Only the person with the cleanest heart can express lust so perfectly. —— Mei Lanfang
Schopenhauer said: "All the feelings of being in love with each other, no matter how supernatural they are, are rooted in sexual impulses."
Aristotle said: "After copulation, all animals will be melancholy."
Bruno said: "Unsatisfied lust is painful, but the satisfaction of lust makes us sad. What we yearn for is only that short moment in the transitional phase."
Hegel said: "Instinct and passion are nothing more than the vitality of the subject, and the subject takes it as the goal of practice."
Desire is arranged in many forms in Luca Guadagnino's "Trilogy of Desire". In fact, the director of Gua did not intentionally plan to make "I Am Love" , "Holiday Surprise" and "Please Call Me by Your Name" into a trilogy of desires, but it was in "Please call me by your name" After the release, he repeatedly used this method to target them, which also caused professional film critics and amateur audiences to recognize this title. But the title can be recognized because these movies have obviously similar themes and narrative methods-everyone in each movie is exploring what desire is, how to explore desire, where is the potential of desire, and desire The impact on individuals and society. At the same time, Gua Dao also uses the ups and downs of desire-it is sometimes positive and benign, sometimes negative and vicious-to let us understand the powerful transformative power behind desire and the rebirth consequences caused by desire.
Of course, in addition to being a means of advancing narrative and presenting themes, desire is also a kind of erotic aesthetics . The "Trilogy of Desire" is eye-catching because of the deep resonance between its theme and style. Guador has developed and perfected a pornographic language, which not only conveys the appearance of desire, but also conveys the feeling of desire. The interaction between the object and the physical space is perfectly reflected in the organic interaction between the actors and the space where the actors are located. Through the framing, movement, push and pull, editing and arrangement of the lens, the urgency of the erotic experience is captured, and the grass and fabric are also given. The climax point of all possible things such as the neck and peaches.
Sex drive
In the "trilogy", desire has long become the narrative itself , because the characters cast by the director of Gua represent desire, and even said that without her (their) desire impulse, there would be no extension of the story. In "I Am Love", this desire exists in the body of the Russian wife Emma (Tilda Swinton), who married a wealthy Rich family rooted in the urban textile industry. As the mother of three adult children, Emma, a series of deterministic labels reveal her suffocating and inextricably obligatory life. It wasn't until the young man Antonio Emma met that she awakened her desire for sex and forced her to conflict with her responsibilities. Gua Dao calls this conflict the opposition of capitalism and individual freedom. It is true that desire will make Emma's future life upside down and even suffer a huge loss, but the sex with Antonio provides her with a way to return to her true life, although this loss will also make Emma. Suffering, but no matter how freedom and sexual instinct drive her to follow her desire, because for her, the path to self-realization means destroying the past and never looking back.
After that, Gua went further to torture the dark power of desire in "A Bigger Splash" (A Bigger Splash). This film is a remake of Jacques Deray's "Swimming Pool" (1969) and was inspired by David Hockney's eponymous painting "A Bigger Splash" Inspired, tells the story of the summer pool and holiday of a gorgeous rock singer Marian (also played by Tilda Swinton) who resembles David Bowie. Marian in this story is recovering from vocal cord surgery, and her lover partner Paul (Mattias Schonell) is on vacation on the island of Pantelleria in Sicily. But Marianne’s former producer and ex-boyfriend Harry (Ralph Fiennes) did not say hello and came like a hurricane, sneaked into their Garden of Eden like a snake, raided their peaceful paradise, and brought a Penelope (Dakota Johnson), the deadly fruit of Satan, claims that Penelope is his recently discovered daughter. In fact, the most attractive part of "Holiday Surprise" is that we can never fully penetrate the relationship between Marian, Harry, Paul, and Penelope. Being ignited by Harry, but also destroyed by Harry, the tension of desire arises from all directions, and also falls from all directions.
In "Please call me by your name", desire is minimal and hopeful. Seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) desires 24-year-old American graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) is a journey of self-discovery. Erio admits that he knows very little about "important things" in this brief summer romance, and Oliver's flesh as a desire is both disturbing and exciting. Chalamet shows his body gradually awakened through complex and stunning performances. The love between Elio and Oliver is slow and direct, not muddy, pure and clean, although there are some small emotional ups and downs and the uncertainty about the feeling itself, "Please" does not show it at all Such as the destructive desires in "I Am Love" and "Holiday Surprise". The whole movie is paving the way for his father’s words. He tells Elio that life’s short-term life is concealed, telling him that things beyond sexuality, love and friendship are worthy of our lives to experience and youth to engrave, even if only once. , Even if it is heartbroken, this is a painful progress. Desire brought Erio a rebirth. The long shot at the end showed that he was moving towards his goal, because he had the courage to admit what he wanted most-that was the desire instinct.
