furnishings in the room, and the grace revealed in the logic of Sherlock Holmes is admirable. Even if the owner suddenly comes home, he can make up a reason to leave calmly without being surprised.
Cobb's behavior made Bill curious and convinced, so he followed Cobb to start another life, but unexpectedly he stepped into a great conspiracy step by step. The "Follow" was released at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival and was director Christopher Nolan's debut.
When it comes to Christopher Nolan, his "Inception", "Interstellar", "Memento" and "Deadly Magic" are all excellent works that are well known to the public.
The "Following", which is only 69 minutes long, is a small test before many of his subsequent films, and some fans even regard it as the foreshadowing of "Memento" in 2000.
In addition to the "Batman" series, Nolan's works are mostly characterized by wild imagination and brain-burning storylines. The editing of this "Following" also adopts the method of parallel multiple story lines, forcibly cutting the three stories that were originally on one timeline, and smashing each story and recombining it.
This editing technique is also applied incisively and vividly in the famous American drama "Westworld", which makes "Westworld" a brain-burning drama in the hearts of American drama fans.
But simply playing with the timeline is not the most exciting part of this "Following".
As the plot progresses, the three stories are gradually connected into a string, and just when the audience just sorts out the relationship on the timeline, the film directly enters the two huge plot reversals in the last ten minutes, and the plot suddenly changes. Like a roller coaster, the climax goes straight and comes to an abrupt end. Can not help but make people applaud. This black-and-white film, which costs only $6,000, is called "a cool black-and-white film with youthful dreams and ambitions." Its sensation at the Toronto Film Festival brought Nolan a huge success, and his superb shooting skills and unique imagination quickly propelled his career to the top.
Not only because of the cost, Nolan also used black and white film to pay tribute to his most admired Hitchcock master.
He focuses on the film itself, making the smallest details to the extreme. The typewriter-style title font design uses Bill's appearance to locate three stories, uses different doors to distinguish different locations, and even does enough work on the puppet with a broken arm.
Of course, there are also some small places where they hide their love for Batman deeply, laying the groundwork for the "Batman" series of movies to be filmed in the future. Bill's appearance represents the current state of life of a class of young people who, under the pretext of seeking inspiration for writing, follow strangers aimlessly, not so much a morbid curiosity as a spiritual emptiness hidden in loneliness. .
Bill said that he has been alone for so long that he feels more and more lonely and bored, with nothing to do all day long. Indeed, in Cobb's words: he was a socially unhappy bastard, a homeless man living on welfare.
Humans are social animals. Trapped in the poverty of life, spiritual emptiness, and spiritual loneliness, following others has become the only means for him to connect with this society, and it is a poison for him to comfort his inner loneliness.
Although he seeks rationalized explanations for his behavior, despite the rules he has set for himself, further social demands also make him constantly break his own rules and eventually step into the abyss. In contrast, Cobb's behavior also has no small morbid component.
He arbitrarily intrudes into other people's lives, peeps into other people's privacy, collects other people's belongings, and takes pleasure in it. Not only to satisfy the curiosity and voyeurism in the bottom of my heart, but also not to experience a different life, but to obtain the omnipotent God-like pleasure from it, a kind of almost abnormal self-realization. Nolan surreptitiously reveals their crippled, self-righteous social disability, and their eventual tragedy.
Regardless of this conspiracy, who is the winner in the end. One person is, after all, another person's tool.
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