Elegy of the Old Times

Gabe 2022-04-19 09:02:35

After watching the movie, I thought: It really looks like something the French would make, so elegant, so nostalgic, and so wistful.

At the beginning, we saw an unwilling magician, facing the sparse crowd, performing the old tricks that we are familiar with. Traditional top hats, old-fashioned suits, eternal rabbit props, posters that will never change... Everything has a taste of the old times. Until the rock band came out, the whistle blew everywhere, and then it was the magician's turn to play, the scene was all, and there were only a few old people and children left in the audience. I suddenly reacted: Oh, it turns out that it is a new era of rock bands. How can the old street art survive under the onslaught of TV and new pop culture?

So when he arrived in a Scottish mountain village as far away as the end of the world and started to perform in front of the simple villagers, I thought, just like this, stay and live sweetly with that little girl.

Impossible, even in such a small mountain village, people will get bored one day. So, the magician hit the road again. This time, with a little country girl who came out on her own initiative. The relationship between these two people is really so French: like a father and a daughter, like a lover, it is unclear and ambiguous. Living in a cheap small hotel, surrounded by street performers who are suffering from the same illness, the support of each other is so touching. For a moment, I almost guessed that the little girl and the old man found a new way of acting and started to go viral. But I forgot, that era is over, and the director didn't want to give us an untimely ending at all. I even forgot that this is not Hollywood, but a French film.

In fact, the whole film is the story of such an out of place person. Outdated magician, outdated way of performing, sentimental abandoned by the times. Even the little country girl, she is not ruthless, she is just too young, so she is destined to be lost in this colorful new era, and the ending of the two seems to be destined. No one can resist the tide of the times.

It is said that after seeing "Beautiful Trio", Tati's family nominated the director to shoot this Tati's posthumous work. It's not hard to understand: Isn't it just that anachronistic nostalgia in "Beautiful Trio"? Tati himself is known as a "lost craftsman", insisting on the art of silent film expressed by body language in the era of sound movies. The animation follows the old fashions in this regard: the lines are almost non-existent, and the few sentences that are there are processed into completely incomprehensible language. In this way, we have to admire the greatness of the animators, who can convey such subtle movements and expressions - this is not the strength of animation.

And those pictures that are so refined to the extreme: the beauty of Edinburgh becomes dreamlike. Small mountain villages in Scotland are like lost paradise. If there is no author's incomparable nostalgia for the old times, how can such a scene be depicted?

Finally, if it's interesting and regrettable, I actually think the comedy part of the animation can be a little more "crazy". The tone is still too soothing, a little too provocative. This is supposed to be a movie with extreme joy and sadness, but because the joy is not enough, it can't match the sadness.

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