What I want to introduce to you today is "Girl", which won the Cannes Film Festival Director's Debut Award and an Un Certain Regard Award, and starring Victor Polster also won the Best Actor Award for this film.
The film is actually very simple, and the scenes are mostly in schools, homes, ballet studios, and hospitals.
The story is actually about a boy (transgender) who wants to become a real girl through sex reassignment surgery, she loves ballet and gets into the best dance school.
She has a very clear positioning of herself, and gave herself a new name lara. At the beginning of the film, she pierced her ears and put ear studs on her. There was not a moment in the whole film that she was hesitant to give up.
Her father understood and supported her very much. She moved to another school and changed her job just to give her a fresh start. She regularly took her to the hospital to check her physical condition, cared about her adaptation to the new school, and comforted her by saying, "You are a girl".
The dance teacher also kept encouraging her, accompany her to practice over and over again, and told her "you have worked very hard".
01
I saw in 15-year-old Lara a level of determination and perseverance rarely seen in her peers.
Because she started late and the structure of her toes is a bit different, she needs after-school tutoring to keep up with the previous section;
In order to not show her male organs obviously when dancing, she chose to stick it with tape;
After dancing and sweating a lot, I won’t take a bath with the girls;
High-intensity practice, bleeding toes and layers of white cloth, fainting from rehearsal and unwilling to give up the show...
But no matter how strong and hard she was, the pain and pressure still came one after another, overwhelming her.
Because of fainting during rehearsal, the performance was not successful in the end, and I didn’t get a chance to take the stage after practicing hard. In the end, I could only be the audience who was enjoying the audience. Here is a fixed camera pushing forward, constantly pushing lara into the auditorium. s face.
I think ballet is not just Lara's dream. Ballet can show the beauty of women's temperament, so this is also the actual performance of Lara's almost paranoid wanting to be a girl.
Lara's lines are few and far between, and most of the time I understand her sensitivity and caution from her deep blue eyes.
When the girls were taking selfies and chatting gossip, she just stood quietly and listened patiently. The loneliness in her eyes and the polite smile made me see that there was always a gap that was difficult to bridge between her and others. .
It's not that she didn't think about stepping over. She attended the girls' party, but a group of girls strongly demanded to see her male organs, asking her over and over again "do you want to be a boy or a girl", and was forced to compromise, she could only be naked Show the public the part of yourself that you most want to hide.
She ate a lot of estrogen and wanted to change her body, but the pressure made her thinner and thinner, and her physical condition was getting worse day by day, so it was difficult to undergo sex reassignment surgery.
When she went to the house of the boy she liked, it could be seen from the kiss that it was difficult for her to let go of herself completely, and she was always worried. She was afraid of the boy's touch on her body, so she could only squat down and use her mouth to solve it and then escape.
I noticed that there was one more scene in the movie: the subway.
Although there is not a single line, I can feel that this is the only outlet for her to briefly escape from life and dreams.
Only on the subway, a place surrounded by strangers, will no one peek at her, talk about her, be curious or disgusted with her, can she forget her dance moves, her own body, and that she is a person who has not yet become Girl boy, forget all your worries and stress and be yourself easily.
In the end, she chose a way to free herself: ice cubes and scissors.
When she stretched the scissors down her lower body, I couldn't bear to watch it, I could feel the pain through the screen, and her shout hit my heart. Perhaps it was also at this time that I understood how firm she was in her determination to be a girl.
02
Although this is the director's debut, the techniques and skills are very mature and not at all green.
Let me start with my favorite use of the lens.
There are many dancing clips in the film, but each clip will not make people feel repetitive and boring. I follow Lara with a shaky lens. Most of them take medium and close shots, and the angles are constantly changing. The mirror is cleverly used, and the rhythm is very good. Strong music and breathing, the last practice before the rehearsal on stage is the climax of the whole film's dance scene shooting.
At the end of the film, after lara made the craziest decision and was sent to the hospital, there was no more lines in the whole film, but the power of the camera was used to show us the love between relatives and lara's acceptance of self.
First, the father in the ward held Lara's hand tightly and kissed her. The two looked at each other without a word of reproach. This scene lasted for 1 minute and 38 seconds;
Then Lara drinks water and looks at her body in the mirror. This scene lasts about 45 seconds;
Then the screen went black, accompanied by the melodious soundtrack and the crisp sound of high heels, the scene of Lara with short hair walking in the underground passage was shot from the back to the front. From her raised head and confident eyes, I could see her love for her. Self-acceptance and courage to face the future, this shot lasts about 50 seconds.
Then there is the camera's capture of the body.
Lara often observes her body in the mirror, so there are many scenes in the film that describe Lara's body, not only the bleeding and deformed toes, but also the bony upper body and some shots of sexual organs, most of which are still in the mirror Lara body of.
Shooting the body is not only describing the external changes, but also the psychological level.
When we look at ourselves in the mirror, it is easy to ignore our strengths and magnify our weaknesses infinitely.
Lara repeatedly looked at the unchanged male body in the mirror, from the front, the side, and the back over and over again, which also made people feel how much she cared about her body and her strong desire to become a girl.
When she is not satisfied with her body, often looking at herself in the mirror will inevitably bring some negative emotions to her, such as anxiety, disgust, etc. These emotions have been stagnant in her heart for a long time, but they are invisibly imposed on Lara. more pressure.
In addition, the rooms in the film are relatively narrow spaces, including Lara's bedroom, the kitchen at home, and the kitchen of the boy's favorite boy's house, all of which have a relatively small range of activities, but in this small space, the director used mirrors, Auxiliary objects such as door frames allow us to see richer connotations from the small scene.
Moreover, the light in the bedroom and kitchen is generally dim or even red, which forms a contrast and contrast with the bright light during the day, as if the light with ambiguous colors also casts a layer of indescribable thoughts on people.
Write at the end:
As a girl watching this movie,
Impressed by the delicate and real acting skills of the actor who plays lara,
Conquered by the beauty of lara,
In my mind she is a girl.
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