First of all, I have to say that the female perspective of Sils Maria, the metaphor of multiple mirror images, and the contrast between art and reality are all my favorite themes. The film adopts a "play within a play" format, and the whole film is connected by writer Wilhelm's play "Snake of Maloya". The general plot of the play goes something like this in the mouth of the older actor Hendrick, who was once Maria's lover: "Helena, who has a certain social status and is older, is inevitably attracted to the young and vigorous Sigrid. And ultimately a story of self-destruction." Coincidentally, this narrative should be in line with the tone of most film critics and audiences. But it is also just as the writer's wife Rosa and Maria made fun of Hendrick in the phone call: "The less he understands the better, when he understands nothing, he's excellent." It is inevitable to fall into the small trap used by the writer Wilhelm to distinguish and confuse people like Hendrick. In the eyes of the world and even Maria, Helena and Sigrid represent two completely different sides of the world. Sigrid is young and strong, as described in the film: exuding irresistible confidence, but the 40-year-old Helena represents On the other hand, aging, fragile and useless. In the movie, the director Claude asked that question for the audience, and if so, how did they attract each other in the first place. And Claude himself answered this question. In his interpretation, Helena and Sigrid are not that different, and even they are the same person in a certain angle. I think this is the original intention of the writer Wilhelm, and it is also the conclusion that only a few readers who have thought deeply and carefully behind this story will come to the conclusion, which is why Rosa will hand over the sequel to the story after the death of the writer Wilhelm to Claude. Bar.
Understanding Helena and Sigrid's relationship is the first step in understanding the play and film. The fascinating thing about drama and the real is that their borders are so blurred that the drama itself is a way of interpreting the real. In "Sils Maria", the director's setting makes there exist two levels of reality and drama between the drama, the film, and the audience, and the fun of finding the essence is multiplied and fascinating. . In the reality of the film outside of the Serpent of Maloya drama, the main two mirrored relationships are Maria and her assistant Val, Maria and Joann, who plays the second version of Sigrid. Maria says more than once in the movie that she played Sigrid at a very young age, and in a way she was Sigrid at the time, and she still thinks she is Sigrid even at the moment in the movie's timeline. With the development of the plot, the people around her and the audience unconsciously tried to use the years to label her again and again. The 40-year-old Maria contradicted her own statement in the movie, as if it had become another reality outside the drama. And the figurative Helena. And the film's few strokes are enough to visualize Joann, the representative of this young, rebellious and violent idol face in teenage culture. What I find very interesting is the interview about Joann, the film fragments seem so blunt and shoddy, and The rest of the film is so out of place that it seems to have no meaning. Still, Val can't stop calling her "should be my favorite female star of this era". People always make mistakes. But the mistakes of older people can seem so unbearable, and young people seem to have the natural privilege of making mistakes and being forgiven easily.
The aging itself brought about by the passage of time is an irresistible torrent for Maria and everyone. The weight of the years itself has become the most irresistible label that each of us has to bear in our society and culture, and people use this label to compare Helena and Sigrid, Maria and Joann and Val, thousands of The young and once-young me and you are so sharply separated. Time does give people identity through experience, adds experience, changes appearance and behavior, and these are just appearances. Time itself is a giving and never diminishes. The extension of the timeline does not change the inherent essence of a person. 18-year-old Maria and 40-year-old Maria are still the same person. Its passing changes the bystanders who ignore the essence. their views and attitudes. These bystanders set their own labels and rules, and at the same time are bound by them. Maria is immersed in it, resisting the labels that people impose on her, while refusing to accept the essence of herself outside of time. Almost from the beginning to the end of the film, she unconsciously uses the same standard to measure herself. Although she says she is still Sigrid, she stubbornly separates Helena and Sigrid in her self-concept, such as in PART TWO. Reject Val's interpretation of the script and resist your own understanding of Helena. This is Maria and everyone else's obsession with appearances and their irresistible demons. On top of that, we're like Maria, not even Helena's faithfulness to herself. Faithful to pain, true to loss, true to the essence of the self hidden by the labels of worldly rules. Many of Val's lines in PART TWO are straightforward enough, and it is indeed much easier to resonate with Sigrid, the power side represented by youth in the secular definition. Compared with Val's lines, the expression of the fragment of the 1924 German director Arnold Funk's black and white silent film "Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja" inserted in the film is much more poetic. The metaphorical ontology of the place of death that fascinates writer Wilhelm, and ultimately chooses, is the self-expression of the true essence.
