I finally got around to watching Xavier Dolan's "Just the End of the World" recently. The film won the Grand Jury Prize in the main competition unit of the 69th Cannes Film Festival. But I think this award is not only because he is the son of Cannes, but more importantly, it is an appreciation for an artistic innovation.
The film is entirely supported by dialogue. I really watched too many mainstream movies, and when I saw the dialogue, I thought of fighting back and forth. But it is precisely because of this comparison that Dolan's uniqueness can be seen. Dolan changed the front and back shots a little bit, pushing the camera forward just a little bit, pushing the over-the-shoulder shot into a close-up. The dialogue filming method in "It's Only the End of the World" is anti-mainstream. Most of the time, it's a close-up with a wide aperture and shallow depth of field. In this way, the characters are highlighted from the environment, and the camera takes the audience to gaze close to the actor's face, and the actor's face is fully revealed. It has to be said that such a scene requires a lot of reliance on the performance of the actors. The audience has nowhere to look except staring at this face, and the performance of the actors is magnified many times: the advantages are magnified, and the disadvantages are also magnified. Fortunately, the actors selected by Dolan are those who are good at acting, and the degree of completion is very high.
Of course, this kind of shot scheduling really breaks the audience's inherent cognition about movies. You know, we always look at the unknown with the known. When the unknown completely surpasses the known, the audience instinctively rejects it. So when the male protagonist returned home and the five people talked together, most of the audience, including me, were completely stunned. They only saw a few big faces cut to and fro, and it was not our native language, so they felt it was too noisy. , I don't know what to say, let alone try to figure out the meaning of the words. Moreover, the long-term movie watching training tells us that we must obtain useful information from the dialogue. Once we cannot obtain it effectively, we will be exhausted immediately.
But I persisted through the first half, and the second half was sweet. You will find that you don't need to know what they are arguing about at all, as long as you know that the male protagonist is back with the eldest son, and wants to tell his family that he is sick and dying, but the family just doesn't give him a chance to talk. So with this suspense, the movie moves forward steadily. Moreover, when we gradually accepted (or ignored) this kind of dialogue shooting method with a large aperture and a shallow depth of field, we would find that, ah, it turned out to be a very ordinary family drama. After all, Dolan is young. Compared with Ozu and Ang Lee, his performance on family conflicts is still a lot worse. The way of fierce conflict in the family is not appreciated by Orientals at all. We play at a higher level. We like to be different from the outside, like a group of peace on the surface, and undercurrents surging inside.
And Dolan's brilliance is that he just changed the way of audio-visual performance, which brings the audience a new viewing experience. What I'm trying to say is that Dolan's dialogue is not necessarily the best, but it's really novel and unique, and Cannes should have been awarded to art, not conservative business. isn't it? Artistically, we encourage innovation, even if it's not that good.
Therefore, young people, don't always think that everything is stable and the sword is slanted and wide.
Goodbye.
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