.
I cannot refute this. It is true that the rhythm of "Floating Ghost" is so slow that most viewers fall asleep; indeed, its subject matter seems to be so arrogant; indeed, it only covers the whole body with a sheet and makes two small black eye holes. The concept of children playing ghosts for Easter as a movie is really dumbfounding.
However, I can only say that this is the best movie I have seen since 2017, and it is also the very few successful stream of consciousness American movie in recent years. When I walked out of the movie theater, I didn't even understand why I admired the film so much, but I could understand the audience who left midway, although I felt very sorry for it.
"Ghost Floating Life"
The aforementioned long shot that caused most of the audience to exit is of course the notorious, five-and-a-half minutes long shot in which the heroine eats chocolate pie. Its notoriety can probably be attributed to the polarizing comments of film critics after the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year-the negatives are "boring" (Melissa Anderson of Village Voice), "Mara (actor of the heroine) (Rooney Mara)’s performances are old-fashioned and useless" (Newark Star-Ledger's Stephen Whitty), "This is a bad joke" (Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty), and the positive ones are "wonderful" ( USA Today's Brian Truitt), "Mara's performance is outstanding" (Time Out film critic Joshua Rothkopf), "This is a good joke" (Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang).
Yes, it seems that the evaluation of "Floating Ghost" has only two extremes, good and bad, and there is no middle term.
Let’s review what happened before the heroine M (Rooney Mara) ate chocolate pie for five and a half minutes. We saw her discussing moving with the actor C (played by the new actor Cassie Affleck); we saw her move the things she didn’t need at home to the street; we saw the house in the middle of the night one day The piano suddenly made a strange and miserable sound, but they did not find anyone in the house; we saw them return to the bed, long and loving kisses; we saw C died in a car accident one day; we saw M stopped in a car accident The expression in the corpse room was unacceptable; we saw C wake up suddenly, wrapped in a bed sheet and turned into a ghost with a simple appearance; we saw the ghost dragging a long bed sheet back home; we saw the sales agent People came to the house and left the chocolate pie, and told M to contact her to continue selling the house when he was ready; we saw M returning home, trying to do housework to alleviate the feeling of sadness, but found that once he stopped, he would be saddened. Swallow.
M started to eat chocolate pie, and C, who returned home, could only slowly watch M from the corner go through this still, long, and sad five and a half minutes.
M, played by Rooney Mara, is heartbreaking
It tells the story of the first third of "A Floating Ghost" in a flat and straightforward manner, just like the scenes in the movie present them to the audience indifferently. It seems dull, it seems that it is only directed at a low-level human ghost story. Come to develop it. This is why I can understand why many viewers choose to give up at this moment. These clips at the beginning of the movie are all lengthy and fixed shots. Apart from the occasional beautiful pictures, there is really nothing special about it. The images that are nothing special and lack the sense of cinema but challenge patience make the audience feel confused and even angry, which can only be said to be a matter of reason.
The audience who had to leave finally left here, but the film did not apologize for it. The scene did not become fluid, it became more still; the rhythm did not become fast, it even stopped moving as if paused; the plot did not become as terrifying as the title of "Floating Ghosts" implies. Instead, the most ordinary scene is shown in front of the audience. Yes, we saw M remove the tin foil from the package, sit on the ground, put a fork into the chocolate pie, put it in his mouth, and repeat. We don’t know how many times she repeated this action. We can only hear her pushing harder and harder into the bowl, making the sound of the fork and the glass bowl rubbing; we won’t count how many bites she ate, we can only see In the end, she couldn't stand it and collapsed and ran to the toilet and vomited; we were not told what her mood was like at the time, and we can only look for clues into her heart in the still picture. And if you still have any doubts about Rooney Mara’s acting skills before this, she has successfully presented her grief in front of us in this scene, she should be able to eliminate all doubts, right? In this static picture for five and a half minutes, the attentive audience can see her tears dripping onto the tip of her nose on the screen, and seeing the funny ghost can only stand aside and watch it quietly without the power to comfort her. Time is so still, and the picture is so poignant. I never thought that the scene that moved me the most in 2017 so far was such a simple picture.
