Set the tone in the first five minutes, and this film is no exception:
Nearly five minutes of long shots and symphony talk, without a single line, the differences between environment, characters and races are all explained.
The white children running carefree on the lawn of the manor slowly moved to the black slaves working in the back garden and then to the slaves captured and killed in the fields. After 7 minutes and 45 minutes of purple and dark green grass, the film was named, and night fell.
The director adopts a flashback mode. After the 40-minute cruel plantation clip ends briefly, the clip is the scene of the heroine waking up from the bed at home. The vibration of the mobile phone and the change of light and shadow are added, which confuses the audience and makes us think that this is just the heroine. She just woke up from the dream, but the director actually laid the groundwork long ago: the heroine’s husband asked her if you had a nightmare, and the heroine’s answer was no. At the same time, the camera was aimed at her waist after the heroine got up. We can see that there is no imprint on her waist at this time, which makes the audience believe that it is a dream.
But the dreams you think are actually memories.
In addition, the director also buried a lot of foreshadowing in the hotel after the heroine was on a business trip, such as a bunch of kapok that he suddenly received, which corresponds to the black slave cotton at the beginning; another example is the little girl holding a black doll in the elevator to make the heroine quiet. "If you talk, you will get into trouble." The little girl dragged the doll when she got out of the elevator, echoing the white man who was dragging the dead black man on horseback before the title was released. The airplane ✈️ is also an important prop: the roar of the airplane when the black people are working in the fields, the family and airplane drawn by the heroine's daughter, the family and airplane drawn in the room the night the heroine ran away, etc.
This film fully demonstrates that clever use of structure can add a lot of points to the concept, if this film is a sequential mode: from the heroine's business trip to the large-scale reproduction park, and then to the heroine's successful escape. Although this kind of narrative makes the audience comfortable, it is far from the intriguing flashback.
I remember that Black Mirror S2E2 is also a similar concept setting: Punishment of infinite reincarnation, criminals are not as good as dead. Both also construct a large-scale virtual world, or an immersive drama against humanity, in which the others are all extras. This film does not use indoctrination and preaching to express the core theme to the audience, but to show the audience these illusions and the struggle of the protagonist in the illusion.
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