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In an artist's creative career, time is an eternal shackle.
Most of the inspiration for creation comes from accident. There are many themes of movies in the world, and there are not many, but with the change of the times and the accumulation of works of art created by human beings, it is a way to find new inspirations. A very difficult thing.
For a film director who is entering his later years, he can no longer invent such whimsical stories, and sometimes, only his own life may be left on the screen.
There are a few typical directors who are talented and famous in the circles when they are young, but when the inspiration is almost exhausted at the end, they return to the subjects they were most passionate about at the beginning.
Some directors go from glory to pain to good end; others choose to only make films that follow their own artistic ideas, even if they are small, such as Stanley Kubrick; and some filmmakers are reaping the glory After the inspiration is exhausted, he still continues to force himself to innovate, but he often falls into the whirlpool of business. This kind of creative process is somewhat reluctant from an objective point of view.
The film "Pain and Glory" in this review is the autobiographical film of the famous Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.
The director put his own life experience on a film hero named Salva, and he used this film to express to the audience his current inner troubles and reflections on past memories.
The protagonist of the film, Sawar, is a film director entering his later years, and after finishing his last film, he has no inspiration for writing for a long time.
He wandered around his house every day, while racking his brains to think about the script, this period of free time made him gradually recall his childhood, his former love, his mother, and the time he lived with him in the cave. Forged indissoluble friends.
Due to his long-term high-intensity work, Saval has suffered from various diseases every day since his middle age, ranging from tinnitus and chronic pharyngitis to gastroesophageal reflux, peptic ulcer, and endogenous asthma.
The only friend with whom he had daily dealings was the theater actor Alberto, with whom they had collaborated on several occasions, and which Salva would discuss with Alberto during the writing of the script.
Later, Saval finally decided to write his own experience into a script and perform it on stage in a one-man show. He asked his good friend Alberto to play himself in the play.
In fact, the protagonist of the film, Savar, is the director of the film, Almodovar, and Alberto in the stage play is also Sabal, so this is a kind of play within a play.
Every episode of the film is the director's own life story.
Almodóvar's autobiography was a brilliant choice for a dramatic film rather than a documentary.
If it is only made into a documentary, the audience can only see a mediocre and simple description as plain as other biographies from the most objective third-person perspective.
But when it is made into a movie, and the design of the drama within the drama will make the audience immerse in the inner world of the drama character first, and only realize at the end that this is an autobiography, the ending of the movie can also be sublimated because of this, leaving an impression on the audience. An invisible feeling of loss.
The reason why most people like movies more than documentaries is that we know very well that the plots in movies are mostly fiction, and we sometimes don’t need to think about it; and the content of documentaries are real events intercepted from the real world. Or real people, especially when watching some suffering-related documentaries, in addition to sadness, part of our emotions is fear, and we refuse because of fear.
So people who like to watch horror movies may not necessarily like to watch disaster documentaries.
The film incorporates symbolic metaphors into the design of color, composition and scene, the most prominent of which is the color part.
Red elements are added to almost every scene in this film.
It can be seen clearly: both the childhood and the present-day Saval are wearing red in their attire.
In other scenes of two or three or more people, at least one person is wearing bright red clothing, and the deliberately dim color of the clothing of the surrounding people will highlight this person's presence.
In his childhood, Salwar lived in a grotto in a slum area. The surrounding walls were all white, and the clothes of the people around him were also white. Only Salva's mother often wore the rose-red dress.
This symbolizes that little Saval is the hope of the family. The beautiful red dress shows that this child is different from other children here, because only Saval can read and write in the whole village, can do arithmetic, and is good at singing.
There is only one brightly colored dress on my mother's side. She only wears it when she is doing housework at home and when she is interacting with other women in the village. The rose red is slightly lighter than the real red, which symbolizes that she can only have a certain sense of Sawar when she was a child. The ability to discipline and control, and when the son is a little older, he will be able to go to other places according to his own ideas.
So Saval was reluctantly sent by his mother to a mission school when he was nine years old, because at that time the family was poor and there was only this place where children could learn knowledge, but after finishing the mission school, Saval went to Madrid to study alone.
Before the mother died, she thought that her son still hated her for this matter.
In this scene of Savar's mother and son getting along before their mother's death, the two are dressed in black and white.
Black and white symbolize opposing sides in the film, and also indicate that the importance of the characters is equally distributed. In this picture, both the latter role is played, and the atmosphere is rendered as a sad parting, because the next time the mother is mentioned, she has suffered an illness and died.
The mother and son each occupy half of the frame, showing that Saval has understood the strict discipline his mother gave him when he was a child. At this time, the mother is also willing to let go and not restrict her son's life, even though she is running out of time.
The further back the movie is, the greater the proportion of red in the picture.
The red at this time symbolizes the passion of Saval's artistic creation, and the light blue that appears in the picture at the same time as the red color plays a neutralizing role, symbolizing the close relationship or friendship between the two characters in the film communication.
The above picture is the scene of the reunion of Saval and his former lover after a long absence.
On the stage where Alberto performed, the stage background consisted of only red and white. This is the color that appeared most in Saval's childhood, but the difference is that when he was a child, Saval was just like a red flower surrounded by a white rock wall, and the white on this stage was surrounded by red in the middle on. This suggests to the audience that the protagonist is gradually breaking free from the ideological troubles that have long troubled him, and has broken through the creative bottleneck.
Towards the end of the story, while visiting an art gallery, Saval came across a portrait painted by his "student" when he was nine years old, and bought it.
But when he learned that there was the other party's mailing address behind the painting, he didn't want to go to him.
For this mason "student", Saval has both a favorable impression and a sense of shame.
The curator of the museum said that the painting was bought at a flea market in the countryside, and that many of the authors were ordinary farmers who had no idea that they had artist talent.
Sawar may not contact him for this reason. In such a poor village, many children actually have talents in certain fields, but due to the backwardness of the villagers' concepts, they can only continue the traditions of their ancestors: farming, working, getting married give birth.
Saval knows that part of what he is now is due to his luck. He has an enlightened mother. If he hadn't been forced into a missionary school by his mother at the time, he might have no chance to study, let alone get in touch. Art.
The appearance of the last painting is probably just a fiction of the director in the script. In his real experience, there is no such chance.
Almodovar expresses his inner expectations through this plot. He may be very much looking forward to meeting this friend again, but in reality, unless a miracle happens, after fifty years, where has a person gone and what has happened, except for him I know it, no one can guess.
Although this whole plot gave a fairly happy ending at the end, when the shooting camera slowly pulled back and exposed the filming scene of the movie, it suddenly made people feel lost.
Pain and glory, glory gave the director a moment of joy, but the pain of entanglement in his heart and constantly trying to seize the memory will not disappear.
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