- a small review "The French Lieutenant's Woman"
"The French Lieutenant's Woman" (The French lieutenant's woman) is adapted from the British author John Fowles's novel of the same name. It was completed in 1981 under the direction of Carroll Reitz. The film uses a two-line narration in a play-in-play style, telling the love story between an actress named Anna and fellow actor Mike when she plays the role.
This film can be called a classic in literary and artistic films, and it is also a rare masterpiece in British films. One of the highlights of the film is undoubtedly the "film-in-film"-style dual-line narrative film structure used by the director, that is, two interconnected plot lines unfolding in parallel. The main line briefly describes a film crew who came to a small town to shoot the movie "The French Lieutenant's Woman", a love story that happened in the Victorian era. The noble young master Charlie is hopelessly in love with the mysterious woman Sarah and eventually leads to a happy perfection. story. The sub-line of the film is the story of the male and female protagonists having feelings in reality and finally breaking up under various pressures. In the main line, the male and female protagonists join hands to the other side of happiness. In that closed era, the light of freedom like this is so difficult and rare. In the sub-line, in the modern society where the free air is full of streets and alleys, the two are forced to break up because they cannot break through the worldly vision. The same people, the same mutual love, different times have different endings. Through such a two-line narrative, the director reveals the entanglements and contradictions hidden in people's hearts under the background of different times.
It is worth mentioning that the long-shot expression method is used many times in the film, which vividly expresses the intricate relationship between the characters and the complex inner entanglement. In particular, a long shot of several minutes at the beginning of the film has become a classic case of long shots. On the other hand, in recent years, most of the film and television works advertised as literary films rely on beautiful pictures and explicit scenes to attract audiences, but the basic film language has been neglected. Needless to say, we still have a long way to go.
In the movie, Sarah is always standing at the end of the embankment and looking out at the sea. What is she waiting for? Is it waiting for the French lieutenant who has long since loved her, or is it self-repentance like Madame said? no one knows. Maybe she's just craving what she's missing, but having been missing for so long has blurred the image of that thing so much that this craving turns into a Godot-like waiting.
Life is the stage, and each of us is an actor. Although she is not like Cheng Dieyi, "I am not crazy, I cannot survive, but I always hope to play the most perfect version of myself. But the reality is like Anna, and the Sarah she wants to be only lives in an ideal. However, the reality is far from the ideal. How far? Idealists and realists must have different answers.
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