Lynn Ramsey is not a prolific director. From 1999 when she filmed her first feature film "The Mouse Catcher", in nearly two decades, she has only registered four feature films. Every movie before "You Have Never Been Here" is a psychological portrait of a special character: "The Mouse Catcher" depicts the psychological abnormalities of young people in the slums of Glasgow, Scotland with traditional British realism; "Mervin "Carla" portrays a female supermarket cashier's fluttering mental state wandering outside the values of social life; "What's wrong with Kevin" is a psychological nightmare suffered by a failed mother who was tortured by the "devil son".
"You've Never Been Here" seems to break through the limitations of her previous films in terms of themes and genres, taking a hired killer's subversion of the teenage girl sex crime group as the main clue. In the first half an hour of watching, the audience will think this is a stylized crime thriller, but then we will find that Lynn Ramsey continues behind the weak and not-so-thought-out plot. Her consistent creative theme, with a cool to dazzling audio-visual language, presents us a mental portrait of a male killer who looks cold and rude but is plagued by heavy psychological trauma. And the whole film is like a psychoanalytical dissection full of emotions, which outlines the personality of the actor from several different sides: violent at the beginning of the film, the actor Joe, who has just completed the task, walks through the corridor behind the hotel. Suddenly a gangster rushed up from behind and attacked him. He didn't care about the ineffective blow to the opponent, just grabbed his neck and gave him a fatal blow with his forehead. We were surprised at his habit of facing violence, but then we discovered his irresistible mania: he would knock someone to the ground with a punch because he was twenty minutes late. And when we saw him slowly climbing the stairs calmly and calmly holding a hammer in the video surveillance video, and smashing the brains of everyone we met, we finally realized that violence is part of Joe’s personality. In the face of all the malice and aggression in the external world, all he can do is to retaliate without hesitation. Weird tenderness However, when Joe returned home from the killing scene, we caught a glimpse of another psychological aspect of him. Lynn Ramsey is here to pick up the early appearance again. She brings realistic and naturalistic expressions, and uses microscopic details of life to express the delicate emotional connection between the hero and the elderly mother: he graciously accepts the mother’s kindness Jokes, sit at the table and wipe the tableware with her mother, clean up the water marks she left in the bathroom... It is very different from that of Joe who is merciless to his opponent in the dark night streets. Under the surface, he is full of compassionate tenderness for the harmless part of the external world. When he picked up the rescued girl Nina with a gentle and even warm attitude, we understood the fragile and gentle side of his introverted character. When we saw him lying on the floor with his dying opponent and humming to the radio hand in hand, that soft and weird inner emotion gurgled out, which not only softened but also enriched the inner world of this tough guy killer. Inner pain All this strange mixture of violence and tenderness is not a source of water falling from the sky. In the interspersed flashback images, we realize that Joe has experienced a series of heartaches in the past: domestic violence in childhood and the tragic experience of being a war veteran on the battlefield have left him indelible memories, and Let him face tremendous pressure from the heart from time to time in real life. This is also in the film at the last moment when he is about to die, he gives up suicidal thoughts, and pursues the motivation to rescue Nina and punish the culprit. Nina became a mirror image of the weak and powerless self in his memory, and all he had to do was to release such a violently besieged self from repression. When he finally realized that the opportunity of the wicked man was passing by, the inextricable inner pain made him slumped on the floor and wept bitterly. Fortunately, at the end of the credits, Nina's sentence "This is a beautiful day" liberated him from the delusional illusion of swallowing a gun and committing suicide, leaving him with a gleam of hope. What needs to be mentioned is that the theater version of "You've Never Been Here" is very different from the 2017 Cannes version of the competition. The Cannes version gives a more detailed account of the history of the actor Joe, so that the audience has a clearer and more intuitive understanding of the evolution of his psychological trajectory. The theater version simplifies it to insert flashbacks that last only a few seconds. In contrast, although this kind of treatment has set up many obstacles for the audience to understand the plot of linear development, it has strengthened the stylistic characteristics of the film itself and pushed the psychological crisis that Joe himself encountered to the peak of sensibility. As viewers, we have always been accustomed to seeing a thrilling and complete story or a vivid expression of thoughts and feelings through movies. But a film also has the natural function of portraying a microscopic psychological state, and Lynn Ramsey has captured this feature of the film and maximized it. What she has pursued in the four films so far is to combine The fragmented image details are collaged to outline a character's deep and complete psychological state, and it is this minimalist but deeply focused creative intention that gives her a unique personal style.
Of course, the realization of this intention is inseparable from the vivid interpretation of the actors. Jacques Phoenix appeared in "You Have Never Been Here" as a reticent image. He got rid of the routine emotional "rolling broadcast" program of method-based actors, and instead used his unique body language to interpret the daily life of the characters. Behavior: His gestures, walking posture, and micro look are all unified in the shell of a violent and merciless killer with a lonely heart and a sad appearance. This is exactly Lynn Ramsey’s personal style: her character’s mental state is never shaped by words, events, and opinions, but is permeated in endless micro postures and actions, and conveyed in the most perceptual way. To the audience.
The last thing to praise is the concise and perfect audio-visual combination rhythm of the film. Lynn Ramsey mobilized all possible means to construct a changing and unified audiovisual rhythm with composition, color, light and shadow, movement, and the coordination of sound and music. While each picture is closely connected with the previous one, it also develops subtle and malleable changes in perceptual feelings and technical means. A large amount of suggestive white space (such as the omission of some intuitive violence scenes) is instead given The film has an unprecedented perceptual impact. And this bursting power is wrapped in layers of delicate external forms with female psychology, concise, meticulous, emotional and full of strength at the same time.
It should be said that the idea of placing the display of a character’s personality image in the frame of a commercial film allows Lynn Ramsey’s image to get rid of the mess, redundancy, and dissociation in the previous film, and present an appropriate sense of proportion and sense of scale. Rarely concise and sharp. She finally crossed the dividing line between art and commerce, and opened up a brand-new route for shaping the psychological state of film-like characters.
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