Sensory stimulation of food
Gua Dao is an excellent master of senses, he orchestrates the tide of sensory images to create images that we can taste, touch, smell and hear. The large number of elements that trigger sensory pleasure provided in the "Trilogy of Desire" is the key to our emotional investment. The fascinating viewing experience of the three films makes the audience seem to be walking on the Italian countryside path in person. The delicious food is naked. The sweat of the skin and the golden light in the hot sun. But at the same time, Gudao didn’t apply the skills of sensory pleasure to the surface, although he did his best to calibrate the visual environment of desire to the optimization, from lighting to lighting, from filtering to color adjustment, in order to create a pleasant and rich experience. , But every pornographic object and every erotic action in the movie lingers with sensory expectations. There is a certain undercurrent of suffering, covered up incomplete flesh, and suppressed fiery soul.
Food is the most common visual sign of desire. Fish, eggs, figs and other fruits are given a large number of close-up shots. They either form a static empty shot or are touched by the characters, making them sexually suggestive. In Gua's opinion, sensory pleasure will never be separated from the food on the table, because in addition to meeting the needs of food and clothing, food can also contain a lot of erotic possibilities. For example, food plays a very complicated function in "I Am Love", which shows personality, love, desire, family bonds and betrayal. The opening dinner scene of "I Am Love" is to celebrate the birthday of the patriarch of the Ricky family. It is very solemn and solemn. Everyone is sitting in jeopardy. The neatly arranged food on the table represents Emma's constant sexual depression; When Emma tasted the vegetable prawns cooked by her lover Antonio in the Milan restaurant, her state was relaxed and calm. The slight stage light also made her expression more sexy and moving.
In fact, this scene of tasting prawns in a Milan restaurant is very worthy of analysis. (As Emma’s son Eduardo De said, “Since I tasted Antonio’s food, I couldn’t help but fall in love with him.” Now it seems that Emma is facing the same risk. When the vegetable stewed shrimp was put into her mouth, Guadao bathed her with warm artificial light, as if the film of the film had been washed. The background music of John Adams increased the volume at this time, drowning Ai The voice of Ma’s mother-in-law talking with her future daughter-in-law. Even when Emma was tasting the food, the camera was interspersed between the eyes, mouth, and the food on the plate, composing Emma with extreme close-ups. The power of food made her reverie and was transferred. Go to another space and be thrown into the sensual world of bliss. This is the first act that opens the world of Emma's desire, and it is also the cliff that leads her to the abyss of desire.)
Although the scene of this scene is touching, and the tone is also hazy and fairy tale, in "Holiday Surprise", the food is on the contrary vigorous and direct. For example, on a summer morning in the movie, (Harry’s personality is like ADHD) he can’t stop being active. He is shocked because of the lack of food in the refrigerator. He occupies the kitchen and prepares to make a salt-skin grilled fish. . In the process of his cooking, he skillfully slapped the live fish on the cutting board, slashed across the abdomen with a sharp knife, and pulled out the fish intestines and fish brain arbitrarily. After this fierce kitchen scene and the scene where Harry takes Marian through the mountains and water to taste the homemade ricotta cheese of Italian villagers, you will feel like watching a food show. But this is not just a simple setting to satisfy the appetite, and the catalyst for the Chinese-style bonding of the relationship between the characters in "Holiday Surprise". Harry used food to seduce Marianne and tried to have sex with her, hoping that the old relationship would rekindle and restore their former relationship. But compared to Harry’s enthusiasm for food, Paul (Marian’s current partner) has a calm attitude towards food. What he competes with is abstract art and erratic character crisis, and this kind of obscure Desire forms are formally revealed through the depiction of food.
"Please call me by your name" table scenes are even more numerous. Table drama not only enhances the fun of daily life, but also contains a lot of erotic meanings in some small actions. For example, Oliver saw the fluid egg with the yolk flowing out, and he sucked the egg greedily. On the one hand, it reflected his great appetite. On the other hand, his self-confidence and frankness immediately made Elio unable to stop. Not only the eggs, but the melon guide also built a bridge between the fruit and desire, making the relationship between Elio and Oliver closer. The peach scene in the film is amazing. When Elio pierced the peach with his hand, letting the juice stay on him wantonly, and masturbated with the ripe peach, the melon guide fixed the camera on Elio’s face and described the desire in detail. Thinking carefully with shame, then Oliver licked the dried juice clean again, full of fun and not vulgar.
