The theme of the film is not complicated. The full name of the film "Doves on the Branches Rethinking Existentialism" means that the director's purpose for shooting this film is to allow the audience to objectively see the human existence from a dove-like perspective. But the characters in Roy's works exude the weird atmosphere of Sartre's old saying "The world is absurd, and life is painful." At the beginning of the film, there are three strange but very realistic death scenes: the first is the uncle who died of a heart attack because of pulling the cork too hard. When seeing this scene, the author suddenly remembered the poor "Desire" Tennessee Williams, the screenwriter of "Street Car Number One", died of suffocation because this buddy swallowed the cap of the eye drop bottle by mistake. Life is very easy, who can predict that a little mess will make death suddenly come? In the second scene, she becomes a dying grandmother who wants to take a large bag of gold and silver treasures to hell. Although everyone knows that it is impossible for people to take these objects to hell when they die, but in retrospect we Chinese But they keep burning paper money for the dead, and each paper money is hundreds of millions of dollars. What are we doing? In the last scene, a person who had bought food suddenly died, and sandwiches and beer were left. An old man received the glass of beer for free in broad daylight. The food of the dead dared to rub, can only say that the indifference of people's hearts has been cold to the bone. Various scenes show that absurd life and indifferent soul are the universal reality of society. Although the three scenes may be uncontrollable, our laughter is only a big irony of the reality of our existence.
However, this movie does not completely abandon the narrative. We have two protagonists who sell toys and always say they want to bring joy to everyone, but they look downcast because they can’t be happy at all. Toys can't be sold at all (to be honest, their toys are used to scare people to death), and they live in small apartments and life is cold. Their grief stems from the pressure of their living environment. What is the pressure? Money! The discussion about money comes from the poem written by the little girl who is used in the film. Although the film is as loose as a collage in terms of narrative effect, you can spell out a common meaning from the information given in the lens. This high-end expression is often called intra-lens montage. Back in the movie, the stories of these two people and the "I'm glad to hear that you have a good life" that are often used by the characters in the movie have reached the same goal. Good words are false, but the pain of life is true. In the information presented by the director, this kind of sad life is not limited to real society. We have seen defeated crusade troops in history, weeping widows, monkeys who were electrocuted during experiments, and they were driven into and plastered with loudspeakers. The black slave burned alive in the drum. Human history is full of endless sad killings and failures. This negative energy has spread across species and races.
When I watch movies, I always feel that Roy Anderson’s oblique imagery is very much in Edward Hopper’s "Nighthawk". The loneliness of space and the sense of distance between the characters are exactly the painter Edward Hopper. Pursued for a lifetime. And Roy Anderson recorded the Hopperized scenes in a static shooting method with almost no lens movement, so that every shot presented in the style of oil painting. Anderson’s tribute to art history is much more than that. His inspiration itself comes from the Flemish painter Borruger’s "Hunter in the Snow", and the drum that burns the slave is filled with trumpets, Roy Anderson's design is also borrowed from the notion that the hell part of Bosch's "Earth Paradise" is full of musical instruments. I rarely see a film like a good book that can be cited in the vast art history. Only the well-known Roy can do it.
Watching an art movie requires constant reflection from the brain. Unlike commercial films that give the exact cause and effect of the story, art films require the audience to organize the information of the film shots to form a story. This is also a very interesting point of art films. Roy Anderson’s masterpiece of art film integrates the traditions of the older generation of absurdist theater and literature revolutionaries, and makes good use of the symbolic information of traditional European paintings in the image symbols. The reason why this film can get the Venice Film Festival gold The reason for the Lion Award. But to be honest, what impressed me the most was the real society presented in the movie. Sartre’s phrase "The world is absurd, and life is painful." From a certain perspective, it has become a characteristic of the operation of human society. People can survive.
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