"Pool Love Murder" is a suspense thriller starring Charlotte Rampling and directed by Ou Rong. It mainly tells that the heroine Sara, as a well-known best-selling author, wants to break through the bottleneck of her creation, and came to the publisher’s country villa to find inspiration, but encountered a series of bizarre things, which made Sara gradually blurred. The story of the border between reality and fiction.
This movie is my favorite in the Ou Yung genealogy. Although "Entering the Hall" is more popular with everyone, it is obvious that the looming clues and the relationship between the characters in Ruo Ruo Li fit the ambiguity of the theme and the tension of the nested text. The famous director Robert Altman has a book called "Don't Tell Me A Story, I Want Characters". In fact, the core of a movie must be the shaping of the main characters. The more solid the characters, the clearer the direction of the story. So here, I will not talk about my guesses about the plot, and Ou Yung himself did not want us to figure out what is going on, how to feel the characters and emotions, is the real charm of this movie. Next, let me talk about the characters first. Through the first two scenes, the director explained the basic profile of the novelist Sarah: 1. The distress of identity recognition-although he is already a successful best-selling author, he does not recognize his own work very much and wants to have Make a breakthrough and create a novel with real literary value; 2. Dressed in a simple, low-key to boring, arrogant and indifferent. These two points are very clear and should be seen by most viewers. But there is a short scene in the middle that is easy to be overlooked: before she goes to the publishing house, she goes to the bar and asks for a glass of whiskey. Depending on the weather, it should be morning, at most noon, she would go for a drink. This clue is very important, because the wine factor basically runs through the entire movie. A scene immediately followed, that is, a scene: the sleeping father, with a wine glass next to him, the camera shakes slowly, and she secretly drank the wine again. From this, we can conclude that Sarah, like her father, suffers from alcoholism. A woman who seems to be over 50 years old lives with her elderly father. We don't know what role her mother plays in her life, but the relationship with her father seems to be harmonious. After arriving at the villa, she went to the supermarket to buy things, stood in the wine column and hesitated, and finally bought Coke. At this moment, she seemed to have made up her mind to give up drinking. In almost all the idle writing after this, she focused on describing her ambivalent attitude towards drinking and food. Why did Ou Rong do this? Because of desire. This movie digs deeper into the desires of a woman. At the beginning of this article, a woman who tries her best to contain her desires, a person who is full of contradictions about desires is established. The latter part of the movie is about how Sarah’s almost pathological restraint on desire was dismantled step by step. Seeing this in the movie, a guess is whether the mother once left them because of his father's alcoholism. She subconsciously thinks this is wrong and must be corrected. At 35 minutes into the movie, Sara secretly opened the refrigerator, ate Julie's caviar, who claimed to be the publisher's daughter, and of course, drank her wine. In order to conceal her behavior, she actually poured water back into the bottle, which looked very funny and absurd. It was a very childish behavior, which was in stark contrast with Sarah who had tried her best to restrain herself. It was from this scene that Sarah's ascetic thoughts began to collapse in an all-round way. Food color is also. In the mirrored erotic drama immediately following the next scene, it goes without saying that sexual desire began to grow. Regarding sexual desire, Sara sneered when Julie kept bringing men back. Her first reaction was how embarrassing your mother would be if she knew about it. She looked contemptuous on the surface, but she acted very honestly—not only was she peeping, and she didn't bring earplugs to listen to Julie and the man's mixing voice before going to bed. Later when Julie asked her provocatively if she was a virgin, her answer was: I was in London when I was young. Combining these two points, Sara's mother should have met her and fucked with a man. The erotic process of combining Sara and old Matthew was done in Julie's room, not in her own room (the original Julie's mother's room). The small props of the cross that appear repeatedly in the film are constantly retracted by Sarah. It is not difficult to think that this is probably an ascetic incarnation of her mother. She cannot do "immoral" things in this room. The ghost character of mother appeared constantly to prevent Julie's desire to vent. Because of the long-term abstinence, Sara's erotic fantasies are even more sad and naive. The three scenes explain, 1. Two times the same angle of pool fantasy: the handsome guy in the restaurant is standing next to the girl Julie and the old butler Matthew (inferiority complex) is standing next to Sara; 2. In Sara’s view, Julie The men I like are fat and ugly (arrogant); 3. The handsome guy in the restaurant liked her, not the young Julie, and even refused Julie's request for sex. (Self-wanted) These few fantasies also show that Julie's mother has a terrifying degree of control over her mind. In addition to the development of the story, Julie's desires continue to grow. After Julie, the daughter of the self-proclaimed publisher, appeared, the relationship between the two people also became an important clue. Sarah and Julie’s relationship line is from mutual hostility (wait and see)-spy (action)-"mother-daughter relationship" to reach a reconciliation, and at the end, help Julie bury the body (intervention), Sarah seems to have completed a kind of adultery General psychological satisfaction. Her depressed, gloomy character (daughter's identity) has been completely changed after becoming a "mother". She is no longer a daughter under the control of her mother. She has become a mother. She can control others because of this. Her own desires are no longer guilty, so she eventually seduce Matthew. The great thing about Ou Rong is not only that, but all the idle pens are useful. Let's look at the last paragraph again, the daughter of old butler Matthew appeared-an old dwarf. This is a stroke like a dream, it adds to the overall mysterious atmosphere of the movie, making people feel that fiction and reality are indistinguishable. Not only that, Ou Rong completed the comparison of three pairs of mother-daughter relationships. The "ghost-like existence" of "absent" mothers in their daughters' lives causes them to have no "sound" personality. It also implies that although the heroine Julie has completed the release of her desire, the ghost of her mother will accompany her forever. Julie's somewhat shocked expression at the end proves everything. In addition to the exquisite exploration of desire and mother-daughter relationship, "Pool Love Murder Case" has a very perfect performance in the creation of atmosphere, the subtle suggestion of details, and the use of colors. Even though I have watched it 5 times, I am still willing to watch it again and again to discover the little surprises hidden in the film.
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