Erotic space
The "Trilogy of Desire" divides the sensory space, and adds desire to these sensory spaces, so that sex and intimacy are consistent with nature, and the character surrenders to the environment and the senses.
In "I Am Love", nature is a paradise where Emma and Antonio pursue freedom and self-expression. When we first saw them having sex, the camera gradually moved them from their twisted bodies to the window, and the hills and lush trees beyond the window were unobstructed. Later, Antonio cut Emma's long hair short, as if cutting off the responsibility of Emma's orthodox family. Immediately we were taken into the scene where they had sex in the bushes. Guador meticulously planned a symphony-like sex scene here, mainly with extreme close-ups of flowers, bees, knees, nipples and sweaty shoulders. These shots are sometimes high-definition and sometimes high-definition, causing confusion in perspective, and Emma's fair-skinned The skin is overexposed in the hot sun, and the blindness effect allows nature and the body to be completely integrated, allowing the two coitus to dissolve in the sea of light and shadow.
In "Holiday Surprise", the relationship between natural environment and desire is more complicated. Guador, who had lived on Pantelleria since he was a child, described this rocky and volcanic island as the most "fierce and ruthless place" on the Sicily Islands. Moreover, the film also directly gave portraits of the refugees, who washed up on the beach like sea garbage because of political asylum or avoiding war, further implying that the island is an indifferent place. In such an environment, the four protagonists in the film are also imprisoned in such a closed space, anxious, hot, and sticky, emphasizing the smallness and insignificance of this ancient land, and also suggesting the short-sightedness and stubbornness of the local people. Unshakable, satirizes the sex games of love, jealousy, and hate of the four characters, forming a spatial coincidence and contrast.
"Please call me by your name" naturally creates a more harmonious and warm tension with people. Most of the scenes of the film were shot outdoors, but apart from the pools, ponds, orchards, trees, and country trails, the director of melon is more concerned about how to present the interaction between Elio and Oliver's body and space. For example, Elio and Oliver who were run by a small closet, Elio and Oliver who kissed by the pond, Elio and Oliver who rode bicycles one after another on the small road in the town, and Eli who touched each other's cheeks under the waterfall. O and Oliver, regardless of whether it is an open space or a cramped space, their desires are sometimes tightened by stinginess, and sometimes magnified infinitely. They are trying their best to find traces of each other's desires in different environments under the deliberate provocation of their guides.
Nowhere to put the body
Desire is the devil whose body cannot control and whose needs are desperately satisfied. In "I Am Love", we can see Emma being pushed by sexual desire to find lover Antonio's quick pace, and we can see Harry in "Holiday Thrill" dancing unscrupulously, like an open-screen peacock eagerly courting, You can also see Elio sneaking into Oliver's room in "Please", putting Oliver's red swimming trunks on his face, inhaling deeply, and then slowly arching his body up and down.
Director Gua once said that a movie is a space art that shows the body of a character. Compared with language, his film characters tend to express desires physically, and through the slower and slower sequence of shots, the feeling of desire release is inflated infinitely. Emma, as a Russian immigrant in a repressive and serious family, was very well-dressed, but she was able to wash off the rouge gouache in front of her lover Antonio and put on colorful plain clothes; Maria was even spared because of vocal cord surgery. Acoustic communication uses only facial expressions, shapes and dances to convey emotions. As a child who loves to read, although he has accumulated a lot of knowledge in his brain, he is incoherent under the charm of Oliver, and can only be through jerky tentativeness. The action expresses one's desire.
Desire is desire, it is teetering and eager to move, like a depressive sound that makes us ecstatic and depressed. Following the guidance of desire can make life better on the one hand, and it can also make life chaotic on the other. It liberates us, destroys us on the one hand, fuels the flames in the fire and enthusiasm, and swallows it in regret and hatred on the other. . But despite this, desire can always push us towards a new self, and desire always opens a new chapter in every journey of life.
In short, Gua Dao tells us through his "Trilogy of Desire" that desire is fleeting. In these three movies, Gua Dao refined the erotic aesthetics to a highly concentrated and extremely pure form. He established a recognizable and detectable emotional world. In this world, we understand-desire, it is hot, But it is more scorching.
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