The first impression of the whole movie when watching it should basically be fragmented narrative techniques, interspersed with storylines and jumping locations. If you look closely, you will find many director's designs and arrangements, and the whole article can be cited at will. Pros and cons or the corresponding character settings and plots, there is no useless shot. To give a few small examples that I find very interesting, one is that Val once asked about the mutual attraction between Maria and Wilhelm in PART TWO. Here, you can imagine the roles of Rosa and Maria, and the relationship with Wilhelm. But I personally like Maria's answer here: Every thing more would have in danger our relationship, my intuition told me that was far more valuable than desire. Also in Joann's date with Chris, Chris also said: Taste can get worn out, kind of like desire. As one of the few clips in the film that directly involves the feelings of men and women, the interaction between Maria and Hendrick is a surging undercurrent of restraint and restraint, starting from the two leaving the banquet , the whole process can even be said to have nothing to do with lust itself, it is more like a contest between the winning and losing desires. That's a stark contrast to Joanna and Chris's public dating and even the high-profile extramarital affair that forced his wife to commit suicide. As mentioned in detail in the second paragraph of the article, when director Claude invited Maria to play Helena at the banquet to describe his understanding of the script and Hendrick's explanation a few minutes later, it was also a small mirror image of each other. It's also an interesting metaphor for Sils Maria, where the film takes place. I believe that the director arranged for Maria to speculate on the role in the cabin where Sils Maria Wilhelm was writing. The themes of the film and the plays in the film echo vaguely and distantly those eternal and eternal things that have been discussed more than once in the writings of Nietzsche, Proust, Thomas Mann and others who once lived here. questions.
Both Helena and writer Wilhelm carry a sort of self-destructive symbolism, while Sigrid and Joann, who reprises her role, are self-destructive and vital. In a broad sense of the world, existence itself is all kinds of destruction. With the passage of time, the entire universe cannot escape the mortal fate of the whole. Time is the only rule maker in this game, and for these thinking people, it's the only bookmaker who will win. And Nietzsche is said to have realized the theory of "eternal reincarnation" when he lived in Sils Maria, trying to give the greatest meaning to the transient life that will eventually be destroyed. But it would be more formalistic to discuss the relationship between film content and philosophy here. In previous films, it was discussed that the director threw out various appearances and connections, but kept a hidden plot. The 25-year-old director who appeared at the end of the story gave Maria his answer. "She has no age, or she can be any age, just like all of us." "She is beyond time." This is the appearance of the answer to the film's theme, or an interpretation. However, writer Wilhelm wrote a sequel to The Serpent of Maroya, which, in Claude's description, is "more and more daring, more and more mysterious. If we look at it from another angle, we are like him Think the same, project yourself into the future instead of freezing yourself in the past.” This can be seen as the author Wilhelm's revelation of the relationship between the essence of life and time after summarizing and thinking about the stories of Helena and Sigrid. It is undeniable that every interpretation of things may be misinterpreted. But the essence of man, like the truth itself, cannot be hidden.
I don't know what kind of mentality the writer Wilhelm made in the end. There is not much material for analysis, so I won't do too much interpretation here. But Helena's self-destruction is discussed several times in the film. People including Hendrick and Maria, who see her as weak, decided her own destiny from the beginning, using Sigrid as a weapon of suicide, thus ending the story painfully, only Val is seen in the film A different side of what the script was written for. I don't quite agree with Val's interpretation of death or not. But as Val said to Maria, when Maria played Sigrid when she was young, she didn't think too much, but as she said, she was immersed in the character, which is the essence of her and the character itself The natural response brought about by the fit. Young Sigrids haven't had time to be labeled, or because they are too young or too ignorant to care about labels, so this is the most appropriate life, this way of life always brings people An irresistible brilliance. And what I do believe is that Helena and Sigrid are essentially the same person, and that Sigrid made Helena discover herself, ambitious or not. So in her relationship with Sigrid and her own life, Helena ignored the boundaries and rules without thinking, immersed herself in the arranged roles, and only relied on intuition to play the role she should play, and ultimately self-destruction It was indeed her choice, but just like the writer Wilhelm, she went all out and left no chance for herself. She was indeed innocent in her own way.
"The text is like an object, it gonna change perspective based on where you standing." I think Val's sentence can be used for more than just explaining lines in a script. The object itself is immutable, it is always true to its essence, but there are countless ways to observe and interpret it. No matter how unpredictable Maloya's snake cloud is, its appearance and impact also have its own inherent laws. Although it is said that time is always the biggest winner in the entire game of our universe, the more you think about it and understand the rules of the game, the more cruel the game or the script becomes. In this huge game, what is important is not only how one can resist the labels imposed on oneself by others due to the passage of time, but also how to abandon the meaningless appearance of oneself and others. In this game, everyone has his inherent role. Although everything is voluntarily or forced, it is inevitable to go to various forms of destruction, but in this process, whether the individual plays himself faithfully to the essence, This should be the meaning of destruction and self-destruction.
Tribute to the film's author, Wilhelm, and the sequel to his undeclared Serpent of Maroya.
Epilogue:
Also I don't think there's any other good analysis for Sigrid and Joann, because "they" themselves don't give a fuck, any understanding is unnecessary. There are a lot of lines in the film that I like, especially Val's. In PART TWO, the clips of Maria and Val talking about the lines several times are very exciting, and the deep meaning outside the words is worth watching and trying again and again. Although some lines in the character setting are too philosophical, it seems a little unreasonable to say it from the mouth of Val in the film, but it still can't stop my liking. It may also be because the direction of the plot is just in line with some recent thinking and reading directions, so it brings an individualistic bias. At the end of this, I end with one of my favorite lines in the whole show.
"Oh, so I am allowed not to be old, as long as I don't want to be young, isn't it?"
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