"A movie should be more like music than a novel. It should be an accumulation of emotions and feelings. Its theme, the meaning it wants to express, these should be placed after the emotions." For the film, Stanley Kubrick I used to say that.
The first third of "A Floating Ghost" just confirms this view of Kubrick. In the seemingly dull and slow scenes and stories, director David Lowe aims to create a series of images that can resonate emotions for patient audiences. This is extremely rare in American movies, and only more common in European movies, such as Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece "Stalker". The long shot allows the audience to feel the atmosphere that the director hopes to create more, while the still picture makes it easier for the audience's eyes to find the focus of the director's desire to express, or the composition carefully designed by the director. Film creators with this stream of consciousness are probably only Terrence Malick in mainstream American production, right? His "Day in Heaven" and "Tree of Life" are the best in stream of consciousness movies. Coincidentally, director David Lowe's previous work "They Are Not a Saint" has been criticized for being too much like Malik. But this time, he finally came out of the shadow of this master also from Texas.
Director David Lowe directs ghosts
If the scene of eating chocolate pie is the culmination of the accumulation of emotional atmosphere in the first third of "Floating Ghost", then the last two thirds of the movie are more fascinating and worthy of contemplation. When we see M gradually come out of sadness and even finally put down the past and leave here, the focus of the story and the emotional focus of the movie finally fell on the ghost in the sheets. In order to make the theme of the film more distinct and to make the audience more intuitively dependent on emotions, David Lowe wrote the rest of the script from the perspective of ghosts. We see that the time experienced by it is different from that of normal people, and time keeps jumping. From his perspective, we saw how M came out of grief day by day and embraced life again, but it was so cruel to him; we saw from his perspective the Mexican family after M left and his sense of loneliness; From its perspective, I saw the scene of a party after the Mexican family. A talker seemed to express his thoughts about time and the meaning of existence (and the important theme of the movie, although I think this monologue is very redundant...); We have seen from its perspective that the house was demolished many years later, and the original countryside has finally become a high-rise building, and there is no more familiar things. When we saw it finally couldn't stand it, we decided to jump off the building and die.
However, at this moment David Lowe used a more subtle god to make a stroke-we followed the ghost, went backwards in time, and returned to the time when the house was not built more than 100 years ago, and saw the pioneer We tried to build a house in this place and died. Then we returned to the familiar house, and then we saw the former C and M. When they first entered this house to see the house, they moved in and chatted side by side together, they sat on the porch and drank happily. While chatting with beer, they are arguing about whether to move out of here, C finally decides to agree to move.
Unable to accept this established fact, the ghost sat down by the piano, causing the keyboard to make a miserable and familiar sound.
Time brings us sadness, but it is still worth looking forward to
Perhaps it was at this moment that I began to determine that "Floating Ghost" is the best movie of 2017 so far. Time is a smooth circle. We followed the ghost to experience the stillness of time, the fast forward of time, and the backward flow of time. Finally, we still experience the sadness that time brings us. In the end, we saw that C was still in a car accident, and the ghost also saw a new ghost standing in front of the window and watching M leave. In the face of time, our lives seem so meaningless, but we still choose to persist in repeating what seems to be an inevitable event. But even so, as the ghost finally found the note left by M, the music, an important part of the movie, became more hopeful at the last moment. It seemed to represent David Lowe, who was in front of sadness, was still concerned about life. And time cherish expectations.
And of course he should have expectations. After "They are not saints", he devoted himself to the big production and successfully produced the unexpectedly wonderful "Peter's Dragon", and then brought the audience "Ghost Floating Life", which can resonate so quietly and beautifully to the audience. It is a rare independent stream of consciousness film, and was later directed by the legendary Hollywood veteran star Robert Redford, the retired film "The Old Man and the Gun".
David Lowe is certainly worth looking forward to.
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