Life and death, love, occupation, and war are all topics of this film. It is like a plate of olives of various varieties. It tastes sour, salty, and even a bit stale in the mouth, but for those who like this taste, There is a calm satisfaction in eating.
The film has many threads, some intertwined, some independent, but none of them are the traditional structure of starting from the beginning, developing, climaxing, and ending. Relatively long, is the experience of a pair of salesmen, Sam and Jonathan. They go to different settings to sell vampire dentures, creative pouches that laugh at the touch, and an ugly "Uncle One Tooth" mask. It's a pity that not only can't they sell, but they can't get their money back. Manufacturers also come to them, blaming them for their poor sales. Apart from that, there is no other coherent plot.
Continuing the style of the previous film, the actors in this film are still made up to look like white-faced clowns. They perform in a slow or rather obtuse way. When it comes to style, Swedish director Roy Anderson is famous for shooting commercials. In the past 40 years, he has only made five feature films in total. A new work after 7 years - it is still not difficult for us to see some of his expressive preferences. In addition to the multi-line interweaving mentioned above, he basically completes a scene with only one fixed shot, and the scheduling of the scene is biased towards the stage play; Rich in-depth relationships, and use of depth-of-field scheduling to expand the amount of information, and sometimes even subvert the content in the foreground.
Windows are his favorite tool for building deep relationships. There is a scene in the film, in a bar that is open to the street, facing the street are two large windows and glass doors, suddenly an 18th-century army burst in, the young and handsome Charles XII cleared all the women out of the bar, She greeted the little boy behind the bar and took him away. Outside the bar, an entire army of the Eastern Expeditions walked past the window, imposingly. Later, in this bar, modern women were crying out of the window. The army of Charles XII returned from a defeat and walked back from the window, with a kind of sadness facing history.
Charles XII was called "the little Napoleon of the early eighteenth century" because they were both military geniuses and had the fate of failing to conquer Russia. Charles XII, as the tenth king of the Fassa Dynasty, fell from a European hegemon to a second-class power in his hands, and he never married and died at the age of thirty-six. No wonder the women cried bitterly. No wonder Anderson was teasing him for his love for men.
The film has no full story, no juncture, and ends in a few still unrelated segments. This is probably the full picture of life in the eyes of the 70-year-old director-weird, stream-of-consciousness, dialectical and at the same time changing, and it turns out to be another kind of beauty.
Originally published by NetEase Entertainment
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