A Beautiful Mistake takes place in Barcelona. Director Inaritu's films always take place in a noisy city. From his rise to fame in the early 2000s with his multi-threaded, cross-narrative in "Love is a Bitch" to his last major film, "Babel," which won best director at Cannes in the same way, the fast-paced and complex interpersonal relationships of urban life seem to be always grabbed his attention. It can be said that the structure of his plays is closely related to the urban life he wants to describe, and in "Babel Tower", there is a multi-national and multi-language post-modern world profile, and he can use this structure to reflect this. This kind of world situation - whether the path dependence of the director's technique leads to the bias in the choice of materials, or whether a certain method must be adopted because of a love for a certain material is still a topic of constant debate. I personally prefer the former, because in "Tower of Babel", although this technique presents a multi-faceted picture of the contemporary world, such a collage does not have the drama tension of "Love is a Bitch". Rather, it appears to be intentional.
"Beautiful Mistakes" seems to be a change made by the director. The screenwriter is no longer Guillermo Arriaga, Inarito's previous "screenwriter" - "21 Grams", "Love is a Bitch" and "Babel" are all written by him, the two can be described as Perfect teamwork. This time, Inaritu himself served as the screenwriter, abandoning the multi-threaded and cross-narrative, but chose to tell the story in chronological order.
The film revolves around the life of the psychic who is about to die. His work, his brother, his wife, and his psychic appear in sequence. On the line of his work, the film is full of ramifications, depicting the A few outsiders struggling to survive in the metropolis - a black Chinese factory owner and his gay lover, a black undocumented peddler and his wife. It can be said that the complexity of urban life involved in "Beautiful Mistakes" is no less than that of the director's previous films, but after abandoning the original narrative technique, the director's control of each plot point is unexpectedly precise and reserved. He was accustomed to a little fatalistic tendencies. After the psychic Uxbal divorced his alcoholic ex-wife, he raised two children on his own. When he went out to work during the day, he put the child in the care of a Chinese girl. His job is a broker, and he is a population broker—helping companies in the city that need cheap labor to find cheap labor from China, so he met the Chinese owner of an underground factory; he is also a protection broker for the city police, he helps the police Collecting protection money from unlicensed street vendors, he met a black man and his wife.
After Uxbal learned of his illness, the psychic persuaded him to settle everything in order to leave this world in a safe and secure manner, but Uxbal found that he could not settle things before leaving, but would inevitably Died in despair and noise. The biggest blow to him came from the collective gas poisoning death of Chinese workers, for which he was at least partly responsible, but his original intention was to "settle" them well, so he bought them gas heaters. One of the most heart-pounding scenes in the film also appears here: Uxbal escaped from the scene of the incident and came to the overpass alone. After calling his ex-wife, he held his mobile phone blankly and looked up. It was the loneliness of the sky. As they approached, several groups of crows swirled in the air, with no branches to perch on. What hides behind the noise is the desolation and loneliness of this city.
There are not many scenes with such a fatalistic meaning, but when they appear, they are shocking. The owl carcass buried deep in the snow, as echoed at the beginning and end of the film, is said to spit out a ball of hair before it dies, but this may just be a beautiful mistake. Uxbal's daughter misspelled English words and accidentally told the cruel truth of life.
View more about Biutiful reviews
