One of the most special in the list of Oscar nominees for best foreign language film is the Belgian "Girl" (Girl).
Its specialness lies in her "simplicity" . It uses a very personal narrative method to spare the external pressure of society and concentrates its firepower to express the inner world of a "girl". Fat Brother thinks it is inappropriate for many people to define the film as an LGBT work. Because the original intention of "Girl" should be "de-gendering" , rather than imposing any kind of gender identity to define the role, the protagonist Lara in the film wants to get the society's self-identity. The 15-year-old Lara was originally the eldest son in the family. He has two dreams: one is to join the Ballet Academy, and the other is to become "her" completely.
The narrative logic of "Girl" is very simple and direct. One side is ballet practice, and the other side is family life and medical process. The two sides are interspersed with narratives to form intertextuality . The film shows empathy for its subject. In the world of ballet, the human body is bent and reshaped by the force of the will, providing fertile ground for Lara's hope of taking hormonal drugs and surgically altering her "body". The camera's depiction of Laura's body makes sense because it's her place of concentration and, at the same time, her bloody battleground.
"Girl" attaches great importance to those fragmented narratives of life , and even repeats it many times. In life, Lara has been thrown into the crowded subway many times. The camera focuses on her face. We can clearly see the flashing of her eyes, the panic in her heart, and the ups and downs of her emotions. With the progress of the plot, the scenes on the closed train began to have tension. The change of the plot before and after, and the increase of pressure made Lara even more isolated and helpless, as if she was always watched and scrutinized by the public, until Lara shed innocently on the train. It was only after tears that the director was willing to put an end to this repeated torture.
These repetitions of life are the soul and foundation of the film, the source of its strength and emotion. In addition to the troubles of life, there is the pain of ballet . Those soft scenes, coupled with Lara's beautiful temperament, made one's mind rippling and intoxicated. But while Lara smiles and swirls, her unspoken, physical injuries from ballet training make her unbearable. The self-confidence in the training room and the inferiority complex in the toilet formed a huge tension, gradually tearing her apart.
Before she started, her physical features were always her psychological weakness. The embarrassment in the dressing room, the "showing off" in the bathroom, and the curious requests on her companion's birthday, gradually destroyed her fragile confidence in self-identity. "Girl" quietly completes the narrative transition between ballet and life. The play structure of the play is loose before and tight, slow and hurried, and the rhythm of the whole film has a sense of flexibility and relaxation. In order to match the direct and neat narrative, "Girl" uses very typical European film narrative rules . Emotional rendering of long takes, hand-held photography that highlights instability, discontinuous editing within the same scene, deliberate visual repetition, fragmented plot collages, and abrupt stops that often don’t “finish” an episode.
This way of cutting from the "cause" to the " effect " of the event conveys the necessary information to the audience with rough sections and shocking breaks, which makes people caught off guard and has no time to adapt. This is also the climax of the whole film, the reason why the shocking self-mutilation, which is painful in life, can bring shocking power. Of course, the most impressive thing in the whole film is the stare that appears many times . The camera takes the trouble to focus on Lara's face in close-up in each scene, showing her subtle expression changes, amplifying her inner anxiety and unnaturalness.
In several close-ups, the film once deliberately breaks the strong anti-gaze of the fourth side. Frustrated with training and therapy, Lara hopes to find her identity back in her life. She took the initiative to go to the house of her admiring neighbor, a gentle young boy. She offered the kiss, the boy wanted more, and the body reminded her to stop there, so she changed the way to satisfy the boy, trying to prove that she could be recognized as a girl. Then Lara watched from being seen. She looked straight at the screen and stared at the audience, like a torture. At this time, the audience has become the object of being watched, scrutinized and questioned. In expressing Lara's inner conflict, in addition to the close-up of the lens, the reflection of the mirror is also used many times .
According to Borges, mirrors are filthy. In his novel "Tron, Uqbal, Orbis Tertius," he wrote, "Mirrors and fatherhood are repulsive, and the intersection of two mirrors produces innumerable images, which multiply the universe and multiply the population. "In Girls, the mirror is Lara's desire for another side of herself .
She watched herself naked in front of the mirror many times. In front of the mirror, she wears women's clothes, her favorite underwear, and hides the "dirty" things. In front of the mirror, she can look at herself freely. There are her longings in the mirror, as well as her anxieties. Desire gives birth to hope, anxiety triggers castration, and the two forces have been colliding back and forth in the narrative. The stare in front of the mirror eventually caused division and distortion .
Margaret wrote "The Handmaid's Tale," in which Offfried, the heroine, went downstairs, passed a bulging mirror in the hallway, and caught a glimpse of herself: like a deformed shadow, a poor imitation, or a cloaked The fairy tale character wearing a red cloak is slowly descending, towards a moment of indifference and danger at the same time. Lara's demon reflected in the mirror triumphed over her inner angel, and ballet couldn't save her. "Girl" captures the elegance and heaviness of transgender people in the process of changing their identity. Although the film has tried its best to take time out of the suffocation caused by society, the invisible pressure that individuals bear in the group has always shrouded Lara's head, which eventually led to tragedy. .
But the theme that "Girl" wants to express is "from human nature to gender". Lara needs to be treated as a human being first, and then social discipline and identity in terms of gender. That is, the public needs to get rid of the prejudice in Beauvoir's "second nature" . In any case, she deserves the right and freedom of choice. Don't judge her just by her body, ask her. She has always been the most beautiful "girl" in the hearts of her father and loved ones.
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